Why translated ebooks are no longer foreign to publishers – how to pick and choose the best

Every month, the website Three Percent updates its database on literature in translation. Being US-based, it refers only to original novels and poetry published in the US, but it's a good bellwether for the state of translation in general, not least because, with ebooks, books translated into English in the US are usually available to us in the UK as well. And the news isn't as bad as some might think – the website may be named for the generally tiny proportion of new literature published in translation, but 2013 saw the highest number of translations since it started counting in 2008 – more than 500 books from some 187 publishers.

What's driving this increase? Consistent powerhouses such as Dalkey Archive Press and – this may surprise you – AmazonCrossing (Amazon's translation imprint) make up the bulk of publications, but a wealth of smaller presses are rethinking the process of publishing in translation, traditionally a laborious process involving government-sponsored reading lists, recommendations from foreign friends, unreliable readers' reports and dashed-off sample translations. These difficulties are a legacy of fierce competition between big players, but in a marketplace increasingly populated with small, digital-only publishers, it's possible to take a different approach.

The Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co, for example, deploys one of the innovative digital strategies we've discussed before: offering a subscription to its next five titles for just £12. But more significantly, it decided from the outset to do away with the slush-pile approach to world literature and concentrate only on books from prestigious international publishers such as Germany's Suhrkamp Verlag and Spain's Editorial Anagrama. The result is a small list of exceptionally high quality. As its founder notes on the company's website: "These publishers make it their business to be expert in their literatures, to choose books that have significant literary merit and, since in most cases they still have vibrant literary cultures, ones that sell too. Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel."