Popular or prestigious? – A study of hierarchies and what is translated, directly and indirectly, into Swedish 2000–2015

ABSTRACT

Many novels are translated into Swedish from the other Nordic languages. In the past, Nordic languages were also sometimes used as mediating languages (ML) for indirect translation (ITr), (Ringmar, n.d., 2008a, p. 174), but this is no longer the case. To better understand this change and ITr, this article draws upon Bourdieu’s theory (1983) of ‘scale of production of symbolic goods’. Two questions are asked: (1) What kind of literature was translated indirectly into Swedish 2000–2015? and (2) Can Bourdieu’s scale of production contribute to explain why Nordic languages are not used as MLs in ITrs? In response to these questions two data sets: (a) direct Nordic translations, and (b) ITrs of novels from all languages, are analysed from four perspectives: (i) the profile of the publishing company, (ii) literary prizes, (iii) the amount of crime fiction, and (vi) grants from the Swedish Arts Council. The analyses reveal that the ITrs are often written by prize-winning authors, and published by well-established publishers receiving grants for the translations. The direct Nordic translations and the ITrs diverge on Bourdieu’s ‘scale production’. These findings might partly explain why no Nordic language functioned as ML for an ITr into Swedish during the period examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Indirect translation
• ITr
• scale of production
• Swedish
• Nordic translation
• Bourdieu

1. Introduction

Mediating languages (MLs) play an essential role in research into indirect translation (ITr). There is a general assumption that it is mainly the most frequently translated languages in the world – the (hyper)central language(s) – that are used as MLs in ITr (Pięta, 2019, p. 25). In addition, Ringmar (2015, p. 171) has ‘emphasised the relation between hierarchical systems and ITr’. However, at a regional level, differences can be observed in the composition of the list of the most translated languages, as shown by Zlatnar Moe et al. (2019, p. 44). Thus, detailed information regarding specific language areas should increase our understanding of the connection between the most frequently translated, ultimate source languages (SLs) and MLs employed in ITr.

In the past, a substantial amount of translation was performed directly between the Nordic languages, and according to Ringmar (n.d.; 2008a, p. 174) other Nordic languages were sometimes used as MLs for ITr into Swedish. Direct Nordic translations into Swedish are still numerous 2000–2015 (see Table 1). However, as can be gathered from Allwood (2021), the Nordic languages are no longer used as MLs (see also Table 1).

Table 1. The most translated languages globally 2012, compared to the hierarchies of MLs for indirectly translated novels and the SLs for novels translated directly into Swedish.

Most translated SLs globally 2012, based on Lindqvist (2015)	% of the SLs	The MLs for ITr into Swedish 2000–2015	% of all MLs	Most translated SL in direct translation into Swedish 2000–2015	% of the SLs
English	62	English	68.6	English	61
French	10	French	8.6	Norwegian	17.7
German	9	German	5.7	French	6.1
Russian	5	Russian	5.7	German	3.3
Italian	3.5	Spanish	5.7	Danish	2.7
Spanish	3	Dutch	4.3	Spanish	1.9
Swedish	2	Turkish	1.4	Russian	1.5
Japanese	1.5			Finnish	1.3
Danish	1			Portuguese	1.2
Latin	1			Icelandic	1.0

The aim of this article is to answer two interrelated research questions: (1) What type of novel was translated indirectly 2000–2015? and (2) Can Bourdieu’s theory of ‘scale of production’ contribute to explain why the Nordic languages are no longer used as MLs in ITr? Because of the second question, we also need to establish what type of novel was translated directly from the Nordic languages into Swedish during this period.

This study is based on a comprehensive research project identifying ITrs and their MLs in all of the novels translated into Swedish between 2000 and 2015, and it exploits Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the scale of production of symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu, 1985; 1995). A Bourdieusian theoretical framework posits a continuum between (a) large-scale production with texts written for the public at large and (b) restricted production, where the expected audience consists of the authors’ ‘peer group’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 17). In this article, ‘the scale of production’ is applied to direct and indirect translations to shed new light on ITr and on the local, Nordic/Scandinavian sub-system in the world system of translation (cf. Lindqvist, 2015; 2016; Ringmar, 2015).

The structure of the article is as follows: Section 2 outlines the hierarchies of translated languages and Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘large-scale production’ and ‘restricted production’ of symbolic goods, followed by a few remarks concerning the Swedish book market. Section 3 presents the material, research design, and the operationalised research questions addressed by the study. The results and discussion appear in Section 4. Finally, concluding remarks are presented in Section 5.

2. Theoretical considerations: language hierarchies, the scale of production and the Swedish book market

This section addresses language hierarchies in terms of the most frequently translated languages, internationally and in Sweden. It compares three different hierarchies: (i) the world hierarchy of translated languages; (ii) the hierarchy between the MLs for novels translated indirectly into Swedish; and (iii) the hierarchy between the languages translated directly into Swedish. After that, Bourdieu’s two concepts of ‘large-scale production’ and ‘restricted production’ of symbolic goods are presented and contrasted against each other. The section is concluded by a few remarks concerning the Swedish book market.

