Online Encyclopedia of Danish Translators

This is an interesting project from the Danish Association of Translators:

Had it not been for translators and their work, much of the world’s most important literature would only have been accessible to readers with specialized skills in foreign languages. Furthermore, without translations and the people who wrote them, a country would have been deprived of the contrasts, reflections and inspirations from other literatures that are so essential to the life and spirit of its national literature. Nonetheless, translators are severely underexposed in a country’s literary history.

This obvious but often glossed-over fact has now lead the Danish Association of Translators (DOF) to the initiative of making an online encyclopedia of Danish translators. In order to avoid the complete historical effacement of translators in the slipstream between cultural anonymity and linguistic transparency, between mere bibliography and pure theory, the online database will present men and women who have enabled Danish readers (and Danish writers) to engage with other literatures from near and far – the men and women who have actively conducted the exchanges that allow Danish literature to breathe.

This initiative is intended to work on several levels, both as a frame of reference for the history of translation in Denmark and as a qualification of translation criticism. The individual entries will present a translator and his or her bibliography and literary career. They will also contain details of the individual translator’s linguistic background, technical methods, apparent strategies, particular challenges and literary merits in a critical perspective, etc. The encyclopedia will be continually expanded.

TranslatorWiki! WikiTranslatorium? Whatever funny name you could come up with, this would be an interesting way of making visible the people who make visible the books we read from around the world.