>the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population
Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).
Ridiculously small is a relative thing; compare with the hundreds of millions of Mandarin and Spanish speakers or even the 130 million Japanese speakers and you're talking about a much smaller market to target.
Moreover the wealth and cultural influence of these countries is a function of their willingness to interact beyond their linguistic sphere of influence.
exactly. Mandarin, english, spanish, the arabic family, portuguese, russian, urdu and probably others all have speaking populations of more than 200 millions.
my argument of the lack of translated sources was not related to the inability of translating, so wealth and literacy are not relevant.
I was referring to the economics of going after a much smaller market.
A publisher is more likely to target french and german before going after norwegian, thus a non mainstream author may appear in a finnish translation much after the publication in english, if ever.
Or a movie distribution company may have less incentive to target the niche of TROMA aficionados in dutch than it does for the spanish ones.
They both would have relatively similar costs for the translation, but a much lower possible return.
Wealth and literacy are quite relevant, because most translations are not done by the original publisher, but by local actors who have to live with the local market. If there are are sufficiently many Danes who are ready to spend money on (say) books, the local publishers will do it.
Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).