Drawing upon an analysis of archival, statistical and secondary sources, a hypothesis was proposed regarding a paradigm shift from a demand-driven literary circulation set-up to a supply-driven model. This was traced first using data on the early schemes of translation support (including intergovernmental agreements, League of Nations plans, minutes recording the internal discussion at ministries of foreign affairs, publishers’ and editors’ correspondence) as they were proposed and put into operation in the early 20th century and later in the 1950s and 1960s.
Further on, this hypothesis was tested and reconsidered based on the quantitative and qualitative research on the impact of funding since the 1970s. Data on the international circulation of literature within a pool of smaller European countries were collected. The resulting patterns were matched with historical perspective, focusing on the developments in connection with four major aspects: a) macro-historical events. i.e. Cold War and its end, EU enlargement, b) introduction of institutionalised translation funding schemes in across Europe, c) genre variation, d) individual source country/literature profiling in the international literary space.
Subsequently, qualitative research was carried out using semi-structured interviews with acquisition editors in the respective countries. The quantitative results were used to detect the most important publishers of literature translated from non-central literatures in each respective country. The interviews were analysed in order to understand the patterns of decision making processes in various types of publishing houses.
Overview of the results:
The results include four conference presentations, three public engagement events, four organised conferences and conference panels, six academic papers and chapters in books, and two events for professional audiences.
Exploitation of results
Conference presentations provide feedback from the academic community, especially at the early stages of the project, they boost networking and collaborations.
Public engagement activities helped to spread the word about the issues of translation funding and international literary circulation and get in touch with lay audiences as well as prospective students of humanities and digital humanities. The discussions with lay and semi-professional audiences were highly successful and generated further activities with both public engagement and policy-making aspects.
Conference and panel organisation helped to establish the researcher as a leader in two interconnected fields: sociology of contemporary translation and digital humanities in translation studies. It also contributed to presenting the research in the context of similarly positioned research into translation as a sociological and digital humanities topic.
Academic papers are the most important academic results that will stay to be exploited in the future by the academic community.
Throughout the project, the research was exploited by the professional publishing community, somewhat disproportionately evidenced by only two tangible results. The field work (contacting and interviewing publishers and editors) proved unexpectedly important to the informants (apart from the researcher). They welcomed such comparative and in-depth research into a field they often considered neglected.
