Exil:Trans – Life and work of persecuted translators
Exil:Trans – Life and work of persecuted translators
Project duration: September 2019 – August 2022
Project description:
Exile during the Nazi-regime has been a research object of various disciplines focusing on different groups of actors, among them culturally relevant figures such as writers and scientists. However, barely anything is known about translators in exile – and therefore about the agents responsible for the circulation of knowledge and ideas attributed to such figures. The project Exil:Trans aims at closing this gap by systematically researching translators who were forced into exile by the NS-regime. Its main objective consists in studying the impact exile had on these translators and their translation activities, thus contributing to the academic and public discourse about the cultural effects the Nazi tyranny had and still has. Exil:Trans not only takes into account the perspective of individual translators, but also the perspectives of the individual and collective agents, such as authors, publishers, and cultural institutions, involved in translation under the condition of exile. By analyzing the networks in which translators translated, a more comprehensive and detailed picture of their working and living conditions can be drawn. The project plans to
- create a special database that provides basic biographical and bibliographical data, especially translators’ names, birth/death dates, translations, and exile paths;
- carry out further in-depth investigations into translators’ lives with the help of this database, which will also be accessible to the general public. The aim of these investigations is to identify their networks and analyse the intersection of the various perspectives involved in the translation process.
- This will, extrapolate more general, transindividual patterns on basis of the established case studies, to identify regularities of translation in exile. This way, the project’s aim of contributing to the understanding of the cultural effect of exile during the Nazi-regime can be reached in a conclusive manner.
Keywords: translators, exile, histoire croisée, national socialist tyranny, networks, biography
Funding body: FWF, Joint Project
Project lead: University of Vienna, Centre for Translation Studies, Univ.-Prof. Gerhard Budin & Univ.-Prof. Larisa Schippel
Project partners:
- Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz – Germersheim, Arbeitsbereich Interkulturelle Germanistik
- Université de Lausanne, Centre de traduction littéraire Website: coming soon.
