Beyond the market: Translation and cultural resistance in Slovak periodicals
Beyond the market: Translation and cultural resistance in Slovak periodicals

Summary/Abstract: This article contributes to the framework of big translation history, conceptualized by Diana Roig-Sanz and Laura Fólica in 2021, by analyzing medium-sized datasets of translations published in four Slovak periodicals, assembled by the authorial team in 2024, and applying data-driven methods to uncover broader historical and cultural patterns. The analytical lens used in this study is the source language, treated as a cultural good with varying degrees of symbolic capital within the ecosystem of world languages. An analysis of the literary periodical Revue svetovej literatúry, alongside data on the Slovak book market from 1995 to 2015, reveals that Revue – as a translation-focused periodical with a strong editorial direction and supported by cultural subsidies – can subvert dominant linguistic power relations by significantly diminishing the prominence of English as a source language. Moreover, a comparison of the choice and distribution of source languages in two periodicals from the late 1990s and two from the early 2020s allows for an exploration of questions such as the changing role of German as a language mediating international discourse and current knowledge, both in the years following the fall of the ironcurtain and in the decades that followed. This work was supported by EU – NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia under the project No 09I03-03-V04-00667 “Information flows and zones of resistance: Translation in Slovak cultural and literary periodicals since the 1990s”.

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