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As the world celebrates Book Lover’s Day on the 9th of August, the online language learning provider Preply released a report on The Most Translated Books in the World.
Preply has compared 195 countries and researched the most translated book produced by an author from each country. When necessary, they have relied on the World Cat Library data to find out the available title in most languages. They then visualized the data into an easily digestible infographic. Preply has disregarded religious texts and omitted countries with tags translated less than 5 times.
Overall, Preply found children’s literature dominating the first positions. “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint- Exupéry is number one. It currently holds the Guinness record for the most translated author for the same book.
In the United States, Ron L. Hubbard’s “The Way to Happiness” is the most translated book of all time, a title primarily used as a recruitment tool by Scientology.
Fiction is the top genre of the most translated texts in North America, South America, Africa, and Oceania.
In the European continent, many of the most translated books are from children’s literature. At the same time, the genres of Asia’s most translated books are as diverse as their people, cultures, and landscapes.
Here are the top 10 most translated books per country:
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (382+ languages) – France
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (300+ languages) – Italy
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol (175+ languages) – England
Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (160+ languages) –Denmark
Testament by Taras Shevchenko (150+ languages) – Ukraine
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (140+ languages) – Spain
The Way to Happiness by L. Ron Hubbard (112+ languages) – United States
The Adventures of Tintin by Georges Prosper Remi (93+ languages) – Belgium
The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách (90+ languages) – Hungary 10.The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo (80+ languages) – Brazil
Ranking by continent:
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (382+ languages) – Europe
The Way to Happiness by L. Ron Hubbard (112+ languages) – North America
The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo (80+ languages) – South America
The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (63+languages) – Africa
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (50+ languages) – Asia
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (20+ languages) – Oceania
