That post about how to find the translations of books turned out to address a more difficult question than I had imagined. Surely, somewhere there was a giant database, which maps translations to originals?

Well there are, sort of.

The big discovery for me was something called the Index Translationum, which was built by UNESCO. (I was tipped off to it by the very useful www.askusnow.info, a service where you can chat with librarians.)

For instance, there are 390 listings for a search for “The Lord of the Rings,” 442 for “Harry Potter” (yes, as a matter of fact, Harry Potter has been translated into Basque), and 24 for Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. That last number would appear to be larger than the number of translations listed on www.philipkdick.com. It would also appear to be more than the 16 listed on LibraryThing. (click “Work Details”) It’s very important to note, however, that LibraryThing has the proper Unicode records of titles in non-Roman scripts, whereas the Index Translationum has a crummy, ill-defined transliteration system.

Thanks to Anirvan Chatterjee of BookFinder.com for his suggestions, which included the fact that LibraryThing tracks translations.

One final suggestion I’d throw in myself is simply to check Wikipedia. If the book is famous enough to have it’s own article, as The Man in the High Castle is, then the left-hand links often turn up several articles whose titles are probably the title of translated works. In this case, the links turn up Człowiek z Wysokiego Zamku, Manden i den store fæstning, Das Orakel vom Berge, El hombre en el castillo, Le Maître du Haut Château, La svastica sul sole, האיש במצודה הרמה, Mannen i det höga slottet, and 高堡奇人…

So the bottom line is, there are a bunch of places to look. But we’re not in the age of a “translation lookup web service” or anything like that, yet.

Further suggestions welcome…

(I’d add in passing that it’s really surprising that online bookstores don’t make this sort of information available. A Brazilian customer, say, who searches for “The Man in the High Castle” might be that much more likely to buy a copy if upon being informed that O homem do castelo alto exists…)