Translation Spaces

Translations have long been recognised as an important element in the transfer of knowledge. Traditionally, they have been studied in relation to individual languages or language pairs, which often supports a national perspective. At the same time, qualitative approaches have dominated, relying heavily on a few artefacts and focusing on specific text types. The present project takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Rather than focusing on a specific source or target language with regard to a single text type, the starting point is all known translations that were printed and published in the Habsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1918. To this end, a publicly accessible database is being created that brings together information on authors, translators and translations. This will enable structural statements to be made for the first time about knowledge transfer in a multilingual and multicultural society. These include questions of multidirectionality (`By whom and for whom are translations produced?`), binarity (`Who is involved in a translation?`), simultaneity (`What is the temporal relationship between source and target texts?`) and spatial characteristics (`Between which locations do source and target texts occur?`). The innovative potential of this approach lies in the use of computer-assisted methods for collecting and evaluating this data. Existing translation bibliographies are digitized and modeled in a knowledge graph. Both statistical analyses and network analyses are used for this purpose. Data visualizations are used to highlight relevant relationships, patterns, and unusual groupings. In addition to extensive quantitative analyses, individual case studies are conducted on relevant aspects, such as the relationship between peripheral languages, the spatial characteristics of these translations, the relationship between source and target texts, and new editions and parallel translations. Finally, the relationship between individual text types (such as fiction and non-fiction) and the role of individual publishing houses in the general transfer of knowledge are examined in detail. The research project is aimed not only at historically oriented translation studies, but also at other disciplines in the humanities, including individual philologies, literary studies, and historiography.