How do you figure out what languages a book has been translated into?
I was watching an interview of an author this morning, and by way of introduction, the interviewer said that the author’s book had been “translated into 30 languages.”
That’s a standard phrase, but I wondered which 30 languages the book had been translated into.
And then I realized I have no idea how to find out the answer to that question.
Do you?
I founded BookFinder.com, where we deal pretty extensively with international book cataloging issues as we serve users from around the world. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell what languages a book’s been translated into.
Some options are:
ask the author or author’s publicity agent
look at the author’s website
consult a commercial books-in-print catalog like Muze, find the unique work ID, and see what languages the book is listed in
consult a crowdsourced book catalog like LibraryThing, find the unique work ID, and see what languages the book is listed in
The options are all pretty bad, but of these, I’d recommend LibraryThing (for fairly popular authors, in fairly common European languages).