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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. |