Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
Ya h o o!^4 ; academic bibliographies, via the FirstSearch portal^5 ; the UNESCO trans-
lations database Index Translationum^6 ; and Zabic and Kamenish’s “Survey of
Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian poetry in English translation in the U.S. and Can-
ada” (2006). With translation projects, search parameters (such as poetry Bosnia
OR Bosnian for Google) allowed for a range of state allegiances, like ‘Bosnian’,
‘Bosnian Croat’, or ‘born in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Paper texts were found
via web bibliographies, on-line contents pages of journals, publishers’ and book-
sellers’ websites, etc.; if contents, translators or translated poets were not listed,
hard copies were obtained when possible. On-line texts were read directly. Texts
found only in the 1992–2005 and 1996–2006 surveys were added to the database.
Altogether, 102 texts were found: 51 translation projects, 43 reviews, and 8
combined translation + review projects. They were published in paper (32 texts),
on-line (65 texts), or both (5 texts). Projects featured 59 named poets, plus 44
named translators working solo or in co-translating pairs. Slightly more transla-
tors had English (23, or 52%) than BCS (18, or 41%) as their first language; the
others had Hungarian or Irish as their first language.
Searches will not have identified all relevant texts appearing in the period, but
as web publishing or web announcement of paper publishing is the norm in na-
tive-English-using countries, they have probably identified a representative range
of texts. Relative numbers of translation projects vs. reviews, and of paper vs. web
texts, however, are probably an artefact of the search methods used. It is also un-
certain how far the largely literary, largely English-native-writer review writers
might represent the views held by all readers of the translation projects. Unfortu-
nately, particularly with the global reach of web publication, it is hard to see how a
representative sample of all readers might have been obtained.
Several of the projects surveyed involved me as a translator. To avoid warping
the data, I did not exclude these, but I identify my participation wherever applica-
ble. In the Findings section below, quantitative data are fleshed out by case studies
of projects and translators. In one case study, I again use my insights as a partici-
pant to reconstruct a project network (for the paper anthology Scar on the Stone:
Agee 1998b). In line with the other case studies, I did not anonymize participants.
As in Chapter 2, however, I asked the central actor – here, editor Chris Agee – for
feedback, and he confirmed that my analysis was accurate and acceptable.- http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search?hl=en, uk.search.yahoo.com/web/advanced. As these
generated too many ‘raw hits’ to scrutinize, searching was abandoned once fifty successive raw
hits had identified no new projects. - firstsearch.uk.oclc.org/
- portal.unesco.org/ culture/ en/ ev.php-URLID=7810&URL DO=DO TOPIC& URL SEC
TION= 201. html