TNA Fellow Lisa Teichmann

Translational Trajectories of German Fiction in the German and Austrian National Libraries

Who are the most translated authors of German fiction represented in Germanophone national collections? This project aims to create an infrastructure for digital tools that will enable researchers to investigate translations using data from the German and Austrian National Libraries and to visualize literary exchanges, translation flows, and networks between Germanophone literary communities of writers, publishers, translators, and readers at large. As part of the PhD thesis “Mapping German Fiction in Translation in the German National Library Catalog (1980–2020),” a method was developed and deployed for identifying translations by searching the library catalog according to the original language, in this case, German. For the German National Library, the method achieved a high accuracy in identifying translations; however, it has not yet been tested on other library data. Building on previous work, this project will develop and test a new method for extracting and visualizing translation data from the Austrian National Library. This research not only contributes to making this resource and its data more accessible, but also represents a first step toward building a data infrastructure that extends national and linguistic boundaries.

To better understand the project and its research context, consult the following article: Teichmann, Lisa. “The ‘Mapping German Fiction in Translation’ Dataset: Data Collection, Scope, and Data Quality.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 10, no. 1, Apr. 2025, https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.128010.