I'd say there's a good bit of coincidence in the matter, to be honest. Even in a language area like the Dutch one, where fantasy is rather popular and the bestsellers like Jordan, Martin and Goodkind sell tons of books as well, some authors are unheard of, for whatever reasons, while other authors who are nowhere near as famous in the Anglo-Saxon world do manage to get translated, or at least get sold in the original English. Why? Who knows. Better contacts with the right person, somebody in the big local publishing house picking up and liking some particular book, having the right timing, it can be so many things. Movie or television connections definitely help, too.

With regards to France and French, I'm not surprised by Dom's comments, France is still egocentric enough to mostly care about its own authors, and Quebec for obvious reasons is less so. Portugal is kind of interesting because Portugal itself is a small European country with a largely multilingual population, so you'd expect them to be very much in touch with the Anglo-Saxon world the way the Dutch-language world is. But then on the other hand you have Brazil, putting Portuguese in the top ten of the world's biggest languages, which puts the language in a position more like that of French.

I don't think the actual length of the books has much to do with it. I agree with Dom about the whole splitting up phenomenon having to do with book prices, and perhaps with not having to wait so long for a translation to be released. I do think fantasy has been bigger historically in the US than elsewhere (including the UK, I think). Even now, and now is already quite an evolution from twenty years ago I dare say, no fantasy book will ever make it into the top ten of any bestselling list here in Flanders, at least. They can sell well, but not *that* well. Mind, we do get lots of spec-fic-ish stuff on our bestselling lists - Shadow of the Wind was a ridiculous bestseller, Dan Brown obviously, and others. But real fantasy, no.