2.1. The world hierarchy of translated languages

Among the world’s most translated languages, English is undisputedly the (hyper)central language which serves as the ultimate SL for most translations (Casanova, 2005; Heilbron, 1999; Zlatnar Moe et al., 2019). English is followed by the central languages French and German, which have about 10 per cent of the global market each. We then find six or seven semi-peripheral languages, among which Swedish and Danish are perhaps the most surprising, given the rather small number of people who speak these languages. In translation terms, the rest of the world’s languages are peripheral, with one per cent or less of the market share each. This picture has been approximately the same at least since the 1980s (cf. Lindqvist, 2015, p. 81).

The fact that Swedish and Danish rank so high in the list of most translated languages in the world might to some extent be explained by the existence of a Nordic/Scandinavian sub-system of translation, where these languages are mainly translated between themselves (Lindqvist, 2015; 2016; Ringmar, 2008b; 2015), thereby adding to their ranking in the list. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen a rising international interest in crime fiction, not least from the Nordic countries, i.e. from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (so-called Nordic noir).¹

As can be seen in Table 1 the hierarchy of MLs used for ITr into Swedish resembles the world hierarchy of translation more closely than that of direct translation into Swedish. The Table juxtaposes statistics from Lindqvist (2015, p. 81), which is based on the Index Translationum and shows the ten most translated languages in the world for the year 2012, to statistics generated for the present article (see Section 3.1). The middle column shows the MLs used for ITrs of novels 2000–2015 and the right column shows the ten most translated languages as regards direct translation of novels into Swedish 2000–2015.² The Nordic languages are marked in bold in Table 1.

The ranking of SLs for direct translations into Swedish (the right column), differ from the other hierarchies in that all the Nordic languages are present among the ten most common languages. On the world’s top ten list, Swedish and Danish are the only Nordic languages represented, with a combined share of about three per cent.³ No Nordic language was used as ML for ITr into Swedish during the researched period.

2.2. Large-scale and restricted production of symbolic goods

As mentioned in the introduction, this study draws on the Bourdieusian concept of ‘scale of production of symbolic goods’ in the literary field. According to Bourdieu (1985), the literary field, or system, is organised around a scale of production with two opposing poles: (a) large-scale production and (b) restricted production. Bourdieu has indicated that one should not conceive of ‘a clear boundary’ between these two poles since they are but poles in the same space (1995, p. 120).⁴ Nonetheless, the two extremes can seem rather far apart from each other. Authors, translators, and publishers close to the pole of large-scale production are ‘subordinated to the expectations of a wide audience’. In contrast, the only expected readers of authors near the pole of restricted production are other actors in a similar cultural position. (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 121, 217). Somewhere between the two extremes lies (mainstream) prestige literature. In the following paragraphs, the two extremes on Bourdieu’s scale of production are contrasted against each other.

Books intended for large-scale production are predominantly subject to ordinary market forces. Their producers try to minimise risk, and a book’s success is measured in large print runs and fast turnover. In contrast, the pole of restricted production is driven by ‘anti-economic’ economics (Bourdieu, 1983; 1995; 2008) and thus behaves as if ordinary economy, or economic gain, is of no importance. Heilbron and Sapiro (2007, p. 8) point out that literature close to this pole ‘most often relies on a system of subsidy in publishing and translation’ and that books that are subject to restricted production are ‘founded on criteria of literary or intellectual value rather than on chances of success with the public-at-large’.

Actors striving towards the pole of restricted production thus aim to achieve symbolic capital, which, in the long run, could result in economic value as well, by focusing on literature that might sell slowly but for many years to come. The underlying logic is that such works will eventually join the canon in anthologies and university reading lists. This would further elevate the prestige of the work and sell more copies (Sapiro, 2008, p. 155).

Authors writing best-sellers and popular literature belong to the large-scale production. To this pole, Bourdieu also assigns journalists who write books on ‘hot’ topics, famous people who address current affairs, autobiographies, and ‘professional writers who bow to the canons of a tested aesthetic (“prize-winning” literature, successful novels, etc.)’ (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 144).

Bourdieu’s views on literary awards may seem ambiguous. On the one hand, he sees ‘prize-winning’ literature as belonging to popular literature; on the other hand, he argues that the number of Nobel Prize in Literature laureates is relevant to evaluating a publishing house’s ‘nobility’, i.e. its symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 124). In the present study, prizes and awards – as signs of consecration – are analysed to distinguish literature of large-scale production from literature closer to a more prestigious ‘middle ground’.⁵

2.3. A few comments on the Swedish book market

It is not possible to state the exact number of publishing companies in Sweden. According to Steiner (2019, p. 107), there are 250–300 publishing companies that can be described as ‘professional companies with regular publications intended for the general public’. As a comparison, the database used as a starting point for this article contains 269 publishing companies that published novels in Swedish in direct or indirect translation 2000–2015.

Three large companies dominate the Swedish publishing market: Albert Bonniers Förlag, Norstedts, and Natur & Kultur. Smaller publishing companies are occasionally purchased or sold by one of the bigger companies. For the purpose of this study, these smaller companies are regarded as publishing companies in their own right, as is often done in literary studies into Swedish publishing practices (cf. Ruëgg, 2021, pp. 32–35). Imprints with a distinct publishing profile are also counted as separate companies.

Other publishing companies engage in similar business transactions. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Norwegian company Schibsted bought Boknöje AB and a few other small Swedish publishing companies which focused on cartoons, light reading, and management literature. From 2006, they appeared under the joint name Schibsted Förlagen AB. After a few years, Schibsted sold all its Swedish publishing companies except Boknöje (Sundin, 2012, p. 264). According to information in Libris, Boknöje started publishing novels under its own name again in 2015.

