Digital Data for the Sociology of Translation and the History of Translation

Abstract

The study explores the interconnected topics of interdisciplinarity and the use of digital data in research on (literary) translation. Interdisciplinarity is conceived as cooperation between translation studies and other fields of study, specifically with sociology, history and digital humanities, i.e. as an “import” to translation studies, pointing simultaneously to its potential for research in other fields, i.e. an “export” from translation studies. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of digital data (data obtained from online, publicly available, bibliographic databases on national and international levels) in translation research in terms of possibilities and limits. The analyses conducted verify the un/reliability of the UNESCO Index Translationum data sets by comparing them with results obtained from the databases of the National Library of the Czech Republic. As “byproducts”, these analyses produce surveys of fiction authors most frequently translated from Czech (into English, French, German, and Russian) and into Czech (from English). Several examples from our research exemplify the application of data sets extracted from the databases of the National Library and a qualitatively higher level of use of this data source is suggested.