I have no enlightening statistics at my disposal. I do think the paucity of books translated into Arabic is worrying. However, I wonder if there is something else going on that is not picked up in the statistics. My mother-in-law is from Jerusalem and grew up in Cairo and Beirut. She speaks Arabic, French, and English fluently. At least for Lebanon, this trilingualism is far from uncommon. Most of the novels she reads are in English or French, not in Arabic. We were discussing Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, the other day because I had just bought the first volume in his Cairo trilogy. She asked, "why didn't you just borrow my copy?" I was a bit surprised that she would read an Arabic author in English -- it is not as if she doesn't use Arabic anymore; she speaks it everyday with family and friends.
I gather from experiences with my in-laws, and what travels I've had in Turkey (admittedly not an Arab country), Jordan, and Lebanon, that reading books in European languages in the Middle East is much more common than any of us would expect. Of course this would only be true for the educated classes (though I wonder what percentage of Americans actually read many foreign authors). In either case it is probably the highly educated who read foreign authors. Many Americans (even many of the highly educated) speak only one language, and rely on translations. I would be quite willing to bet that the percentage of Arab college-graduates who are multilingual is much higher than the American figure. We are certainly missing a piece of the story by only focusing on what translated. We should also look at what books are sold in what countries, whether in translation or not.
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