3. Research design, material and methods

This section presents the database and the method used to identify direct and indirect translations. In order to operationalise the two research questions of the study, four questions are posed regarding each of the two sets of material, i.e. direct Nordic translations and ITrs from all languages. All of the four operationalised questions are used to inform both of the two research questions. However, for research question 1: What type of novel was translated indirectly 2000–2015? operationalised questions ii and iii are slightly more important, and for research question 2: Can Bourdieu’s theory of scale of production contribute to explain why the Nordic languages are no longer used as MLs in ITr? the operationalised questions i, ii and iv are slightly more important. The operationalised questions are:

1. How do the six most prolific publishers of these novels present themselves on the Internet with regard to their company size, types of books they tend to publish, etc.?

2. How many of the authors have received one or more of four of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes that are awarded to authors of any language and nationality?

3. In light of the popularity of the Nordic noir, what role does crime fiction play in the two data sets?⁶

4. What proportion of the novels have received grants from the Swedish Arts Council?

From a Bourdieusian perspective, it should be clear that these operationalised research questions are intended to distinguish between the literature that can be classified as prestigious, ‘higher middle ground’ of consecrated authors and the more popular genres. Thus, the extreme form of the restricted production of symbolic goods is not taken into consideration.

3.1. Research material

The database used in this study was compiled by the author and contains information about every first edition of novels translated into Swedish, both directly and indirectly, between the years 2000 and 2015. Where applicable, first editions of older books that appeared in a new translation, i.e. retranslations, are also included. Below, the compilation process is briefly presented. For further information, see Allwood (2021).

To build the database, the Swedish National Library Catalogue, Libris, was interrogated using a Boolean search string. The express purpose was to analyse every first edition of translated novels published between 2000 and 2015 in order to identify the ITrs for further analysis.⁷ To detect undocumented, or ‘hidden’ ITrs (see Assis Rosa et al., 2017, p. 119; Ivaska, 2020, pp. 24–27), the information in the database was triangulated against external information about each author’s language background and the translators’ working languages. The term triangulation is used here in its simplest sense, as per Pym (2011) and Williams and Chesterman (2002, p. 99).⁸

When completed, the database consisted of 5,259 translated novels. Of this total, 70 novels are ITrs. In the set of ITrs, there are 27 different ultimate SLs and seven MLs (see Table 1). The 70 ITrs include both overt ones that are identified as ITrs in Libris (and confirmed by the triangulation method) and undocumented ones, that were identified during the triangulation procedure.

3.2. Creating a typology for direct Nordic translations and ITrs into Swedish

As stated in the introduction, the aim of this study is to identify: (1) The type of novel that was translated indirectly 2000–2015; and (2) Whether the Bourdieusian scale of production can be used as (part of) an explanation to why the Nordic languages were not used as MLs in ITrs during this period. To this end, a method was devised to establish the features of novels that can be found in different positions along the Bourdieusian scale of production. The method is used to position (a) Nordic novels translated directly into Swedish and (b) indirectly translated novels on the scale of production of symbolic goods.

Each sub-set of the material was subjected to four analyses. The first step was to analyse the characteristics of the six most prolific publishing companies based on each company’s presentation of themselves on the website of the Swedish Publishers’ Association (SvF 2020). The information was complemented, where needed, with information from each company’s own website. The objective was to establish an overall impression of what kind of books these companies publish, how they position themselves vis-à-vis different genres, and whether they mention ‘quality’ in their presentations (the assumption being that mentioning ‘quality’ would be a way for the publishing house to establish itself as more prestigious).

The second step entailed comparing the novels to four of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes (Table 2). The prizes were selected from a list of 72 literary prizes presented on the online authors’ encyclopaedia Alex (‘Alex Författarlexikon’, 2019). The four prizes are the ones that fulfilled all of the following three criteria: (i) awarded every year, 2000–2015; (ii) not limited to authors of a particular nationality or language; and (iii) not limited to a specific literary genre.⁹ Where the prize was awarded before or in the same year as the novel’s publication in Swedish, it is conceivable that the prize may have influenced the Swedish publishing companies’ decision to have the book translated.

Table 2. The four literary prizes to which the translations were compared, ordered according to year of establishment.

Prize	Year of establishment and aim
The Nobel Prize in Literature	Established in 1901 in Sweden, given to the most outstanding author, regardless of nationality.
Prix Médicis étranger	Established in 1970 for literature translated into French.
Prix Femina étranger	Established in 1985, as a complement to the French Prix Femina, and given to ‘best foreign novel’.
The International Dublin Literary Award	Established in 1994 in Ireland, given to a novel written in, or translated into, English, which is of ‘high literary merit’. Libraries in 177 countries send in nominations (Dublin Literary Award).

