Circulations, vacuums and frictions in literary translations published in Uruguay between 1871 and 2021

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of the source languages of literary translations published in Uruguay based on the data obtained in the interdisciplinary project 150 years of literary translation in printing and publishing houses in Uruguay (1871-2021). Such an overview emerges from the first phase of the project, in which we employed computational tools to process a large volume of information from the perspective of big translation history. The main source of this research is the computerised catalogue of the Biblioteca Nacional del Uruguay, whose cataloguing information was curated and supplemented with other catalogues’ information by the authors and by a group of research trainees collaborating with the project. This paper examines the ‘source language’ variable across the entire time span of the project. By analysing the relationship between some of the source languages and the publishing houses that have published translations in Uruguay, it studies the role played by different languages in the Uruguayan publishing ecosystem. By showing oscillations between the most and least frequent source languages, the panorama that we offer gives rise to a series of hypotheses about translation flows in Uruguay. These variations respond to migratory, educational, cultural, socio-political and translational phenomena, among others, which are discussed individually.

Keywords
history of translation in Uruguay; literary translation; big translation history; bibliodiversity