Julia Kölbl
”Whoever doesn’t move, doesn’t feel [her] chains.“ Translators as Activists in Germany and Austria (1848-1918)
Abstract
This dissertation project examines (currently 48) women who were active as translators into German and were also involved in this context as activists in Germany and the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1918. The aim of the project is to determine the diverse functions of translations in the context of political engagement for the women’s movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, through illuminating the phenomenon of “translation”, to gain a nuanced perspective on “female” political action—especially in the context of the “bourgeois-radical” and social-democratic women’s movement activities of that time.
(Auto)biographical data, ego-documents and a text corpus consisting of 95 German-language translations of political writings and newspaper articles as well as novels critical of society from nine European source languages constitute the empirical basis of the project. The project’s theoretical frame of reference consists of feminist concepts of the public sphere (esp. Wischermann 2003) and politics (Appelt 1994; Sauer 2001), which enable the recognition of political action taking place outside of state institutions such as parliaments, parties or political organizations.
Against this background, a field of translation, with reference to Pierre Bourdieu (1997, 2001), will first be reconstructed and the principles which structure and condition the field will be established. In connection with a qualitative content analysis (Kukartz 2018) and a critical discourse analysis (Wodak 2001) of paratextual material (for example correspondences by letter, reviews of translations as well as potential textual interventions in the translated texts, cf. Genette 1997), detailed insights into the functions of translations in the context of women’s political engagement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will be gained and the conditions, forms and consequences of involvement for “activist” translators in the political public spheres and discourses of the time will be made comprehensible.
Further information
https://online.uni-graz.at/kfu_online/wbforschungsportal.cbshowportal?pPersonNr=122712