In Table 2, the four prizes included in the study are presented in chronological order, based on the year of their establishment and with information from the authors’ encyclopaedia Alex, supplemented where needed with information from the Internet. ¹⁰

As it has been previously suggested that the amount of crime fiction might have influenced Sweden’s and Denmark’s places on the hierarchy of translated languages, the third step in the analysis was to identify what role crime fiction played in the material. Here, two different, tentative methods were applied to the two data sets because of their notable difference in size. For the 70 indirectly translated novels, a close reading of the titles was applied. Where necessary, this was followed by consultations of summaries and reviews of the different novels in order to establish whether the work could be classified as crime fiction or not. Since the Nordic data set was many times larger than the ITr data set, a different approach was applied to identify the proportion of crime fiction among the Nordic novels. First, the names of Nordic crime writers were collected from 16 different top lists (see Appendix 1). In order to find these lists of Nordic crime authors or novels, different combinations of the following search words were entered in both English and Swedish into a common search engine: Nordic Noir, Crime, Top and Denmark / Danish / Finland / Finnish / Norway / Norwegian / Iceland / Icelandic. The authors’ names that these searches produced were then compared to the data set with Nordic authors in Swedish translation.

The above procedure generated the names of nine Danish, nine Norwegian, five Finnish, and four Icelandic authors.¹¹ The book titles by these 27 authors were summed up and compared to the total set of translations from the Nordic languages in order to establish the proportion of crime fiction in the material. For the sake of simplicity, it was assumed that every novel by these authors was crime fiction. Exceptions may exist, of course.

The fourth step of the analysis was to check whether the novels had received a literary grant from the Swedish Arts Council. This support – or lack of it – is relevant since dependence on state grants is a characteristic of restricted production (Heilbron & Sapiro, 2007, p. 8).¹²

The Swedish Arts Council’s internal guidelines (Kulturrådet, 2020) demand that the board consider the following when it decides whether a literary work is eligible for a grant:

• the work’s intensity and linguistic interpretation;

• the originality and personal character of the work;

• the degree of complexity and independence in terms of literary techniques and ideas;

• the author’s consciousness of literary traditions and techniques.

These criteria show that the Arts Council applies high standards for fiction that receive a grant. The Arts Council also explicitly states that translations should be of good quality and preferably made from the original language. However – and this is quite remarkable – when applying for a grant, a publisher does not have to state the SL for the translation, and thus, the Arts Council will not directly know whether a novel is translated directly or indirectly.¹³ Notwithstanding this, on the surface ‘cultural policies in Scandinavia clearly favor direct over ITr.’ (Alvstad, 2017, p. 151).

There is an additional factor to consider that might influence whether a grant is allocated to an ITr. According to its internal guidelines, The Arts Council is obliged to promote ‘a diversity in perspectives’ in literature and to prioritise awarding grants to ‘translations from language areas that are seldom published in Swedish translation’ (Kulturrådet, 2020, p. 8, my translation). Assumedly, this obligation could benefit ITrs, which often originate from less-translated language areas.

4. Results and discussion

In this section, the results of the study are presented and the two data sets are described and classified according to the characteristics of the types of novels that are (a) translated directly from the Nordic languages, or (b) translated indirectly from all languages into Swedish. As outlined in Section 3, the characterisation is based on four features: (i) the profile of the publishing company, (ii) literary prizes, (iii) the proportion of crime fiction, and (iv) grants from the Swedish Arts Council. The results for the novels translated directly from other Nordic languages are given in Section 4.1, and the results for the novels translated indirectly are given in Section 4.2.

4.1. The novels translated directly from other Nordic languages

The numbers of direct translations of Nordic novels into Swedish are listed in Table 3. Norwegian is by far the most translated Nordic language, representing 67.5 per cent of all translations from the Nordic languages. Danish, the second most translated Nordic language into Swedish, accounts for 17 per cent of the Nordic translations. Finnish and Icelandic constitute about 8.5 and 6.5 per cent respectively.

Table 3. The number of novels translated from the other Nordic languages into Swedish 2000–2015, ordered according to the number of translations from each language.

Nordic SL	Novels
Norwegian	566
Danish	147
Finnish	73
Icelandic	55
Total	841

Between 2000 and 2015, 841 novels were translated directly from other Nordic languages into Swedish by 60 different publishing companies. Of these companies, 24 (40%) only published one single translation from a Nordic language, and six companies each published more than 20 translations from the Nordic languages. Taken together, these latter companies represented 69 per cent of all Nordic translations into Swedish (see Table 4).

Table 4. The six publishing companies with the most translations from the Nordic languages, ordered according to the number of translations published.

Publisher	Novels
Schibsted/Boknöje	317
Norstedts	80
Forum	69
Bonnier	54
Piratförlaget	37
Wahlström & Widstrand	24
Total	581

The publishing profiles of these six companies differ from each other to some extent. Wahlström & Widstrand are not presented on the Swedish Publishers’ Association website (SvF) since they are currently an imprint of Albert Bonniers Förlag. Their own website reports that they publish most literary genres and that their ambition is to publish quality literature, both Swedish originals and foreign translations. The company was established in the nineteenth century (Wahlström & Widstrand 2020). Piratförlaget is an author-owned publishing company that publishes Swedish and Nordic authors. The company claims that its conditions for authors are better than those of other publishing companies. No reference to ‘quality’ is made on their website. A large proportion of their authors are writers of crime fiction and journalists-turned-authors. Albert Bonniers is the largest and one of the oldest publishers of fiction in Sweden. They publish in several genres and from many different languages. Forum is another publishing company that does not have a presentation of its own at SvF, being an imprint of Ester Bonnier since 2019 (Forum 2020). According to their website, they publish Swedish and foreign authors. Their stated aim is to publish ‘the best in each genre’. Their publications are very versatile. Norstedts is Sweden’s oldest publishing company and also one of the three largest. They publish fiction and non-fiction in translation and in the original language. Schibsted/Boknöje is the publishing company with the most Nordic–Swedish translations. On closer inspection, their production reveals that except for 10 novels from English and one from Icelandic and Italian respectively, all the other translations by Schibsted/Boknöje were from Norwegian. Of the 566 translations from Norwegian included in this study, 316 were published by Schibsted/Boknöje, i.e. 55 per cent of the total (258 attributed to Schibsted and 58 to Boknöje).

