What Latin Gets Translated? 7,542 Translations from 1800 to 2025

UNESCO's Index Translationum tracked every book translation published worldwide from 1979 to 2009—roughly 2 million records across 800 languages. We scraped all 3,191 Latin-to-English translations from UNESCO, extended the dataset to 2025 by scraping catalogs from 30+ publishers and series, then reached back to 1800 using the Open Library and Internet Archive APIs and the full Loeb Classical Library catalog—reaching 7,542 total records spanning two centuries of Latin translation.

When Were These Works Originally Written?

The most striking pattern is the bimodal distribution. Modern translators don't draw evenly from the Latin tradition—they cluster around two peaks separated by a thousand years.

Peak 1: The Golden Age (1st century BCE). Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Lucretius, Caesar—the canon that never stops being retranslated.

Peak 2: The Scholastic-Renaissance boom (12th–16th centuries). Medieval and Renaissance Latin writers—Aquinas, Hildegard, Erasmus, Copernicus, Calvin—generate as much translation activity as the classical authors. The 16th century alone accounts for 289 translations.

The valley between them (3rd–10th centuries) is the “Dark Ages” showing up in the data. Only Augustine and Boethius punch through.

The 20th century spike (288) is almost entirely John Paul II's encyclicals and Vatican II documents—institutional Latin, not literary.

The Most Re-Translated Works

Of the 2,037 unique works in the dataset, most appear only once. But some are translated again and again. The Aeneid alone has 34 separate English translations in this 30-year window.

Unique vs. Repeated: The Shape of Translation

Roughly a third of all Latin-to-English translation activity goes toward re-translating works that already have an English version. Classical works get re-done constantly; medieval works are being discovered, not re-translated.

Who Gets Translated

Two Centuries of Latin Translation

By extending the dataset back to 1800 using Open Library and Internet Archive records, we can see the long arc of Latin translation into English. Translation accelerated throughout the 19th century, dipped during both World Wars, then surged in the postwar university expansion of the 1950s–60s. The UNESCO decades (1970s–2000s) show the highest recorded rates, peaking at over 1,300 translations in the 2000s. The 2010s and 2020s bars are undercounts from publisher catalogs only.

Note on historical data: The pre-1979 records come from library catalog APIs (Open Library, Internet Archive) rather than comprehensive surveys like UNESCO. They capture books that were cataloged and digitized, which skews toward major publishers and frequently-held works. The true number of Latin-to-English translations published in any given decade before 1979 was likely higher than shown.

UNESCO Years: Annual Detail (1978–2025)

Zooming into the UNESCO period and beyond, Latin translation accelerated from ~70/year in 1978 to a peak of 172 in 2006. The post-2009 bars (lighter) capture academic series and specialist translators but not the full publishing landscape that UNESCO tracked.

Where Translations Are Published

The US and UK account for 87% of all Latin-to-English translation publishing.

After UNESCO: Who Keeps Translating?

UNESCO stopped tracking in 2009. To extend the dataset, we scraped catalogs from 50+ publishers and specialist presses that publish Latin-to-English translations. This captured 553 post-2009 entries—still a fraction of the true total, but enough to see who's doing the work.

CUA Press and Paulist Press lead with 67 combined post-2009 entries, driven by the Fathers of the Church (FOTC) and Ancient Christian Writers (ACW) series. Harvard contributes 80 entries across three series: the I Tatti Renaissance Library (46), Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (34), and Loeb Classical Library. De Gruyter/Toronto volumes are almost entirely the Collected Works of Erasmus. Beyond academic presses, we discovered a thriving ecosystem of specialist presses: Cazimi Press (Benjamin Dykes's medieval astrology translations),Golden Hoard Press (Stephen Skinner's grimoire series), New City Press (the 47-volume Works of Saint Augustine), and individual translators like Joseph Peterson (Solomonic grimoires), Adam McLean (alchemical texts), and the astrologers of Project Hindsight and the AFA.

With 50+ publishers and specialist presses now tracked, the post-2009 rate appears to be 25–50 translations per year from academic and specialist publishers alone. The true rate including trade publishers is likely still 80–150 per year.

What This Tells Us

1. The medieval surplus. Medieval Latin is the largest era by unique works translated (738), but most only appear once. Classical works get re-done every few years. There is enormous untapped material in the medieval period.

2. Translation is accelerating. The rate roughly doubled from 1978 to 2006. Academic series like I Tatti Renaissance Library and Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library are systematically working through previously untranslated texts.

3. The canon is narrow. Of 2,037 unique works, the top 15 most-retranslated account for a disproportionate share of activity. The long tail of one-time translations is where real discovery happens.

Search the Dataset

Search all 7,542 translations by author, title, translator, or publisher. Filter by era to explore what's been translated from each period.

Download the Data

The full dataset is available as a CSV with 7,542 records including source, series, author, title, translator, publication year, publisher, country, estimated original composition date, era, and canonical work identifiers.

Download CSV (7,542 records)

Sources: UNESCO Index Translationum (1979–2009, 3,191 records), Open Library API (1800–1978, 2,524 records), Internet Archive API (1800–1978, 472 records), Loeb Classical Library full catalog (89 records), Harvard University Press (I Tatti, DOML), Cambridge UP, Routledge, Brill, CUA Press, Paulist Press, De Gruyter/Toronto UP, Hackett, Penguin, OUP, Liverpool UP (Translated Texts for Historians), Cistercian Publications/Liturgical Press, PIMS (Toronto), Chicago UP, Columbia UP, JHU Press, Bolchazy-Carducci, Dover, Notre Dame UP, New City Press (Works of Saint Augustine), Cazimi Press, Golden Hoard Press, Ibis Press/Weiser, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, Renaissance Astrology Press, AFA, Project Hindsight/ARHAT, Shepheard-Walwyn, and other specialist publishers. Pre-1979 records sourced from library catalog APIs (not LLM-generated); some noise may remain. Original composition dates and canonical work identifiers estimated via LLM classification.