It’s almost like isolationism never went out of style in American publishing, and in Canada.

Less than three per cent of the books published in America on any given year are translations, which is extremely low compared to European countries: roughly 40 per cent of publications in France are translations and approximately 30 to 35 per cent in Spain.

Canada has the advantage of government funding for books by Canadian authors, which are translated by Canadians. The language the books are being translated into doesn’t matter; it’s only important that the author and translator are Canadian — a large number of translations published exclusively for Canada are the result of our bilingual culture. Most published translations are often by smaller Canadian presses. Larger publishing houses typically publish joint ventures with their U.S., U.K. or Australian counterparts.

“An English-language publisher will buy the English-language rights, translate a portion of it, and then sell territorial rights to various publishers who then contribute a portion of the translation [cost],” explains Iris Tupholme, vice-president, publisher and editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Canada.

Bilingualism notwithstanding, because there are very few international translations published exclusively for the Canadian market, Canada is much closer to the American model than to that of the French or Spanish.

Lorin Stein, senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an American publishing house noted for releasing a significant number of translated works, says that the lack of translations to some extent reflects editors’ difficulties finding books to translate.

“A lot of houses in Europe, if they’re big enough, will have editors that... will cover one or two languages. Here, in the States, where it is less common for people to have other languages, it’s kind of catch-as-catch-can,” says Stein.

Even for books that snag an editor’s attention, neither fiction nor non-fiction is easy to sell in the American market, and by extension, the Canadian market as well.

Lucinda Karter, director of the French Publishers’ Agency, which represents the interests of French publishing houses in the U.S. market, notes that non-fiction books must typically be scholarly works written by highly regarded specialists, since topical issues are no longer newsworthy by the time they are translated and released. Fiction, a much more subjective medium to assess, also encounters publishing hurdles. Problems include lack of author presence for promotion, cultural differences making the work difficult for North Americans to understand, and even the hesitancy of reviewers to tackle translated works.

Reviewers are often concerned they won’t know enough about the book because they are unfamiliar with the culture it comes from, explains Stein. “You wouldn’t believe how many times you hear, when you’re talking to some critics, ‘I can’t review it, because I’ll just look stupid, because I just don’t know anything about it, ’” she says.

Even when an author is extremely accomplished in their original language, they will not necessarily make it into English print. Mexican writer Eloy Urroz, who recently appeared in Calgary for WordFest, points to Sergio Pitol. A Mexican writer, Pitol won the Cervantes Prize in 2005 — the highest accolade given in Spanish language literature — but has not managed to break into the English literary scene.

“He is published in Russian, in Polish, in Czech, in Danish, in Italian, but I haven’t seen his books in English,” exclaims Urroz, who believes the reason for this is the low percentage of translations published in the U.S.

Some maintain the vast difference in the amount of translations published in the U.S., as opposed to Europe, is a reflection of the different literary cultures. Americans are insular and want nothing to do with other cultures, while Europeans are much more open readers. Part of this, certainly, seems to be the geographical conditions of the two regions.

“[Europeans] are used to languages, and a foreign language doesn’t necessarily mean a culture that they can’t understand,” says Karter. “They travel a lot; they know each country around them. Most French people probably are familiar or could read a German book without feeling lost, or too far removed, or an Italian book or a Dutch book.”

Stein doesn’t believe the low number of books translated for the U.S. market indicates American xenophobia. Rather, he thinks much of it may be attributed to the considerable U.S. population, and the sheer number of writers within the country.

“[In] the U.S. we just get a lot of writing, and I think that that is really easy to overlook,” he says. “Quebec imports a lot of books, and it’s kind of surprising that francophone Quebec can, with seven million French speakers, support a bunch of little publishing houses. That’s very surprising, right? But, you’d be really surprised... if they could get by without needing novels written in France. That would be really shocking. In the same way, it would be really shocking if the Dutch people could get by just reading books written by Dutch people. It would not be shocking if Americans could get by just reading books written by Americans, just as a matter of size.”

If this is the case, then the solution to the lack of translation into English has an easy fix: increase the demand — read more.