Klaus Kaindl, Waltraud Kolb

Abstract

For a long time, Translation Studies has been affiliated with Linguistics, so the focus of translation research was largely the transfer from source text to target text, and equivalence was the pearl on the throne. With Translation Studies gaining its independent disciplinary status and the “cultural turn” dethroning “equivalence,” the scope of translation research has been greatly expanded. For the past two decades, the call for humanizing Translation Studies has pushed translators from a peripheral to a central position, with the establishment of “Translator Studies” as a subdiscipline in Translation Studies and the proposal of the “agent model” encompassing cultural, cognitive, and sociological domains. Research on translators has been solidified with the emergence of the “sociological turn,” especially with one branch centering on the “sociology of agents.” Literary Translator Studies traces its origin to the 2018 conference, “Staging the Literary Translator,” organized by the University of Vienna and attempts to address this subject from various angles while providing much needed theoretical and methodological frameworks. In his comprehensive introduction, “[Literary] Translator Studies: Shaping the field,” Klaus Kaindl clearly traces the development of Translation Studies and points out the significance of human research. The volume consists of four parts, each concentrating on a specific area. Part 1, “Biographical and Bibliographical Avenues,” explores Translator Studies through these titular approaches. In Chapter 1, “Literary detection in the archives: Revealing Jeanne Heywood (1856–1909),” Mary Bardet adopts a micro-historical approach to humanize this translator in two ways: through the detailed use and thick description of archival materials and by linking her personal trajectory to a social backdrop. Utilizing these methods, the author is able to identify Heywood as the translator of a series of vanguard renderings through the use of various archives housed in different locales. The second chapter, “George Egerton and Eleanor Marx as mediators of Scandinavian literature” by Sabine Strümper-Krobb, sites these translators in an attempt to link their social standing to translation practice. Through the use of biographical sketches, the author concludes that their various networks and activities led to the use of domestication as their translation strategy. In Chapter 3, “Translator biographies as a contribution to Translator Studies: Case studies from nineteenth-century Galicia,” Markus Eberharter demonstrates how biographical material can help understand the language-acquisition background, motivation, and role of the translator, coining the term “translator biography,” which he then applies to the examination of four figures. The author concludes that it is beneficial to embed a translator’s life into the broader sociocultural context in which translation activities take place through biographical analysis. The last chapter in Part 1, “Staging the literary translator in bibliographic catalogs,” Belén Sanatana López and Críspulo Travieso Rodríguez argue for the integration of information about literary translators into bibliographical contexts in order to reduce their