Translation Is Foreign to U.S. Publishers

By MOTOKO RICH writing in the New York Times, Published: October 17, 2008

FRANKFURT — David R. Godine, a small independent publisher from Boston, sat down at a French publisher’s booth here at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual gathering of the international literary world. “O.K., what’s great?” he asked.

Mr. Godine — who emerged prescient and lucky this month when one of the authors he publishes in translation, the French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature — is one of a handful of American publishers who regularly seek out books to translate during the fair every year.

It is a commonly held assumption that Americans don’t like to read authors who write in languages they don’t understand. That belief persists here in Frankfurt, where publishers from 100 countries show off a smorgasbord of their best — or at least best-selling — books.
By and large, the American publishers spend most of the week in Hall 8, the enormous exhibit space where English-language publishers hold court.

For the full piece link here to the New York Times.