Vargas Llosa and Cervantes occupy fourth and fifth place in the ranking.

Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges are the authors most translated from Spanish into other languages, according to the trends reflected in the Cervantes Institute’s World Map of Translation, a tool that will be presented at the IX Language Congress in Cadiz.

The World Map of Translation is a knowledge generator based on the mass production of metadata on works published and translated into ten languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, French, Arabic, Russian, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, and Swedish. It covers the history of translation in Spanish between 1950 and 2022.

According to the trend from 2000 to 2021, García Márquez, Allende, and Borges are at the top of a list that, in fourth place, has Mario Vargas Llosa as one of the most translated Spanish authors.

In fifth place are the translations of Miguel de Cervantes and the list of ten is completed by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Luis Sepúlveda, Roberto Bolaño, and Javier Marías.

Analysis by language

These data reflect trends, since, as the designers of this map point out, it is not possible to speak of absolute figures but of relative data, because the search engine tracks bibliographies that are in catalogs all over the world.

When analyzed by language, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón are the most translated Spanish-language authors into Swedish, while García Márquez, Pérez-Reverte, and Borges are the most translated into Russian.

Isabel Allende is also the most translated into Italian, English, and German, while García Márquez is the most translated into Arabic and Portuguese.

Miguel de Cervantes is only the most translated Spanish author in Chinese, while Alejandro Jodorowsky, a French-Chilean writer, tops the list in French.

The map is one of the projects to be presented in Cadiz by the Cervantes Institute next Wednesday 29th in a presentation on ‘Diversity and unity of the Spanish language’, a session that will be closed by the first vice-president of the Government, Nadia Calviño.

The King and Queen inaugurate this Tuesday in Cadiz the IX edition of the International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), an event in which 300 participants from all over the Hispanic world will discuss the reality of the Spanish language, its past, present, and future.

Text: RTVE