Cipolletta (AIE): "With Italy Guest of Honour 2024 at the Frankfurter Buchmesse we will grow again, but the system of support for translations must be rationalized and made even more efficient"
Spanish, Chinese, and French: these are the top three languages for which translation rights for Italian books were sold in 2023, a year that attests to Italy having sold 7,838 translation rights. Translation rights to Spanish were 993, to Chinese 748, to French 651, to Russian 617, to English 534, and to German 464. In contrast, translation rights purchased in 2023 by Italian publishers were 9,328, down slightly from 9,432 in the previous year. They mainly translate from English (5,778), French (1,272), German (577), Spanish (421) and Dutch (188).
The numbers by Italian Publishers Association (Associazione Italiana Editori - AIE) Research Office were discussed for the first time today in Frankfurt during the meeting "Italian publishing goes abroad: not only rights," at the Italian Collective Exhibition. The meeting was part of the professional program (available here) curated by AIE with the support of Italy Guest of Honour 2024 at the Frankfurter Buchmesse and ITA – Italian Trade Agency. Speakers included Sandro Ferri (Edizioni e/o), Andrea Ferro (Casalini Libri), Roberto Gilodi (Reiser Literary Agency/ADALI) and Fiammetta Giorgi (Mondadori Libri), with moderation by Porter Anderson (Publishing Perspectives).
"The numbers of translation rights sold in 2023 are at a level four times higher than in 2001" commented Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of AIE. “These are figures that confirm the goodness of the work done by the country system in the last 20 years thanks to the commitment of publishers, thanks to the funds for translations allocated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Centro per il libro e la lettura amounting to about one million euros a year, thanks to the commitment of the Italian Trade Agency with AIE for the realization of the Italian Collective Stands in the major international Book Fairs."
"With Italy Guest of Honour 2024 at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, translations will grow even more," Cipolletta continued. “The attention we are seeing these days on the Buchmesse stage for our authors is an important signal. The national translation support system needs to be expanded and rationalized to make it more efficient."
Italy, where the Bologna Children's Book Fair is held each year, sells mostly publishing rights of children's and YA titles abroad, 2,325 in the last year. Most international co-editions, or 1,350 out of 1,845, are also concentrated in this sector. In the ranking by genre of rights of the best-selling titles abroad, fiction (1,951), general (1,420) and specialized non-fiction (986) follow, and then, again, religious books (429), practical manuals (410), comics (291), and art and illustrated books (26). If we look instead at geographical areas, the sale of rights to other European countries is the absolute majority, with 65.8 percent of contracts signed. This is followed by Asia (15.3%), the Middle East (6.1%), South America (5.8%), North America (3.6%), Africa (1%) and the Pacific (0.6%). In 1.7% of cases, the geographical area is not indicated.
Finally, in 2023, there were 1,845 co-editions, up from 1,716 in 2022. In 73 percent of cases, these are editions of children's books.
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