Books translated into English

[LDiCesare]

I'm wondering how many books get translated into English?

I happen to be reading for the second time 'The Carpet Makers' by Andreas Eschbach (an excellent SF novel).
I looked a bit on the Web, and found the author has a web site, which is readable in German, English and French. There, one can see all his novels and the languages in which they've been translated.
Only one of his novels has been translated into English. Others have been translated from German to French, Italian, Czek, Pole, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, Netherlands.
Most novels got translated in 3 or 4 languages at most, but it strikes me as really weird that English, which is read much more than any of the other languages mentioned, hasn't gotten more translations.

Do English and American readers spurn foreign books? Is this limited to science fiction?

I doubt it's got to do with that specific author, since it took 10 years before Tor books discovered his book (which got the best SF book prize in Germany and similar prizes in France when it was published), and they did so only by chance because Orson Scott Card happened to meet the author and ask him for something he'd written, not to publish it but just to read it.

So, are there many translations of books from other languages to English? I remember finding some of Stanislaw Lem's books in Boston when I worked there quite a long time ago, but I didn't seek something alien in the first place.
I tend to believe one probably has a better chance getting his work known if one writes it in English rather than any other language, even if this work is a thousand times better than the average English book that gets translated.

[SlowwHand]

English is the standard for language. It just is, and that's how it is.

[LDiCesare]

I know English is the modern lingua franca. But, because of this, I'd expect more books to get translated into English, since it's easier for anyone to read a book in that tongue rather than in the original author's tongue (Pole, German, Italian, French or whatever). Yet, it doesn't seem to be the case. Most good books don't seem to get translated. Or do they?

[SlowwHand]

I think a great many do, but I don't know about all.

[Wezil]

My favorite authors all write in English. Milan Kundera is a notable exception.

[Kuciwalker]

Maybe the Anglophone market, despite being bigger, also has too much competition already to make it really worthwhile?

[Adalbertus]

Translating a book is always a difficult task if the author mastered the original language. Puns often do not translate, and what may sound elegant in one language may be unwieldy in another. I prefer to read books in their original language if I can.
Poetry is even worse: A translated poem is either entirely different or close to ridiculous. A rare exception is German <-> Dutch, because the languages are very similar.