Post-Exile Translation: People, Texts, Entanglements 1945-60

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas F. Kelletat
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536538513

Wider research context: "Post-Exil:Trans" is based on the results of the international research project "Exil:Trans" that investigated the life and work of translators in exile (1933-1945). It consequently focuses on the post-exile experiences of these translators up until the 1960s, their translatorial entanglements and the post-war fate of texts translated in exile. The project considers exiled translators who stayed in their country of exile after 1945, those who returned to German speaking countries and those who moved to a third country. The main research context is constituted by scholarly, literary, and pragmatic translation practices in and in relation to the early post-war German, Swiss and Austrian (GSA) region. This particularly concerns translation policies of the occupying powers, translatorial aspects of the post-war book market transformation, as well as the knowledge transfer "into" the newly formed post-war societies via scholarly translation. Objectives: "Post-Exil:Trans" starts from the finding that the experience of exile has generated a discernible translational dynamic in different areas of cultural and scholarly production. It explores the impact of these phenomena in the post-exile period, i.e. of exiled translators, of their ties to other actors and institutions in the GSA region, and of their products, thus mapping out the constitution of the post-war societies from the perspective of translation history. Approach / methods: The project is rooted in Translation History and combines approaches presently pursued in this sub-field of Translation Studies: biographical research on translators as agents and research on translation policy. To avoid a narrow nation-centered view a transcultural perspective is applied. "Post-Exil:Trans" has a strong digital component, with substantial infrastructural continuity to "!Exil:Trans". Beside dissemination of results in open access outlets we continue to aggregate biographical and bibliographical data on translators in freely accessible and sustainable online databases (the German encyclopaedia of translators UeLEX and the Austrian bibliographical database of translations DLBT) as well as in the project's own biographical database Exil:Trans. Biographical data are also presented and visualized with the help of Digital Humanities tools. Level of originality / innovation: "Post-Exil:Trans" not only uncovers translatorial continuities and ruptures occurred in the post-war years, it also contributes to the general historiography of this period. The innovation lies in offering an understanding of social, cultural, political and scholarly developments during the post-war period through the lens of translation - more precisely the entangled biographies of post-exile translators.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Rafael Schögler; Professorin Dr. Irene Weber Henking