The Most Culturally Relevant Language Is ...

Norwegian?

In fact, English comes in at fifth if your yardstick is translations of fiction works, say Victor Ginsburgh, Shlomo Weber and Sheila Weyers from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. (HT: Journal of Interest)

Using translation stats from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the three researchers constructed a ranking system of European languages based on both fiction and "all other" (i.e. non-fiction) works.

For their calculations, they assumed that people in richer countries with higher literacy rates read more, and that it takes longer for people to read books written in languages that are more culturally distant. As a proxy for this cultural distance, they took into account how closely two languages were related to each other.

For example, an English-language reader will get through a book faster if it's translated from German rather than Russian since German and English are more closely related than Russian and English. That's the researchers' assumption, anyway.

They find that between 1979-2002, if all languages had the same number of speakers, there would be 1.28 times more fiction books translated from Norwegian than from English. Click here for a table showing a ranking of the 19 languages the researchers tested. English clocks in at fifth, coming right after French. But before Francophones celebrate their relative cultural dominance, the authors point out that the statistical difference between English and French is insignificant. (I'll also point out that Mandarin, the world's most popular first language, is not included in the study.)

There is a caveat for the rankings of non-fiction works where English ranks third after German and French, the researchers say. "English is not first either. This is because English is more and more used as the language of science, and does not need to be translated, since most scientists can and do communicate in English."

In the end, the results show that while languages like Russian, Spanish and Portuguese are spoken by more people, "their role is often dwarfed by smaller languages, such as Finnish, Czech and Hungarian. The model can unfortunately provide no reason for which this happens."

Here's a little quiz using the U.N.'s data:
(Hint: the U.N. database doesn't seem to include the writers of religious texts which are probably the most translated works of all time. The reason? Presumably it's impossible to know who wrote them.)

1. Who is the most translated Norwegian author? Answer

2. The most translated female author and second overall? Answer

3. The most translated English author and also of all time? Answer (This page takes a while to load so here's a hint: It's not Shakespeare.)

4. Bonus question: At the risk of showing my ignorance (and societally ingrained sexism), who is Enid Blyton, the fourth most translated author?

5. Another bonus question: Who is the most translated Danish author? Answer

What do you think? Why are the Norwegian and Danish languages more relatively popular than English when it comes to fiction translations?