Between center and periphery: networks of translated German fiction authors in the German National Library

Abstract

Translation invisibility is a common issue when working with bibliographic translation data from national libraries (Teichmann and Roman 2024) and tools to visualize the network of transfer still need to be developed for the Germanophone context. Johan Heilbron proposed a network model for translated fiction which maps the relationships between central and peripheral languages. However, it has not been explored which authors connect linguistic communities. In this paper, we build on Heilbron’s center-periphery language model to investigate the following questions: Do authors form a distinct group that connect languages? Which authors connect peripheral languages to central languages and which authors are unique to language groups? By applying a network model to the bibliographic data of 31,519 translated titles originally published in German, representing 3,986 authors that have been translated into eighty-one languages extracted from the German National Library (DNB), this paper presents first-time network visualizations of the DNB’s collection of translations. By applying a community detection algorithm to the network graph, we found two distinct groups of authors: representatives of the canon that connect the central to the peripheral languages, and groups of authors that stay within central and peripheral languages, whose translations are highly specialized in certain target languages and genres. Hence, we argue that we can use Heilbron’s center-periphery language network model to identify authors of German fiction who played a crucial role in pushing the canon beyond its national boundaries by means of their translations, and in turn, make visible the network of translational transfer between languages.