There’s a statistic that gets cited frequently in publishing circles: only about 3% of books published in the United States are translations. The number has improved slightly in recent years, but it remains startlingly low compared to most other countries. In France, translated literature accounts for roughly 15-18% of books published. In Germany, it’s around 12%. In many smaller European countries, the percentage is even higher.

What this means, practically, is that most English-language readers are consuming literature from a remarkably narrow slice of the world’s literary output. We’re reading books written in English, by English-speakers, about English-speaking cultures. And while that’s a rich tradition, it’s also a limited one. Imagine listening to only one radio station your entire life. You might love that station, but you’d never know what you were missing on all the others.

I want to make the case for reading in translation, to explain why it matters, what you gain from it, and where to start if you’ve never really ventured outside English-language literature.

What You’re Missing

The most obvious thing you’re missing by reading only in English is a wider range of perspectives. Different cultures produce different kinds of stories, with different assumptions about what a novel should do, how characters should behave, what counts as a satisfying ending. Japanese fiction has a tradition of ambiguity and understatement that feels fundamentally different from the American emphasis on conflict and resolution. Latin American fiction has a relationship with time and memory that doesn’t map neatly onto European narrative conventions. African literatures (plural, because the continent contains dozens of distinct literary traditions) offer ways of understanding community, identity, and history that challenge Western frameworks.

But it’s more than just different perspectives. Translated literature also gives you access to different ways of using language. Every language has its own music, its own rhythms, its own capabilities and limitations. When a skilled translator brings a book from one language into another, they’re negotiating between these different musical systems. The result, when it works, is prose that feels subtly different from anything written originally in English. There’s a quality to good translated fiction that I can only describe as slightly unfamiliar in the best way, like hearing a melody played on an instrument you’ve never encountered before.

I first experienced this reading the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. His sentences, even in English translation, have a quality of sustained, accumulative attention that feels distinctly Scandinavian. The long, patient descriptions of ordinary activities, making breakfast, changing a diaper, driving to a gas station, have a rhythm that owes something to the Norwegian language’s structure and something to a cultural attitude toward time and detail that’s different from the American rush to get to the point.

The Translator’s Art

Translation is one of the most underappreciated arts in publishing. A literary translator must be a skilled writer in the target language, a sensitive reader of the source language, and a diplomat who can negotiate between two linguistic systems that often have no one-to-one correspondence.

Consider the challenge of translating wordplay. A pun that works in French almost certainly doesn’t work in English. The translator has to decide: do they try to create an equivalent pun in English (which might require changing the joke entirely), do they translate literally and add a footnote explaining the pun, or do they skip it and accept the loss? Each choice has tradeoffs. Multiply this decision by hundreds across a full novel, and you begin to understand the complexity of the translator’s task.

Cultural references pose similar challenges. A passing reference to a popular TV show, a political figure, or a local custom in one culture may be meaningless to readers in another. The translator can keep the reference and add context, can substitute an equivalent from the target culture (which changes the text), or can generalize the reference into something universal (which loses specificity). Again, every choice involves compromise.

The best translators find a way to bring the original text’s voice, tone, and personality into the target language while also making the result read as natural, living prose. This is an enormously difficult balancing act. Translations that are too literal sound stilted and awkward. Translations that are too free lose the distinctive qualities of the original. The sweet spot, where the translation reads beautifully in English while preserving something essential about the source, is what separates great translators from competent ones.

I want to name some translators I admire, because they too rarely get the recognition they deserve. Ann Goldstein, who translates Elena Ferrante from Italian, has managed to capture the intensity and directness of Ferrante’s prose in a way that has helped make her a global phenomenon. Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian” from Korean was a literary event in itself, introducing English readers to a writer of extraordinary power. Jhumpa Lahiri, better known as a novelist, has translated several Italian works and brings a writer’s sensitivity to language to every page.

Starting Points: Where to Begin

If you’re new to translated literature, the prospect of choosing from the world’s literary output can be overwhelming. Here are some starting points organized by what you might already enjoy.

If you like literary thrillers and crime fiction, Scandinavian noir is an obvious entry point. The genre has been popular in English translation for over a decade, and the quality remains high. Beyond the well-known Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo, try Arnaldur Indridason’s Icelandic detective Erlendur series, which is slower and more melancholic than most crime fiction, or Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg novels from France, which blend detective fiction with something close to magical realism. Find Indridason on Amazon.

If you like literary fiction with strong character work, try the Italian novels of Elena Ferrante. Start with “My Brilliant Friend,” the first of her Neapolitan quartet, which follows two women from childhood in 1950s Naples through decades of friendship, rivalry, and social change. Ferrante writes about female friendship with an intensity and honesty that I haven’t found anywhere else. Find it on Amazon.

If you enjoy novels of ideas, French literature has a long tradition of fiction that engages with philosophical and political questions. I’d recommend starting with Albert Camus, whose “The Stranger” remains as startling and provocative as when it was published in 1942. For something more contemporary, try Michel Houellebecq, whose novels are deliberately provocative and uncomfortable, or Leila Slimani, whose “The Perfect Nanny” is a disturbing psychological study of domestic life. Find Camus on Amazon.

If you’re interested in family sagas and generational stories, Latin American literature has some of the best examples in any language. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is the obvious starting point, and it deserves its reputation. But also try Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits,” which covers a Chilean family across the 20th century with warmth and political awareness, or Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s “The Sound of Things Falling,” which explores how Colombia’s drug wars echoed through ordinary lives. Find Garcia Marquez on Amazon.

