You're right that version and edition aren't the same thing, and the catalogues I'm working with don't model "translation" as a first-class field — translator credits live in free-text author fields and are wildly inconsistent across national libraries. The cleanest proxy I can offer is distinct publishers per language, read alongside the edition count. For Le Petit Prince, top languages by edition count:
Language Publishers Editions Ed/Pub
English 518 1,245 2.4
Spanish 416 1,055 2.5
Japanese 204 965 4.7
French 312 928 3.0 (original)
German 199 666 3.3
Italian 184 641 3.5
Chinese 233 361 1.5
...
Hebrew 3 138 46.0
Two caveats are visible in the table. Publisher names aren't normalized across catalogues, so high counts in big markets (English, French) are inflated by imprint variants of a single house — Gallimard, Gallimard Jeunesse, Éditions Gallimard, Folio all show up as distinct. At the other extreme, Hebrew with 3 publishers on 138 editions is the proxy's other failure mode: one or two canonical translations reprinted repeatedly. So the number is directional, not absolute.
The Chinese row is the cjvlang pattern in distilled form: 233 distinct publishers with an edition-to-publisher ratio of 1.5 means most Chinese publishers hold their own translation and reprint it only a handful of times before being displaced. That's consistent with — and probably a conservative reading of — cjvlang's "at least 50 versions" figure.
One extra wrinkle worth flagging: "Chinese" in that row isn't one language. National library catalogues collapse at least five Sinitic languages — Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min Nan, Hakka — under a single "zh" tag. Wikidata records separate Petit Prince translations in Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, and Min Nan, each with its own transliterated title ("Séu-Vòng-Chṳ́" in Hakka, "Sió Ông-chú" in Min Nan), but no national catalogue I pull from surfaces them as distinct. The same kind of collapse applies to Arabic, where "ar" hides Modern Standard plus several regional varieties that have their own literary traditions. So the 361 Chinese figure is already aggregating over a hidden second axis of variation.
Japanese tells a different story: slightly fewer publishers (204) but almost five editions each, suggesting fewer distinct translations reprinted more widely. And the French baseline is dominated by one rights holder (Gallimard family), which is what you'd expect from an original-language market with a single canonical publisher.
Retranslation within the source language is gated by copyright (Berne + 70 years post-mortem is a hard wall for most 20th-century work), the industry's default assumption that one canonical edition per language is enough, and reader expectation of fidelity when the original is in your own language. Saint-Exupéry entered public domain in France in 2015 and the French retranslation flow didn't materially open up — which I read as the publisher-economics side of your point dominating over the legal side. Retranslation into foreign languages has none of those brakes: every generation can argue its predecessor's Chinese / Japanese / Korean Petit Prince is dated or was done from English rather than French (often true), and a new translation is a lower-risk bet than trying to displace a domestic novel.
Shakespeare is the visible English counterexample: "no-fear" modernizations, facing-page editions, precisely because the original has drifted far enough from contemporary English to be partly opaque. The Bible is the other obvious case. So "retranslation-within-language is taboo" breaks down once the time distance gets large enough — roughly when the original stops being read without friction.
That question is one of the reasons I ended up building this the way I did, rather than collapsing translations into a single canonical record.
The tradition your parent was in (translator working directly with a living author) produces some of the most interesting edge cases in translation studies. Kundera is the famous one: he eventually treated the French translations of his Czech novels as the authoritative versions and had the Czech editions revised to match. Borges did something similar on a smaller scale with his English translators. Beckett translated himself between French and English and the two versions don't agree. In each case, "which is the book" is genuinely undecidable on textual grounds.
The decision I made early was that the database shouldn't try to decide. Every edition gets its own record with its own metadata. If an author revised through a translator, that shows up as a later-dated edition in the original language with a different publisher or an explicit translator credit; the relationship is visible but not adjudicated.
It turns out this is also the only stance that survives contact with reality across the national library catalogues I've integrated. Each catalogue already encodes its own editorial judgment about what counts as a "work," and forcing them into a single hierarchy produces more bugs than insights. Letting the plurality stand is both philosophically honest and, as it happens, technically cheaper.
Thanks for the link; Translate Science is exactly the kind of gap-filling project that makes sense once you see how fragmented the bibliographic layer is. Sorry to hear about Victor; I'd seen the repos but hadn't known.
Scientific translations are a different animal from what I've been working on, in ways that make them both easier and harder. Easier because scholarly communication already has a near-universal identifier (DOI) and, in principle, Crossref metadata. Harder because most translated articles never get their own DOI — they live as post-hoc PDFs on an author's site or inside an institutional repository (HAL, SciELO, J-STAGE, NII) with no machine-readable back-reference to the original, and the original's Crossref record almost never points at them. So the signal is worse than with books despite the underlying infrastructure being better.
The approach that might transfer: instead of trying to convince publishers or journals to register translations (they won't), scrape what's already sitting in institutional repositories and national scientific databases, then reconcile by author + title fingerprint + language. The multilingual matching pipeline I use for books is probably the right shape for the article problem too, though the authority side is messier there. ORCID helps; affiliations drift and make it harder.
Not something I'm committing to build, but I'd be curious to see what you and Victor had assembled if any of it is still reachable. Happy to compare notes offline if useful.
