Ethan Zuckerman recently posted on how commerce in cultural goods can be used as a proxy for xenophilia. He writes that cultural imports are a key factor in cultural openness and that those who consume foreign media tend to indulge less in navel-gazing.

Ethan also pointed at UNESCO’s Translationum, a database that keeps track of all translated books. I basically looked at all the data available for post socialist countries and expressed it as a share of population.

The data is dotty and only mildly reliable, but it’s as good an estimation as can be of the number of books translated per capita between 1991 and 2005. GDP isn’t taken into account as the book market isn’t linked with wealth.

Following my bewilderment at what IBM’s Many eyes can bring to online publishers, I used it to map my findings.

Don’t see the visualization? See it here!

Strikingly, countries West of Russia seem to enjoy foreign books much more (bar Ukraine) than their Eastern counterpart. Russia and Central Asian countries show much less interestin foreign literature, while the Baltics and the Czech Republic are most open.

Applying this Cultural Openness Index to old Europe, the UK would be as open as Russia and the US on a par with Kazakhstan (but data stops in 1998 for both). France reaches Bulgaria’s level and Norway, the Czech Republic’s.

It’s not new countries translating from Russian into the new national language. In chart-leader Estonia, for instance, English leads with over half the translations. Russian accounts for only 3% (though translations from Estonian, i.e. for the local Russian speakers, account for 15%).

As culture is one of the main components of soft power, a low cultural penetration would mean that the population is more likely to back its government in times of hostility directed at foreigners. Mmmm… Georgia, anyone?

So much for the simple analysis. When you look at the box-office in Russia-CIS, your see that American movies absorb over 3/4 of all sales. That’s much less than the 85% they take in culturally-open Germany, but still significant.

Why would Russians scorn foreign literature and love American films? And what impact does Hollywood have in Russia? Fire up the comments!