Celebrating International Translation Day: A Literary World outside of English

Written by Ronnie Chang @snicketfence

English-language publishing has been notoriously poor at translating works from other languages. The frequently cited figure that only 3% of Anglophone publications are translations is not far off from the truth and reflects a greater issue with English as a ‘super-central’ source language. When 20% of all published works are in English and 60% of all translated books are translated from English, the Anglophone sphere of translated literature is rather sparse, all things considered.

However, translated fiction has grown in popularity over the past decade, welcoming a younger and more ethnically diverse demographic of buyers than general fiction. In the UK specifically, the demographic for translated fiction heavily skews towards those living in London or the South East while also being 6% more likely to buy from local independent bookshops. In celebration of International Translation Day, I welcome you to join this 6% (among other demographic statistics) with my recommendations for translated literature available for purchase at October Books.

Despite the popularity of translated literature from Japan, which accounted for five of the top ten bestselling translated fiction books earlier in 2026, there is still a dearth of translations for some of the most prolific Japanese authors. Yoko Ogawa is one such example; she is a female Japanese author so prolific that she has won every major Japanese literary award yet the majority of her work remains untranslated. While she is most recognised for The Memory Police, whose translation was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, I am drawn to the first of her novels to receive an English translation: The Housekeeper and the Professor.

The Housekeeper and the Professor was originally published in 2003 before receiving an English translation by Stephen Snyder (who also translated The Memory Police) in 2008. The novel is told from the perspective of the titular housekeeper who has been hired as the carer for a retired mathematician. The old professor is afflicted with short-term memory loss and can only remember events from the past 80 minutes. Despite this, he, the housekeeper, and her son from a sort of familial unit over the course of the novel, bonding through the professor’s love for math and numbers. It is a very grounded novel that I found resonant with my own experiences with older family suffering from dementia and the like.

For those interested in a more recognisable title, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman might ring a bell. A musical adaptation of Puig’s book passed through the Southampton Mayflower a few months ago and I strongly recommend the book for those that enjoyed the show.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is set in an Argentinian prison cell at the height of Videla’s dictatorship. The cell is shared by Molina, a gay man, and Valentine, a revolutionary activist. Puig was himself an out gay Argentine man whose love of film bleeds into Spider Woman through Molina’s pastime of recounting films to entertain himself and Valentine as well as the writing style of the text itself. Spider Woman is almost entirely told through dialogue, featuring no narration beyond the extensive footnotes that ruminate upon the various theories of homosexuality floated about by 20th century thinkers. The book was published in Spanish in 1976 before receiving an English translation by Thomas Colchie in 1979. Its depiction of queer and leftist action as potentially moving in tandem makes it a landmark work of queer activist literature that predates many Anglophone works at this intersection. Puig’s experimental writing style makes it especially unique and well worth the effort to read.

If you want recently translated work with more direct commentary on the contemporary geopolitical landscape, I recommend Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. Shibli is a Palestinian woman living in Berlin who makes it a point to write in Arabic, her mother tongue. Minor Detail was first published in Arabic in 2017 before receiving an English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2020. Shibli’s book centres the real-life Nirim affair in 1949, when a group of Israeli soldiers captured, raped, and killed a Bedouin girl. This incident, the titular ‘minor detail’ of history, becomes the subject of fascination for a Palestinian woman as the novel follows her attempts to return to the site of this crime in the present day.

The German translation of Shibli’s book released in 2022, shortly before the beginning of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the book was slated to win an award, as it had done so many times already, this convergence of events led to the award being rescinded and related events cancelled, eliciting a wave of public outcry. We are now almost a decade out from Minor Detail’s original publication, but the book is clearly no less important now than it was then. Shibli’s insistence on writing in her mother tongue about past atrocities that are directly linked to the present exemplifies the importance of keeping literary traditions alive in all cultures and backgrounds.

Reading beyond the English language means reading beyond the dominant histories and modes of thinking that it exemplifies. Translation is important not just as a tool of communication but reshaping one’s understanding of the world. Drop by the shop and pick up some translated literature. It might be unlike anything you’ve read before.