Od bazy tłumaczeń do panoramy tłumaczenia: próba stworzenia procedury badawczej
From a Translation Database to a Panorama of Translation: An Attempt at a Research Procedure

Summary/Abstract: One of methodological problems translation historians face is a limited availability of bibliographic material – a result of the systemic marginalisation of translators and translations in catalogues. New research tools such as metadata databases offer hope for a breakthrough in the availability of reliable, well-organised and validated bibliographic data. However, this is only a starting point for historical research; another challenge is to develop a procedure to move from the data to a narrative and, subsequently, to a historical panorama. In the research project ‘A Century of Translation. Translators and their work in Polish literature after 1918’, we have been able to tackle the first of these problems quite well. However, the second one still needs to be addressed. This article attempts to create a procedure leading from bibliographic metadata to a historical-translational narrative and proposes some procedures that can be applied to a big and complex data set. We want to observe verifiable and reproducible results and show the limitations of this type of research. As a case study we select 400 records from the database: translations from the French made by women and published in the years 1945–1970. We offer a quantitative analysis and contextualise the results in order to understand the meaning behind the numbers, trace the lines of inquiry they suggest and draw lines of interpreting their social, cultural and ideological contexts in order to reach conclusions regarding the structure and conditions of the literary translation field of the period.

• Details
• Contents