Talk:List of most translated individual authors

Wildly inaccurate list
This article is irresponsible and wildly misleading. It takes its data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Index Translationum database, which is an incredibly useful resource. However, if you click on one of the authors and start reading the information this organization has gathered, you quickly find two problems: 1) Not all translations are included. And 2) different printings of the same translation are counted as separate entries. In effect, some authors are said to be translated fewer times than they actually have been and others more times.

To examine the first problem, take as an example Elena Ferrante, one of the most popular international authors today. Her Neapolitan series has been translated into 45 languages. She has other translated books, but take just those four books and multiply it by 45 (assuming all four have been translated into all 45 languages) and you get 180 translations. And yet if you pull her up in this database, they list only 20 records. Part of the problem is clearly that this database is out of date. The most recent entry listed for Ferrante is 2009. That is not responsible for all of the missing titles, though--the 20006 English translation Troubling Love, for instance, is not included in this database.

For the second problem, you can stick with Ferrante. Notice that the Dutch translation of L'amore molesto has two entries: one for 1996 and one for 1997. These are two printings of one translation (they have the same translator). Immediately, it is apparent that this is not a list of the number of translations, but the number of printed editions. To take a much more egregious example, does anyone really believe there are 7236 translations of Agatha Christie? (Also, how many languages has she really been translated into? The 1978 Guinness Book of World Records says 103. On the other hand, this 2018 Guinness site mentions that her crime novels have been translated into 44 languages. I would be shocked if, by adding translations of her other work, it more than doubled the number of languages.) Even the most popular international authors do not have every book translated into every language. And even if her 66 detective novels had each been translated twice into all 44 languages, that would still be 5808 translations, not 7236. For an author who has sold two billion copies worldwide, it is not at all surprising that there would be so many different editions of identical translations. But even with her enormous popularity, there are not anywhere close to 7236 translations. Furthermore, even the number of editions is inaccurate. For instance, I found one English book that was published in French in 2008 but only the 2017 re-issue was listed in the database.

All this to say: this article is not what it purports to be, a list of the most translated individual authors. So it should definitely be re-titled. But what accurate title would not be completely clunky? And how many people would actually be interested in what this article is actually about? Or maybe the article title should remain and the content should be deleted and an explanation offered about how there is no valid list? WindSandAndStars (talk) 18:49, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Flag correction and other matters
I've corrected the flag displayed for Philipp Winterberg. Although I cannot establish from the very skimpy article on this author (or its apparent direct source on the German Wikipedia) whether he is alive or dead, and if so when he existed, but I get the impression that he was not around in the days of the German Confederation (which is not the same beastie as the Federal Republic of Germany). I am unsure too of what is meant by 'number of translations'. Is having more people translating you into fewer languages better than fewer people translating you into more languages? I would reckon that a listing of the number of languages an author's work has been translated into would be of more interest. The comments by WindSandAndStars about the counting of 'translations' in the source material confirm my suspicions about the 7000 odd translations of Agatha Christie (into 103 languages). Also, why is the number of entries actually giving number of languages so small? Sarandone2 (talk) 15:21, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Quran?
Not a bad list, important to include Biblical Authors. What about Quranic Authors? Thanks 180.150.37.16 (talk) 11:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)