Review of Radical Translations, Editors: Sanja Perovic, Erica Joy Mannucci, and Rosa Mucignat

With the exponential growth of print in eighteenth-century Europe came an exponential increase in the number of translated works. In Romanticism and the Stranger, David Simpson describes the problems with “precise accounting of the numbers and kinds of translation into English” as primarily bibliographical, citing “the phenomena of secondary translation (e.g., into English from the German via the French) and of fake or unacknowledged translation, along with the fact that physical copies of many published works have not been recovered” (155). As a result, most attempts to trace the phenomenon of translation in Europe have focused on case studies of particular authors, as in Laura Kirkley’s work on Mary Wollstonecraft both in translation and as a translator; particular national and linguistic contexts, be they English, German, or French; or, in the case of Diego Saglia’s recent work, particular media forms. But a general exploration of translation in the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has remained an elusive undertaking, largely due to the enormity of its scale. Enter Radical Translations. Created by principal investigator (PI) Sanja Perovic, along with co-PIs Erica Joy Mannucci and Rosa Mucignat, and developed with the support of King’s Digital Lab, this database offers a new way to engage with the transnational circulation of radical ideas in the Romantic period. At the heart of this project is a bibliographic database that captures information about more than 1,600 titles (so far)—either translations or their source texts in English, French, and Italian—and the nearly 800 authors and translators involved in their production. Selected according to a capacious definition of “radical,” which includes “any translation that aims to extend democratic and egalitarian ideas into new contexts,” the dataset represents an ambitious effort to capture the movement of ideas through Europe and North America during the years leading up to and following the French Revolution. The exclusion of other European languages such as German omits many significant works in circulation, but this is a practical limitation that the project hopes to redress in future stages of the work. In addition to the data, the site contains a timeline, a wealth of contextual information in the form of blog posts, and detailed documentation of editorial choices useful for both the casual user and the most technical of digital humanists. Designed according to the Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME 2.0 model, the database has two main entry points: “Resources” and “Agents.” Resources captures information about source texts and their translations, while Agents consists of the people and organizations, including businesses, that were involved in writing, translating, and publishing source texts and their translations. Resource records provide metadata about a specific edition of a work, including categorization according to subject matter and literary form, links to records for the agents (authors, translators, and publishers) involved in its publication, and links to “Related Resources,” which may include both a source text and other editions of the same translation (see fig. 2). The records are easy to understand at a glance, aided by a key (see fig. 1) that identifies the categories represented by different graphics; the search function enables keyword searches, which can be filtered by all of the fields captured in the records. In addition to providing an accessible overview of radical source texts and their translations, the fields captured in Resource records give evidence of careful thought about the challenges of building a bibliography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, as well as about how to open new avenues for exploration. One of the most exciting features of the …