The light, or popular, literature published by Schibsted/Boknöje primarily consisted of ‘novel series’, i.e. novels where the reader gets to follow a character or different generations of a family through several books. The stories typically have a romantic component and take place in Norway in the past. Female Norwegian authors seem to excel in this genre. Among the translations published by Schibsted/Boknöje, one can find highly prolific writers such as Bente Pedersen (85 translations into Swedish in the data set) and Laila Brenden (71 translations), Torill Thorup (36 translations), May Grethe Lerum (34 translations), and Trine Angelsen (30 translations).

To summarise the top six publishing companies with Nordic authors in Swedish translation: three are old and prestigious, two are orientated to popular literature, and one is primarily concerned with light literature. This last publisher represents 38 per cent of all Nordic novels in Swedish translation.

Concerning the literary prizes described in Section 3.2, it can be concluded that Nordic authors seldom win these prizes. Only one of the 841 novels (written by 234 authors) that were translated into Swedish was published the same year, or in consecutive years, as when the prize was awarded. This was the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, which won the Prix Femina étranger in 2010.¹⁴ Between 2000 and 2015, only two other Nordic authors received one of the four prizes listed in Table 2: Swedish Tomas Tranströmer received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, and Norwegian Per Petterson received the International Dublin Literary Award in 2007. Thus, it seems that prestigious, internationally awarded prizes are not a prerequisite for translation from the Nordic languages into Swedish since these authors seldom win any of these prizes.¹⁵

In terms of Nordic Noir, a total of 27 Nordic crime writers were identified, representing 121 novels in Swedish translation, i.e. 14 per cent of the total Nordic material. However, it is important to note that the remaining Nordic material could also contain crime fiction, and that the number of novels that can be classified as such is probably somewhat higher.

According to Bourdieu, dependence on state aid and different kinds of grants is characteristic of literature that is close to the pole of restricted production of symbolic goods. Therefore, this article also examined the proportion of the novels that received a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. For technical reasons, this inquiry could only be made for novels published 2005–2015. Consequently, novels published 2000–2004 were omitted. The results thus include 647 out of the 841 novels translated from a Nordic language into Swedish. However, there is no reason to believe that the results for the first five years would have shown a different pattern regarding the distribution of grants.

Of the 647 novels, 109 received a grant from the Arts Council, i.e. 17 per cent.¹⁶ Only two of the identified 87 crime novels were awarded an Arts Council grant.¹⁷ This observation is in line with the Bourdieusian assumption that literature close to the pole of large-scale production is not dependent on grants and awards.

4.2. The novels translated indirectly

In this section, the findings relating to the ITrs are accounted for, starting with a presentation of the ultimate SLs (see Table 5). Then follows the results concerning the profiles of the publishing companies, the literary prizes, ITrs in relation to crime fiction, and ITrs in relation to grants received from the Swedish Arts Council.

Table 5. The 27 ultimate SLs and number of ITrs into Swedish 2000–2015, ordered according to the number of translations.

Ultimate SL for ITr	Novels
Hebrew	15
Afrikaans	10
Turkish	7
Indonesian	4
Galician	3
Italian	3
Russian	3
Albanian	2
Japanese	2
Kazakh	2
Korean	2
Kurdish	2
Basque	1
Dari/Farsi	1
Dutch	1
English	1
French	1
Georgian	1
German	1
Hindi	1
Icelandic	1
Kannada	1
Kerewe	1
Turkmen	1
Ukrainian	1
Vietnamese	1
Yiddish	1
Total	70

Apart from the ultimate SLs of ITrs, Table 5 presents the number of books from each language.¹⁸ Three languages are represented by more than five novels each: Hebrew 15, Afrikaans 10, and Turkish 7. However, the majority of the 27 languages, i.e. 15, are only represented by one ITr each.

The 70 indirectly translated novels were published by 23 different publishing companies. This means that 8.5 per cent of all publishing companies with novels in Swedish translation 2000–2015 published at least one ITr. These companies ranged from the largest and most prestigious to very small publishers that published less than five books during the 16-year span of the present study. Of the 23, 10 companies published only one ITr each, and these were mainly smaller companies.

Six companies published five or more ITrs each (Table 6). Together, they published 41 of the 70 ITrs, i.e. 58.5 per cent. As per above, the descriptions of these companies are based on their presentations on the Swedish Publishers’ Association website (SvF 2020) and on their own websites, unless otherwise stated.

Table 6. The six companies with the most ITrs 2000–2015, ordered according to the number of translations.

Publisher	Novels
Weyler	10
Norstedts	9
Albert Bonniers	6
Brombergs	6
Leopard	5
Wahlström & Widstrand	5
Total	41

Two companies published five ITrs each. These are medium sized Leopard and Wahlström & Widstrand. Leopard publishes fiction mainly from Africa and Asia, as well as non-fiction books with social relevance. At Leopard, four of the five books that were translated indirectly are by the Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. At Wahlström & Widstrand (see Section 4.1), the five ITrs are by the Israeli high prestige author Amos Oz.

