Translation guide: finding literary translations

Translation Guide: Finding Literary Translations

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Dawn Childress
Title: Sally W. Kalin Librarian for Technological Innovations and Humanities Librarian

Finding known translations

Books

To find a book translated into English, you might first try searching The CAT or WorldCAT. Ideally, you will know the Author, English language Title, and the Title in the original language.

Since a work may be translated into English with varying titles, knowing the title in the original language is important to find all translation of a work. The original language title is often the uniform title by which all translations are indexed.

If the work translated is from a language using non-roman characters, such as Russian, Korean, or Hebrew, you might consult the Library of Congress Romanization Tables to search The CAT using the original language.

Tip: If you don't know the original language title, try searching by the author's name and limit to English language material.

Poetry and Short Stories

Poetry and short stories in translation are likely to appear in collected works and anthologies. Try using indexes for poetry and short stories to find the translated works:

Cook, Dorothy Elizabeth. Short Story Index: An Index to 60,000 Stories in 4,320 Collections. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1953.

The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies. 13th ed., completely rev., indexing anthologies published through May 31, 2006 ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Tip: You may also find short stories searching the The CAT: using keywords from the author and title can find short stories in collections where the table of contents is included in the catalog record.

Tip: You can find many translated poems on the Internet. Just try a Google search of the author and title or a few key words from the text.

Has a work been translated into English?

Indexes and Databases

Index Translationum

UNESCO's free online database to translations from 1979 to the present. Contains over 1.3 million records. The database allows you to search for all translations from one language to another (say, everything translated from Slovak into English) by date, or search by author, subject or word from the original title. Covers both translations in books and anthologies as well as in journals published in about a hundred of UNESCO's Member States since 1979.

Also in Print, 1932-1986.

Index Translationum = Répertoire International Des Traductions = International Bibliography of Translations. New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1964.

Index Translationum. Répertoire International Des Traductions. International Bibliography of Translations. Paris]: Unesco, 1932.

BITRA

Bitra comprises over 42,000 entries (books, chapters, articles, journals, Ph.D. dissertations), with more than 12,000 abstracts, more than 25,000 citations in the Impact field, and about 2,000 tables of contents.

The CAT and WorldCat

Bibliographies

Bibliographies are useful for discovering what has been translated by a particular author or from a specific language.

Entries in the Dictionary of Literary Biography contain bibliographies of works by the author discussed, including information on English language translations.

Also try:

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tip: There are many bibliographies of specific literatures or authors in translation. Try searching by subject headings in the library catalog. Some examples:

French literature -- Translations into English -- Bibliography.
English literature -- Translations from Polish -- Bibliography.
Brecht, Bertolt -- Bibliography.

Has and English language work been translated?

To find English language works translated into other languages, the best approach is to search the national library catalogs of the target language. For example, to find the works of English or American authors translated into French, try searching the French National Library. A list of national library catalogs can be found at Libweb.

Since not all library catalogs have all of their books recorded in an online catalog, you might need to check the printed national library catalogs.