Retranslation and retranslators in Hungary between 2000 and 2020

Abstract

This study explores Hungarian retranslations between 2000 and 2020, on the basis of a restricted corpus of 19th- and 20th-century classic novels in four languages, with a special emphasis on the retranslators, in order to know more about their age, gender, work experience or embeddedness in the publishing and/or academic milieu. With a mixed (quantitative and qualitative) method, retranslations of classic English, French, Russian and German prose works published in Hungary between 2000 and 2020 are investigated with the help of bibliographical data provided by the catalog of the Hungarian National Library. The relatively small proportion of retranslation records and the low occurrence of parallel retranslations during the period examined suggest that publishers often opt for reissuing non-copyrighted previous translations. Retranslation activity in a given source language also reflects power relations of languages on the international translation market and results attest to the hyper-central role of English. Hungarian retranslators of classic novels are more likely to be men than women, are generally in their mid-fifties, and often work as editors in the publishing industry. Despite its non-representative nature, the present research highlights a number of issues related to the symbolic power of languages, gender, agents of translation and power relations between them, to be further investigated.