Two companies published six ITrs each: Albert Bonniers (see Section 4.1) and Brombergs. Albert Bonniers's indirect translations are all highly prestigious novels, including novels by Ismail Kadare and David Grossman. Brombergs calls itself ‘[t]he small publishing house with big authors’ (Brombergs 2020). However, considering their annual publication rate, they are here regarded as a ‘middle-sized’ publishing house, in agreement with the state report SOU 2012:65 (2012) and Ruëgg (2021). Brombergs highlight that they have published four winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature since their founding in 1975. Brombergs’s ITrs are by high prestige authors Avraham B. Yehoshua and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as by the Israeli crime writer Dror Mishani.

With nine ITrs, Norstedts (see Section 4.1) is the second-largest publisher of ITrs. Norstedts’s ITrs comprise a variety of high prestige books, including Orhan Pamuk’s work and more popular fiction, e.g. the Italian Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s trilogy about Alexander the Great.

Weyler published the most ITrs during the period under investigation. Founded in 2007, Weyler was active for seven years less than the other companies 2000–2015, but it still tops the list with 10 ITrs. Weyler publishes both fiction and non-fiction works by Swedish authors and by foreign authors in translation. Seven of its ten ITrs are South African thrillers, originally written in Afrikaans.

It can be concluded that the six companies that published the most ITrs in Swedish all state that they publish both Swedish originals and translations. Three of the companies are old and prestigious (Wahlström & Widstrand, Albert Bonniers, and Norstedts). Brombergs also emphasises its claim to prestige through its publishing of Nobel Prize winners. Leopard has a strong focus on social questions, and Weyler could be said to occupy the middle ground, with one Nobel Prize winner, Imre Kertész, in addition to proclaiming an interest in social issues.

The authors that were translated indirectly into Swedish were analysed in terms of the four literary prizes discussed in Section 3.2. This analysis revealed that authors had been translated indirectly into Swedish on eleven occasions after receiving one of the prizes (see Table 7). This concerned a total of six of the 43 authors who were translated indirectly 2000–2015.

Table 7. The authors translated indirectly into Swedish 2000–2015 after receiving one or more of the four literary prizes, ordered according to the prizes’ year of establishment.

Prize	Author	Award year	Year of ITr into Swedish (2000–2015)
The Nobel Prize in Literature	Isaac Bashevis Singer	1978	2000
Prix Médicis étranger	André Brink	1980	2001
	David Grossman	2011	2011
	Orhan Pamuk	2005	2005
	Avraham B. Yehoshua	2012	2012
Prix Femina étranger	Amos Oz	1988	2002, 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013
The International Dublin Literary Award	Orhan Pamuk	2003	2005

Since all six authors who are listed in Table 7 had also been translated into Swedish before they received their respective prizes, the prizes do not seem to have been a prerequisite for a novel to be translated into Swedish. Instead, it is prize-winning novels of high prestige that are translated indirectly into Swedish. Neither does it, in these cases, seem that the prizes affected the future translation method of works by the same author, a fact which could indicate that the publishers were confident with the quality of the ITr in each case.¹⁹

To further substantiate this claim and to put the prize-winners that were translated indirectly into perspective, Table 8 shows that the majority (62%) of all prize-winners of the four prizes (i.e. also authors exclusively translated directly 2000–2015) had been translated into Swedish before they won the prize. In the case of the Nobel Prize, all of the authors were translated into Swedish before they won the prize. About a fifth of the novels were not translated into Swedish prior to the prize and about a fifth were translated the same year or later.

Table 8. The total number of prize-winners 2000–2015 of the four prizes, ordered according to the number of winners translated into Swedish before receiving the prize.

Prize	Not translated into Swedish before the prize	Translated into Swedish before the prize	Translated the same year as the prize or later
The Nobel Prize	0	16	0
Prix Médicis étranger	4	9	3
The International Dublin Literary Award	4	8	4
Prix Femina étranger	4	7	5
Total	12	40	12

It should be noted that the six authors mentioned in Table 7 were not the only indirectly translated authors to win prestigious literary prizes. In fact, the majority of the 43 authors who were translated indirectly 2000–2015 have won numerous literary prizes, domestically and internationally.

The ITrs were also analysed in relation to crime fiction to establish what proportion of the ITrs could be said to belong to this genre. Twelve of the novels were classified as crime fiction (i.e. 17%). Seven were originally written in Afrikaans, two in Hebrew, two in Galician, and one in Dutch.

Furthermore, the ITrs were compared to the Swedish Arts Council’s literary grants. Of the 70 ITrs, 35 received support (i.e. 50%). For 25 of the 70 ITrs, no grant application was sent in. Either the publishers did not know about the grants or they did not expect the books to be eligible. In total, grants were sent in for 45 novels, of which 35 received a grant (i.e. 77%). Between 2004 and 2010, none of the 13 ITrs that applied for a grant was rejected. Of the in total 12 indirectly translated crime novels not one received a grant; eight did not apply, four were rejected. The Arts Council does not record why an application for a grant is not successful.

In this context, a 77 per cent acceptance rate is relatively high. In 2017, the average success rate for all grant applications, regardless of whether they were for direct translations or ITrs, was 40 per cent (Kulturrådet, 2019). Thus, even though the Arts Council officially states that translations should be made from the ultimate SL, the fact that a translation is done indirectly does not seem to present a significant obstacle to receiving a grant.

