12 interesting facts about translations

One can find a lot of interesting facts in any sphere of human life. Translation is not an exception. Cognitive facts are useful for everyone - they explain a lot. Statistics is a stubborn, but fair thing. Let’s consider together its data:

1. Among numerous authors of literary works, Agatha Christie's books are translated most often, in a result - there are 7233 translations! The second place belongs to the works of Jules Verne - 4751 translations, the third place belongs to William Shakespeare, which was translated 4293 times.
2. There are three hundred thousand professional translators all over the world, which is 0.004% of the world's population. According to experts, $ 50 billion is the volume of the translation services market. Every year this number increases.
3. The Bible is the most translated book on the Earth. The Old Testament, the New Testament are fully translated into more than 550 languages, some parts of it are available for reading to people who speak 2932 languages.
4. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into 462 languages.
5. A series of novels about Harry Potter is read by people in seventy languages, and this figure is much inferior to the number of multilingual publications of "Little Prince", which is 300 kinds (it is assumed that the reason is that the bestseller of Saint-Exupery was published much earlier).
6. Errors in translations are very expensive. British Bank HSBC in 2009, conducting a campaign to prepare for entering the world market, has received reputational damage from the advertising company because of inaccurately translated slogan: Assume Nothing. In some languages, the meaning of the slogan was interpreted as "Do Nothing". As a result, the company had to spend $ 10 million on rebranding.
7. In real life, translators include automated translation systems, in addition to specialists. The idea of machine translation was implemented back in the 1940s. Since then, there have been many changes, which today serve as the basis for wide practical use. The service of online translators is used not only by tourists, but also by students to solve current problems, as well as by providers who provide translation services in order to save costs. "Machine translation editor" is a position that finds a place among the staff of many companies. Experts say that human translation will be considered as an extra class service in the nearest future.
8. English, Spanish, Japanese, German and French are the 5 most popular languages for translation. 5 languages from which the largest number of translations is performed are: English, German, Italian, Russian and French.
9. Specialist, whose working day is 8 hours per day, translates 520 000 words per year in average. This corresponds to the volume of the novel "Les Misérables" by Victor Hugo.
10. "Epic of Gilgamesh" is one of the most ancient literary work, translated into the languages of other countries. The poem was created and written in cuneiform in 2700 BC and seven hundred years later has been translated into several Asian languages.
11. Today there are seven thousand living languages on Earth. Some of them are spoken by only one person: the language of yaghans by Cristina Calderón, amurdags by Charlie Mangold, wichitas by Doris Jean Lamar Maclemore, wyandots by John Stackley.
12. The novel "War and peace" by Leo Tolstoy consists of 460,000 words. Translation into English have increased the number of words by 100,000.

Working with numbers has its own specifics for translators. It is easy to make a mistake, which is absolutely unacceptable. Records of numbers are always given a great attention. In order not to make mistakes the translator needs to understand the realism of the data in a specific area. Only a specialist cannot confuse neither the changing flow of indicators, percents, nor the mistake made in the original.