If you’re drawn to spare, minimalist writing, Japanese literature has produced some of the finest practitioners. Yoko Ogawa’s “The Memory Police” is a haunting novel about a society where objects (and the memories attached to them) gradually disappear. Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” is a compact, tender novel about grief and food. And Haruki Murakami, for all his fame, remains genuinely strange and compelling, especially his earlier, shorter works like “A Wild Sheep Chase.” Find Ogawa on Amazon.

African Literature in Translation

I want to give African literature its own section because it’s an area where English-language readers have the most catching up to do. While some African writers write in English or French and are relatively well-known (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o), there are extraordinary literary traditions in Swahili, Yoruba, Arabic, Amharic, and dozens of other languages that remain largely untranslated.

For Arabic literature, start with Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate whose Cairo Trilogy follows three generations of a Cairo family from World War I through the 1950s. The books are warm, detailed, and deeply humane. For something more contemporary, try Jokha Alharthi’s “Celestial Bodies,” which won the International Booker Prize in 2019. Set in Oman, it weaves together the stories of three sisters with the story of a nation in transition. Find Mahfouz on Amazon.

East African literature in Swahili is a growing area of translation. The Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, writes primarily in English but is deeply engaged with the literary and cultural traditions of the Swahili coast. His novel “Paradise” is a gorgeous account of a boy’s coming of age in early 20th-century East Africa. Find Gurnah on Amazon.

The Problem of Availability

One barrier to reading in translation is simply finding translated books. Most mainstream bookstores have limited translated fiction on their shelves. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm tends to favor English-language titles, making discovery difficult. Review coverage in major publications, while improving, still skews heavily toward books originally written in English.

There are some excellent resources for finding translated literature. The International Booker Prize shortlist, which specifically recognizes fiction in translation, is a reliable annual guide to the best recent translations. Words Without Borders, an online magazine, publishes translated fiction, poetry, and non-fiction and is one of the best places to discover new voices. The publisher New Directions has been bringing international literature to English readers for decades and has a catalog worth exploring systematically.

Independent bookstores, particularly those in cities with diverse populations, tend to be better about stocking translated literature. If you’re lucky enough to live near one, ask the staff for recommendations. They’re often passionate about translated fiction and glad to have someone ask about it.

Reading Translation Generously

I want to offer some practical advice for reading translated literature, particularly if you’re not used to it.

First, be patient with unfamiliarity. Translated novels may have different pacing, different narrative structures, and different assumptions about what the reader knows. A Japanese novel’s quiet, elliptical approach to conflict might initially feel like “nothing is happening” to a reader trained on American fiction’s emphasis on plot momentum. Give it time. Adjust your expectations. Let the book teach you how to read it.

Second, don’t judge a literary tradition by a single book. If you read one translated novel and don’t connect with it, that doesn’t mean all literature from that language or country is “not for you.” There’s as much variety within any literary tradition as there is within English-language literature. Try a different author, a different genre, a different translator.

Third, pay attention to the translator. Different translators bring different sensibilities to the same text. If you’ve read a translation that felt flat or awkward, the issue might be the translation rather than the original. Some classic works have multiple translations available, and the differences between them can be striking. For Russian literature in particular, translator choice can dramatically affect your experience. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have generated heated debate among scholars and readers who find them either more accurate or more stilted than older translations.

Fourth, resist the temptation to treat translated literature as anthropology. When you read a novel from another country, you’re reading a work of art, not a field guide to a foreign culture. The characters are not representative of their entire nation or language group. The novel’s depiction of a place or a people is one artist’s vision, shaped by their own perspective and biases. Read with the same critical awareness you’d bring to an American novel about America.

What Translation Means for Writers

Reading widely in translation has made me a better editor. It’s expanded my sense of what fiction can do, what shapes a narrative can take, what registers prose can operate in. When I encounter a manuscript that does something structurally unusual, I’m more likely to recognize it as a deliberate choice rather than a mistake if I’ve seen similar techniques in translated literature.

At ScrollWorks, we think about this when developing our own titles. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo draws on narrative traditions from both European and West African storytelling. Still Waters by Elena Marsh has a quality of restraint and observation that owes something to the Japanese literary tradition. These connections aren’t always visible on the surface, but they’re there, enriching the work in ways that a purely Anglophone literary diet wouldn’t produce.

For writers, reading in translation is one of the best ways to stretch your craft. Exposure to different narrative strategies, different relationships between sentences, different approaches to time and structure, all of this feeds back into your own writing in ways that can be hard to trace but easy to feel. The writer who reads only in English is working with a limited toolkit. The writer who reads across languages has access to the full range of human storytelling.

The Moral Dimension

I’ll end with something that might sound grandiose but that I believe sincerely: reading in translation is a moral act. In a world that seems to be fragmenting along cultural and national lines, literature in translation is one of the few forces pulling us toward understanding across those lines. When you read a novel from another country, another language, another culture, you’re engaging in an act of imaginative empathy. You’re spending hours inside the mind of someone whose experience of the world is different from yours.

This doesn’t mean that reading a Japanese novel makes you an expert on Japan, or that reading a Colombian novel gives you authority on Colombian politics. But it does mean that you’ve spent time, serious, sustained time, engaging with a perspective you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. That engagement, repeated across many books and many cultures, builds something. I’d call it literacy in the broadest sense: the ability to read not just words but worlds.

The 3% of American books that are translations should be 10%. It should be 15%. We’d all be better readers, better writers, and better citizens if we read more widely across languages. The books are out there. The translators are doing heroic work to bring them to us. All we have to do is pick them up.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.