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"Many important patterns in literary history are still poorly understood, because they weren’t easily grasped at the scale of individual reading" (Underwood, 2017, np.)
Our project, The world in Norwegian, is positioned in the intersection of Digital Humanities, Translation Studies, Sociology of literature and Library development. Although methods and perspectives from Digital Humanities has advanced in many fields for several decades, it remains relatively unexplored within Translation Studies (Tanasescu, 2021; Wakabayashi 2019), in the context of smaller language cultures as is the case for Norwegian (Horvath, 2021; Spence & Brandao, 2021) and also when it comes to research support from university libraries (Zhang, Liu & Mathews 2015; Zhang, Xue & Xue, 2021).
This study is a collaboration between translation scholars from three different Norwegian higher education institutions and research librarians from the Norwegian National Library and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Through this collaboration we contribute to enhancing university libraries’ knowledge and infrastructure in Digital Humanities in Norway. The project has received funding from the Norwegian National Library from August 2023 to August 2025.
The primary aim of our study is to investigate translation flows using digital methods and tools. We use Norway as a case in point and investigate the Norwegian literary import over the last 200 years (since 1800). A central concept in the project is bibliomigrancy or bibliomigration (Mani, 2014; Lindqvist, 2015) which is “an umbrella term that describes the migration of literary works in the form of books from one part of the world to the other” (Mani 2014, p. 289).
We partly draw on theories by Heilbron (1999; see also Sapiro, 2010), suggesting that the literary world can be described in terms of centres and peripheries and in open and closed literary systems. According to these theories, Norway is a periphery and an open literary system. This means that the Norwegian literature, to a large extent, consists of translated works, and that translated works have been an important literary factor ever since the country gained its independence some 200 years ago. English dominates as the most common source language in Scandinavia and is sometimes described as a hyper-central language (Lindqvist 2015, p. 78-80; De Swaan 2001, p. 4-5). English has traditionally been used - and is still- in indirect translation as an intermediate language from lesser-known languages in Norway (Rindal et al. 1998).
The main material for the study consists of library catalogues, mainly the National library catalogue of Norway, but also metadata from international library catalogues. The DH lab at the Norwegian National Library has developed an app which collects information from the National library catalogue and, through searching for different bibliographic system criteria, generates an overview of translated fiction.
The development of this app has been a process which was initiated by our wish to discover bibliomigration patterns for translated literature in Norway, gaining a more multifaceted picture of the source cultures and languages involved, going beyond the traditional confirmation about the Anglo-American dominance.
Throughout the process, we (the researchers and the National Library) have been working closely to figure out on the one hand, which metadata we ideally want to collect from a Translation Studies perspective, and on the other hand, which metadata is actually possible to collect in large quantities through digital humanities tools.
One purpose of the app is to provide a visual representation of bibliomigration patterns by showing on a map which countries the translated literature originates from. This map will be open access and freely available to researchers, but our aim is also that the map serve more than one purpose and be useful to everyone who is interested in bibliomigration patterns and the sociology of literature – for example in public and school libraries, as well as for publishers and the Norwegian Association of Translators.
The creation of the map poses challenges on at least two levels: First, how to collect the data which provides us with information about the publication place of the first edition of the original work, and second, how to visually represent diachronic data in a geopolitically shifting reality.
In addition to serving as the foundation of the map, the app will also be useful for example in finding and researching translations of works by a particular author, or by a particular translator. In the test stages, we have also found that the app can be used by librarians for information retrieval. The collaborative aspects of this project have sparked several outcomes that were not included in our initial proposal, and we foresee that we will experience more of this as the project progresses. In our paper, we will present the project as work in progress and demonstrate the digital resources in their current state, as well as discuss the challenges we experience.
References:
de Swaan, Abram (2001). Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge.
Heilbron, Johan (1999). Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(4), 429-444.
Horvath, Aliz. (2021). Enhancing Language Inclusivity in Digital Humanities: Towards Sensitivity and Multilingualism. Modern Languages Open, 1, 1-21.
Lindqvist, Yvonne (2010). Ett globalt perspektiv på nutida svensk översättningskultur. System- och fältteori i praktiken. In Kullberg, Christina & Elisabeth Bladh (Eds.), Litteratur i gränszonen. Transnationella litteraturer i översättning ur ett nordiskt perspektiv (pp. 81–93). Falun.
Lindqvist, Yvonne (2015). Det skandinaviska översättningsfältet - finns det? Språk och stil, 25, 69–87.
Mani, Venkat (2014). Bibliomigrancy: Book Series and the Making of World Literature. In D’haen, Theo, Damrosch, David & Kadir, Djelal (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (pp. 283–296). London & New York: Routledge.
Rindal, Magnus, Egeberg, Erik & Formo, Tone (1998). Brobyggere- oversettelser til norsk fra middelalderen til i dag. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Sapiro, Giséle (2010). Globalization and cultural diversity in the book market: The case of literary translations in the US and in France. Poetics, 38, 419-439.
Spence, Paul Joseph & Brandao, Renata (2021). Towards language sensitivity and diversity in the digital humanities. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 11(1), 1-29.
Tanasescu, Raluca (2021). Complexity and the place of translation in digital humanities: Post-disciplinary communities of practice in the translation studies network. In Marais, Kobus & Meylaerts, Reine (Eds.), Exploring the implications of complexity thinking for translation studies (pp. 30-72). Routledge.
Underwood, Ted (2017). A Genealogy of Distant Reading. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11(2), n.p.
Wakabayashi, Judy (2019). Digital approaches to translation history. Translation & Interpreting, 11(2), 132-145.
Zhang, Ying, Liu, Shu & Mathews, Emilee (2015). Convergence of digital humanities and digital libraries. Library management, 36(4/5), 362-377.
Zhang, Ying, Xue Susan & Xue Zhaouhui (2021). From collection curation to knowledge creation: Exploring new roles of academic librarians in digital humanities research. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(2), 1-7.