Author here. The piece is about bibliographic infrastructure, but the finding that surprised me most while building the dataset was language-specific:
Catalan/Valencian (~10M speakers) jumped from near-invisibility in commercial aggregators to 8th place globally once nine national library catalogues were cross-referenced. Bengali, Thai and Urdu —all with substantial publishing industries— remained near the bottom, not because translations don't exist but because the institutions documenting them haven't been connected yet.
The 97% figure (editions appearing in only one of 14 sources) held across every sample I could run. Happy to answer questions about methodology, source coverage, or why ISBN metadata is such a mess.
Thanks for trying it, and for the honest feedback on purchase links, you’re right. Right now they link to a search on each store rather than directly to the specific edition page. It’s a known limitation: matching an ISBN to a direct product URL across different stores (each with their own catalog system) is surprisingly hard, but it’s on the roadmap.
Glad the core discovery part was useful though. And cool project with the quote finder; we all start rough!
Anna's Archive ISBN visualization is fascinating; it really shows how fragmented and incomplete the ISBN landscape is. We don't use their data directly (licensing concerns), but it confirmed what we were seeing: massive gaps in non-English coverage.
WorldCat is great for library holdings but harder to use for translation discovery specifically, it tells you "this library has this edition" but doesn't easily answer "has this book been translated into Basque?" across its whole catalog. We'd love to integrate it eventually, though.
Right now Wikidata turned out to be the secret weapon: it has structured translation relationships that none of the others provide.
Update: The hydration bug has been fixed and deployed. The search should now work correctly. Thanks for the report, it helped us catch a real issue. Would love to hear if it works for you now!
Thanks for the details — that's very helpful. Chrome 145 on Mac, got it. The fact that text doesn't fully change when switching languages confirms the hydration error is breaking React's event handling.
I'm actively debugging this right now. I'll reply here when I have a fix deployed. shouldn't be long. Really appreciate your patience.
That's a React hydration mismatch. I'm aware of it but hadn't seen it block functionality before. Thanks for flagging that it does for you.
Can I ask: when you load the page, do you see the language selector (a dropdown/search where you pick languages like English, French, etc.)? The search button only activates after selecting at least one language — if the hydration error is breaking the selector, that would explain why the button seems unclickable.
I'm looking into it right now. What Chrome version are you on?
Thanks for trying it! The localhost:8081 websocket isn't from Zenòdot, that's likely a browser extension (React DevTools, a proxy tool, or similar). Could you try in an incognito/private window with extensions disabled?
The search button activates once you've selected at least one language from the selector below the search bar. If you haven't picked any languages yet, it stays inactive... that might be what you're seeing.
Let me know if that helps!
Two caveats are visible in the table. Publisher names aren't normalized across catalogues, so high counts in big markets (English, French) are inflated by imprint variants of a single house — Gallimard, Gallimard Jeunesse, Éditions Gallimard, Folio all show up as distinct. At the other extreme, Hebrew with 3 publishers on 138 editions is the proxy's other failure mode: one or two canonical translations reprinted repeatedly. So the number is directional, not absolute.
The Chinese row is the cjvlang pattern in distilled form: 233 distinct publishers with an edition-to-publisher ratio of 1.5 means most Chinese publishers hold their own translation and reprint it only a handful of times before being displaced. That's consistent with — and probably a conservative reading of — cjvlang's "at least 50 versions" figure.
One extra wrinkle worth flagging: "Chinese" in that row isn't one language. National library catalogues collapse at least five Sinitic languages — Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min Nan, Hakka — under a single "zh" tag. Wikidata records separate Petit Prince translations in Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, and Min Nan, each with its own transliterated title ("Séu-Vòng-Chṳ́" in Hakka, "Sió Ông-chú" in Min Nan), but no national catalogue I pull from surfaces them as distinct. The same kind of collapse applies to Arabic, where "ar" hides Modern Standard plus several regional varieties that have their own literary traditions. So the 361 Chinese figure is already aggregating over a hidden second axis of variation.
Japanese tells a different story: slightly fewer publishers (204) but almost five editions each, suggesting fewer distinct translations reprinted more widely. And the French baseline is dominated by one rights holder (Gallimard family), which is what you'd expect from an original-language market with a single canonical publisher.
Retranslation within the source language is gated by copyright (Berne + 70 years post-mortem is a hard wall for most 20th-century work), the industry's default assumption that one canonical edition per language is enough, and reader expectation of fidelity when the original is in your own language. Saint-Exupéry entered public domain in France in 2015 and the French retranslation flow didn't materially open up — which I read as the publisher-economics side of your point dominating over the legal side. Retranslation into foreign languages has none of those brakes: every generation can argue its predecessor's Chinese / Japanese / Korean Petit Prince is dated or was done from English rather than French (often true), and a new translation is a lower-risk bet than trying to displace a domestic novel.
Shakespeare is the visible English counterexample: "no-fear" modernizations, facing-page editions, precisely because the original has drifted far enough from contemporary English to be partly opaque. The Bible is the other obvious case. So "retranslation-within-language is taboo" breaks down once the time distance gets large enough — roughly when the original stops being read without friction.