5. Conclusion

This study has dealt with two research questions: (1) What type of novel was translated indirectly 2000–2015? and (2) Can Bourdieu’s theory of scale of production contribute to explain why the Nordic languages are no longer used as MLs in ITr? In response to the second question, novels translated directly from the Nordic languages into Swedish have also been analysed.

Despite the number of Nordic novels translated (directly) into Swedish, the Nordic languages are not used as MLs for ITrs. This might be partly explained by the fact that the publishers of many of the Nordic translations into Swedish aim for a popular readership with mass-market publications and large-scale production. This is especially true for the large number of Norwegian novel series sold in supermarkets and newsagents. Of the 841 Nordic novels included in this study, 37 per cent were Norwegian translations of light reading novels published by a single publishing company. The amount of crime fiction in the total Nordic material was considerably smaller, about 14 per cent. Possibly, the Nordic noir does not play such a large role in terms of translations into Swedish. Instead, novel series make the most significant contribution in placing Norwegian as the second most frequently translated language into Swedish.

International literary prizes are not a prerequisite for Nordic authors to be translated into Swedish. Only one of the 841 novels by the 234 Nordic authors published in Swedish translation between 2000 and 2015 received one of the four prizes mentioned in this article before their translation into Swedish. Likewise, the Nordic novels do not seem to be dependent on state grants. Only 17 per cent had received aid from the Swedish Arts Council. Thus, the Swedish market for translations from other Nordic languages seems geared towards the Bourdieusian pole of large-scale production with light and popular novels.

The ITrs into Swedish present a different pattern. The 70 ITrs (with a few exceptions) seem to be part of a restricted production intended to increase the symbolic capital of the actors involved. According to their online presentations, the publishing companies that produced the most ITrs 2000–2015 are all well established and focus at least some of their production on ‘quality literature’. Furthermore, indirect translation continued in the case of six of the 43 authors, even after these authors had received one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Since the two data sets differed in size, different method were applied to identify the amount of crime fiction in them. Studying the titles and paratexts of the ITrs revealed that 12 of these novels could be classified as crime fiction (i.e. 17%). Thus, whilst the numbers are small, it might actually be the case that, in the Swedish context, the general interest in crime fiction plays a larger role in ITrs than in translations from the Nordic countries.

In comparison with direct translations (from any language), ITrs were more likely to be awarded a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. This finding is particularly interesting as it goes against what has previously been suggested on grants and ITr. That the ITrs meet the Arts Council’s standards also reinforces the impression that ITrs into Swedish are generally of a good literary quality.²⁰ The ITrs into Swedish 2000–2015 thus seems to primarily consist of high prestige novels with a minority of more popular novels aimed at a larger readership. The findings in this article regarding ITrs are in line with the Bourdieusian description of the pole of restricted production as relying on subsidies, and Heilbron and Sapiro’s observation that literature belonging to this pole is funded on ‘literary or intellectual value’ (2007, p. 8). ITr in Sweden, thus, seems to be centred towards the pole of restricted production.

The findings also agree with the general assumption that mainly the (hyper)central language(s) of the world are used as MLs in ITr. In the case of Swedish, this holds true even though the national hierarchy of most translated languages diverges from the global hierarchy. The results of the present study suggest that an additional reason why the Nordic languages are not used as MLs into Swedish can be that these translations currently gravitate towards a different pole on the Bourdieusian scale of production, which might not have been the case in earlier times.

Lindqvist (2016) suggested that it would be useful to study the scale of production of literary translations to shed light on the Scandinavian (sub)field of literary translation. This article has done that, but it has also shown that Bourdieu’s concept of the scale of production can be used to broaden our understanding of ITr. While more research is needed to explore further the explanatory power of Bourdieu’s theories for ITr, the present study establishes new ground in this area by (i) defining the types of novels that are translated indirectly into Swedish and (ii) showing that they gravitate towards the pole of restricted production on Bourdieu’s scale of production of symbolic goods.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anja Allwood

Anja Allwood is a PhD student at the Department of Swedish, Multilingualism, Language Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Her main research interests include indirect translation and literary translation. She is a trained translator from Dutch and English and her professional experience spans from translating for the EU to subtitling, as well as teaching university courses in practical translation and Swedish.

Notes

1 Online searches in WorldCat generated no hits on Faroese or Greenlandic literature written between 2000 and 2015 for adults. These languages will therefore not be considered further.

2 When comparing the numbers from the present study with those from studies based on UNESCO’s World Bibliography of Translation – Index Translationum – one should bear in mind the uncertainties inherent to the index (cf. Heilbron, 1999; Paloposki, 2018). Furthermore, the category ‘literature’ in the Index includes children’s books, poetry, prose, and drama, while my material only includes prose fiction for adults. Similar discrepancies arise when working with un-edited statistics from the Swedish Kungliga Biblioteket, albeit on a much smaller scale, which can be noted comparing the statistics in this article to the ones in Lindqvist (2016).

3 For translations into Swedish, the combined share for the Nordic languages is over 20 per cent. Overall, Norwegian is the second most frequent SL. (For practical reasons, in this article no distinction is made between the two written Norwegian standards of Bokmål and Nynorsk, instead ‘Norwegian’ is used to refer to either standard.) The pattern is the same in translations from Swedish. As noted in Ringmar (2015): ‘half of all translations from Swedish are into another Nordic language […]. The seemingly global strength of Swedish is to a large extent local.’

