The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, heads the list of ten most translated authors in Spanish 2000-2021 in ten languages (Swedish, Arabic, English, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, German, Chinese and French). Behind them are Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa and Miguel de Cervantes, according to the World Map of Translation of the Cervantes Institute.
The list of the ten most translated authors is completed by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Luis Sepúlveda, Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías.
As Cervantes sources have explained to Europa Press, the World Map is a search engine that obtains “behavioral trends” and they clarify that they are not 100% accurate data.
Gabriel García Márquez ranks first for the most translated author in Portuguese, Arabic and Russian, while Isabel Allende heads the list in English, German, Italian and Swedish.
Specifically, in Swedish, in addition to Isabel Allende, second place goes to Mario Vargas Llosa, followed by Carlos Ruiz Zafón; in Russian the second position is for Arturo Pérez-Reverte and the third for Jorge Luis Borges; in Japanese the list is headed by Carlos Giordano, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges.
In addition, in Arabic García Márquez repeats in first position, followed by Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa; García Márquez is also the most translated in Portuguese, ahead of Isabel Allende and Luis Sepúlveda; in Italian, Isabel Allende is the most translated and followed by Luis Sepúlveda and Jorge Luis Borges.
In the case of the German, Isabel Allende is the first list, ahead of García Márquez and María Isabel Sánchez Vegara; in English, Allende also repeats, followed by María Isabel Sánchez Vegara and García Márquez, in Chinese she heads the list Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Jorge Luis Borges and García Márquez; and in French, the list is headed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Vargas Llosa and Pérez-Reverte.