Back in 2016, I noted that during 2005-16, Turkey spent US$4.4m to fund translation and publication of fiction by Turkish authors via its TEDA grant program, according to Turkish Books, an article that appeared in the Hürriyet Daily.
TEDA’s own chart at the time showed that the grant program subsidized the translation and publication of 258 books in German, 251 in Bulgarian, 147 in Arabic, 100 in Persian, 103 in English, and 65 in French. Just 24 titles were subsidized for publication in Chinese.
Here’s the latest chart for 2005-24:
The top three according to this new table: Bulgarian (298), German (275), and Albanian (253) — while Chinese editions now total just 30, up 6 from 2016. But these numbers also include a few books that have been republished by a different publisher, and are possibly by a different translator.
The high total for German makes sense: there are more than 3m Turks living in Germany, and there is an appetite for Things Turkish — and not just Döner kebab — among Germans.
In the same table, four languages spoken in former Otttoman territories figure in the Top Ten: Bulgarian (Number 1), Albanian (Number 3), Macedonian (Number 8) and Bosnian (Number 9). It appears Turkey’s literary “soft power strategy” has more to do with feeding neo-Ottoman nostalgia than dealing with the 21st-century reality of a rising China.
Of course, a grant from the TEDA is not the only channel facilitating publication of contemporary Turkish literature in China. Shanghai People’s Publishing House (上海人民出版社) appear to have a monopoly on best-selling Orhan Pamuk’s works, and a list of more than a dozen of his books available from them in Chinese can be found here. They include My Name is Red (我的名字叫红), The Museum of Innocence (纯真博物馆), Snow (雪), A Strangeness in my Mind (我脑袋的怪东西), and The Black Book (黑书).
Here is a list of the TEDA-sponsored translations of Turkish works (mainly fiction) into Chinese:
Ethnic ChinaLit 