This is a list of literary works (including novels, plays, series, collections of poems or short stories, and essays and other forms of literary non-fiction) sorted by the number of languages they have been translated into.
- This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
Title | Author | Year of Publication | Number of languages with source | Origin / Language |
---|---|---|---|---|
The Bible | See Authorship of the Bible | See Dating the Bible | 2,527 (at least one book) 1240 (New Testament) 475 (Comprising the complete Bible, both Old & New Testaments, including the Protocanonical books) |
Hebrew, Aramaic, Koinḗ Greek |
Pinocchio | Carlo Collodi | 1883 | >260 | Italian |
What Does the Bible Really Teach? | Jehovah's Witnesses | 2005 | >240 | English |
The Watchtower, Announcing Jehovah's Kingdom | Jehovah's Witnesses | 1879–present | 206 as of May 2013 (a monthly journal) | English |
Pilgrim's Progress | John Bunyan | 1678 | 200 | English |
The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint Exupéry | 1943 | >180 | French |
Andersen's Fairy Tales | Hans Christian Andersen | 1835–1852 | 153 | Danish |
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | 1870 | 147 | French |
Steps to Christ | Ellen G. White | 1892 | >135, >140 | English |
New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures | Jehovah's Witnesses | 1950–2013 | >121 (the "New Testament" portion) >66 (the complete Bible, identified as New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures) |
English |
The Adventures of Asterix | René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo | 1959–2010 | 112 |
French |
Qur'an | See Origin and development of the Qur'an | 650 | 112 |
Classical Arabic |
Awake! | Jehovah's Witnesses | 1919–present | 98 as of January 2013 (a monthly journal) | English |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | 1865 | 97 | English |
The Adventures of Tintin | Hergé | 1929–1976 | 96 | French |
The Imitation of Christ | Thomas à Kempis | ca. 1418 | 95 | Latin |
Book of Mormon | See Origin of the Book of Mormon | 1830 | 82 (Complete) 25 (partial) |
English |
The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | 1988 | 67 | Portuguese |
Harry Potter | J. K. Rowling | 1997 | 67 | English |
Pippi Longstocking | Astrid Lindgren | 1945 | 64 (Several book series of Astrid's exceed 38 languages) | Swedish |
Kalevala | Elias Lönnrot (compiler) | 1835/1849 | 61 | Finnish |
Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1887 | 60 | English |
The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | 1947 | 60 | Dutch |
The Good Soldier Švejk | Jaroslav Hašek | 1923 | 54 | Czech |
Quo vadis | Henryk Sienkiewicz | 1895 | >50 | Polish |
Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 | 50 | English |
Heidi | Johanna Spyri | 1880 | 50 | German |
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | 1615 | 48 (Although, according to some Spanish sources (Institute Cervantes), this is the book with the most translations after the Bible) | Spanish |
The Story of San Michele | Axel Munthe | 1929 | >45 | English |
The Stranger | Albert Camus | 1942 | 45 | French |
The Very Hungry Caterpillar | Eric Carle | 1969 | 45 | English |
The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | 2003 | 44 | English |
The Moomins | Tove Jansson | 1945 | 43 | Swedish |
The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | 2003 | 42 | English |
Paddington Bear | Michael Bond | 1958 | 40 | English |
Miffy | Dick Bruna | 1955 | 40 | Dutch |
Tragedy of Man | Imre Madách | 1861 | 40 | Hungarian |
Tirukkural | Thiruvalluvar | 0012 | 37 | Tamil |
The Hobbit | J. R. R. Tolkien | 1937 | 40 | English |
The Family of Pascual Duarte | Camilo José Cela | 1942 | 39 | Spanish |
The English Roses | Madonna | 2003 | 37 | English |
Cold Skin | Albert Sánchez Piñol | 2002 | 37 | Catalan |
Perfume | Patrick Süskind | 1985 | 37 | German |
Anne of Green Gables | Lucy Maud Montgomery | 1908 | 36 | English |
Norwegian Wood | Haruki Murakami | 1987 | 36 | Japanese |
Cien Años de Soledad | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | > 35 | Spanish |
Freakonomics | Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner | 2005 | 35 | Englisch |
Dead Until Dark | Charlaine Harris | 2001 | 35 | English |
The Tale of Peter Rabbit | Helen Beatrix Potter | 1902 | 35 | English |
Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window | Tetsuko Kuroyanagi | 1981 | 35 | Japanese |
The Time of the Doves | Mercè Rodoreda | 1962 | 34 | Catalan |
Left Behind | Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | 1995 | 34 | English |
The Power of Now | Eckhart Tolle | 1997 | >33 | English |
Goosebumps | R. L. Stine | 1992 | 32 | English |
Alexander Trilogy | Valerio Massimo Manfredi | 1998 | 32 | Italian |
Gone With the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 | 32 | English |
'Art' | Yasmina Reza | 1994 | 30 | French |
Spiderwick | Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black | 2003 | 30 | English |
The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | 1001 | 30 | Japanese |
Millennium Trilogy | Stieg Larsson | 2005 | 30 | Swedish |
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency | Alexander McCall Smith | 1998 | 30 | English |
The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | 1989 | 30 | English |
Chasing Vermeer | Blue Balliett | 2003 | 30 | English |
Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann | 1901 | 30 | German |
Under the Yoke | Ivan Vazov | 1893 | 30 | Bulgarian |
In Defence of Global Capitalism | Johan Norberg | 2001 | 28 | Swedish |
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, literary, works, number and/or translations:
“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)
“England has the most sordid literary scene Ive ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guys writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. Theyre all scratching each others backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“That mans best works should be such bungling imitations of Natures infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”
—Lydia M. Child (18021880)
“But however the forms of family life have changed and the number expanded, the role of the family has remained constant and it continues to be the major institution through which children pass en route to adulthood.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 18:7.
Other translations use temptations.