Meanwhile, 75 million copies of the bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" were sold around the world last year. The Korean translation sold 3.2 million copies, which is the second most following 5.4 million copies sold in French. The Chinese translation sold 3.2 million copies.

The "Harry Potter" series of children's books was published in a total of 64 languages. The series inspired a number of unauthorized ripoffs, including the title "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon" which was published in China.

The newspaper said that approximately 1.5 million new books were published worldwide in 2005, with 30 percent published in English. While there are about 6,912 languages in the world, only 6 percent of the total population speaks English as a first language.

According to statistics from the Korean Publishers Association, the proportion of translated books in Korea nearly doubled from 15 percent of all published books in 1995 to 29.1 percent in 2003. But the rate has been decreasing over the last few years, from 28.5 percent in 2004, 24.5 percent in 2005, and 23 percent in 2006.

Among the total number of translated books in Korea, 40.2 were from Japan, 25.2 percent were from the U.S., 9.9 percent were from the UK and 6 percent were from France and Germany. Some 26 percent of the translations were comics, 21.8 percent were children's books, 19.6 percent were literature, and 12 percent were social science books. Korea's publishing market is valued at US$3.65 billion, making it the seventh-largest in the world after the U.S. Germany, Japan, England, China and Italy.

"The increase of translated books in the mid- and late-1990s was more of an aggressive effort to confront globalization rather than a colonization of knowledge," said Park Young-ryul, president of Communication Books. "The number of foreign publications will increase since readers are looking for Koreanized versions rather than foreign versions, but the relative influence is expected to decrease."

(englishnews@chosun.com )