[gobdovan]

It's so interesting to think about how there's fewer 'Le Petit Prince' versions in French (which there seems to be only one) vs in Chinese, where there seem to be at least 50 versions. [0]

You could argue that there's more experimentation and creation in other languages than the original just because it's socially acceptable to do 'yet another translation', but not a newer version in the same language (unless it's a manual or technical material).

[0] https://www.cjvlang.com/petitprince

[mysterypie]

> it's socially acceptable to do 'yet another translation', but not a newer version in the same language

I wish they'd teach with modern English translations of Shakespeare in high schools. Maybe then kids would like it a lot more. But it seems like it's taboo to read Shakespeare in anything but the original.

[lamasery]

They do. One series often used is "No Fear Shakespeare". Facing-page "translation", relatively cheap.

It's much better to watch it performed, though. The context the actors provide gets one past much of the difficulty with vocabulary or what have you. But yeah they do insist on reading them in school.

> But it seems like it's taboo to read Shakespeare in anything but the original.

You're definitely losing most of the sublimity in his actual words, if you don't read the original. Especially if the "translation" is into English at e.g. a 9th-grade reading level.

In the case of Shakespeare in particular (and also certain archaic translations of the Bible, notably the King James) modernizing/simplifying it may alter the language enough that the reader may not recognize unacknowledged (because of course your reader will know their Shakespeare) quotes from his works in other works, which quotes are everywhere even in things like modern popular cinema or TV. A big part of why you read Shakespeare to begin with is that his influence is so extensive that you practically have to, or you'll be missing one of a very-few not just helpful, but nigh-necessary, keys to understanding the rest of English literature (broadly, to include things like movies and video games and TV and so on)

[AusiasTsel]

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.