4 See Bourdieu (1985) for further discussion on this topic.

5 Steiner (2019, pp. 80–81, referring to English 2005) maintains that literary prizes and awards can perform several functions, including the consecration of the award’s winner and their publishing house.

6 Similar questions have been asked – but not answered – previously. E.g. Lindqvist (2016, p. 1) asks if the Swedish and Danish languages’ places on the list of the world’s most translated languages is ‘merely a consequence of the Nordic Noir conquest of the literary world?’

7 Books from the Harlequin publishing company were excluded since the company’s business model in Sweden up until 2015 was to only translate books originally written in English (Anna Silberstein, personal communication 2018-08-24). Since English is the most common SL and also the language which most translators into Swedish translate from (Svahn, 2020), there is no reason why the Harlequin books would have been translated indirectly. This makes the proportion of novels translated from English in the present database smaller than it might be in other studies. Notwithstanding this, the hierarchy and proportions between the other languages are not affected.

8 Cf. the triangulation method described in Pięta (2012, p. 316), where she triangulated her ‘peritext analysis, epitext analysis and ST-MT-TT comparative analysis’.

9 Because of these criteria, a number of well known, prestigious prizes were excluded, such as The Pulizer Prize (only awarded to authors in the USA), Premio Cervantes (only awarded to authors writing in Spanish) and the Nelly-Sachs-Preis (only awarded every other year).

10 The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to an author; the other three prizes are for specific novels.

11 The Finnish top lists were surprising because there were several authors that could have been translated into Swedish during the period, but were not. This includes authors such as Seppo Jokinen, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu, Anja Angel, Ilkka Remes and Ursula Auer.

12 Furthermore, the Swedish Arts Council is governed by a state regulation (Riksdagen, 2012) which states that the Arts Council should work to promote ‘a valuable artistic and cultural policy’ (my translation) within, for example, the field of literature.

13 The publishers may state the SL if they wish to. In such cases the SL is registered by the Arts Council. However, as noted above, this is not mandatory (Alan Deswar, personal communication 2020-01-07).

14 It was published in Swedish as Utrensningen, in 2010 (in Finnish: Puhdistus, 2008).

15 One might assume that the results would have been very different had Nordic or Scandinavian literary prizes, such as the Nordic Council Literature Prize or the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, been included in the study. However, these prizes lie outside of the scope of the present study.

16 Unfortunately, it was not possible to determine the number of Nordic translations for which a grant was applied and subsequently denied.

17 These were written in 2011 by Steinar Bragi at Natur & Kultur and Matti Rönkä at Lindelöws bokförlag. The novel by Bragi does, however, not seem to be ‘ordinary crime fiction’, even though it contains a murder.

18 For a detailed description of which ML that was used for which ultimate SL, see Allwood (2021).

19 The work done by Orhan Pamuk is something of an exception. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. Up until then, he had been translated numerous times both directly and indirectly into Swedish. However, after receiving the prize, his work has been exclusively translated directly.

20 The fact that the ITrs often represent less frequently translated language areas may also play a part, since these languages are to be promoted by the Council.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1 lists the websites used to identify Nordic crime writers, as well as the authors mentioned in the websites and in the Nordic material from Libris. The authors are ordered according to country and first name.

Web pages in English

http://crimebythebook.com/by-country

http://norwegianarts.org.uk/norwegian-crime-top-picks-right-now/

https://www.scandinaviastandard.com/scandi-six-crime-writers-of-scandinavia/

https://crimereads.com/the-crime-fiction-of-oslo/

https://blog.whsmith.co.uk/crime-pieces-top-10-scandinavian-crime-novels-in-translation/

http://www.petronaaward.co.uk/p/2015-award.html

https://crimereads.com/its-time-to-discover-the-crime-fiction-of-helsinki/

https://crimereads.com/crime-and-the-city-a-sleepy-little-murdertown-called-reykjavik/

https://crimefictionlover.com/2015/05/eight-nordic-noir-authors-you-should-try/

http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/tags/crime-fiction/

https://scandinaviancrimefiction.wordpress.com/category/finland/

Web pages in Swedish

http://pockethexorna.blogspot.com/2013/06/topp-5-danska-deckare.html

https://www.femina.se/deckare-att-skriva-upp-pa-laslistan/

https://deckarlogg.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/fler-finska-deckarforfattare-och-en-norrman/

https://nxt.smp.se/kultur/island-ar-fullt-av-mord-i-alla-fall-i-litteraturen/

https://kiiltomato.net/deckarlaget-i-finland-thrillern-ar-in-pusseldeckaren-out/

Table

Norway	Finland	Denmark	Iceland
Anne Holt	Antti Tuomainen	Elisabeth Egholm	Arnaldur Indridason
Gunnar Staalesen	Harri Nykänen	Erik Valeur	Árni Þórarinsson
Jo Nesbø	Leena Lehtolainen	Gretelise Holm	Steinar Bragi
Jørn Lier Horst	Matti Rönkä	Henrik Brun	Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Karin Fossum	Reijo Mäki	Jesper Stein
Kjell Ola Dahl		Jussi Adler-Olsen
Samuel Bjørk		Peter Høeg
Thomas Enger		Sara Blaedel
Unni Lindell		Søren & Lotte Hammer