Part II of likely 8. Part I is here.
If you remember last year’s plot of growth, new Chinese translation projects were just getting started in high numbers than Japanese projects. The growth of Japanese projects slowed over the past year, but new Chinese projects seem to be growing on an exponential curve. If the trend continues with new Chinese projects at twice the rate of Japanese ones, by this time next year, we may reach the tipping point that Chinese novels become the majority of Asian translation projects.
My own thoughts: This graph would look the best with only the three most frequent languages. The curve is fit with LOESS (local weighed smoothing) so it really does not forecast anything. For example, the curve wouldn’t have predicted the levelling off of Japanese works if we were looking at the data from 2014-2015.
Note: Values have shifted minutely from last year due to releases being hidden, causing dropout of some projects.
Part I The state of affairs | Table of Contents | Part III Translator Groups and Projects
