Digital approaches to translation history

The International Journal for

Translation & Interpreting Judy Wakabayashi
Research Kent State University
trans-int.org jwakabay@kent.edu

DOI: 10.12807/ti.111202.2019.a11

Abstract: Digital translation history is defined here as a methodological approach

that uses digital technologies to produce, enhance or disseminate research on
translation history. This can help translation historians pose fresh questions and
answer new and old ones. It entails mastering technical competencies in varying
degrees while remaining grounded in the fundamentals of the historian’s craft. This
paper outlines the main affordances of digital approaches as applied to the study of
translation history (how these can help translation historians do things better and/or
differently in some respects), as well as the limitations. It introduces relevant
techniques of text analysis (such as distant reading, topic modelling and stylometrics)
and data visualization, which can help tease out patterns and relationships (e.g.
textual, conceptual, geographic and personal networks) in dynamic ways that
potentially create new knowledge and facilitate public engagement with scholarship.

Keywords: digital translation history, digital humanities, historiography

1. Relevance of digital humanities for translation historians

The digital humanities (DH) investigate traditional humanities questions and

questions made newly possible by applying computing tools and techniques to
digitized and born-digital materials.1 Although translation historians make wide
use of digital media to facilitate and enhance conventional research (e.g.
information retrieval and management; software for presenting and
disseminating research), many have not fully explored how information
technologies can help pose and/or answer research questions that might
otherwise be difficult to even envisage.
DH methods have been applied to both historical and textual studies, which
suggests their relevance to studying the history of translated texts. Digital
translation history is defined here as a methodological approach that uses digital
technologies to produce, enhance or disseminate research on translation history,
including the study of digitized texts, born-digital texts, and other digital
artefacts (e.g. images, audio) relevant to translation history. The goals include:

 supporting conventional research agendas, by saving time and effort

and allowing more thorough and extensive investigations,
 revising previous assumptions and findings on the basis of new and
more data and newly revealed patterns and connections,
 generating unanticipated research questions and facilitating new
kinds of research and new presentation modes,
 facilitating teamwork and public engagement.

1 Born-digital texts are “authored to use affordances of screen-based interactions and new media
technologies and are neither digitizations of print-based materials nor reproducible in print forms”
(Eyman & Ball, 2015, p. 65).

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 132

 Examples of databases relevant to translation history include the Perso-
Indica database of Persian works on Indian learned traditions, which identifies
the proportion of translations in relation to original works in India between the
thirteenth and nineteenth centuries 2 ; the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads
project, 3 which has served as a basis for research by Barker and Hosington
(2013) and others; the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database4
of book trade-based cultural transfers in late eighteenth-century francophone
Europe; and the TETRA (Teatro e Tradução) project, which focuses on the
history of theatre translation in Portugal (1800 – 2009). 5 Databases are not,
however, the only useful tool for translation historians, as outlined later.
Digital translation history requires not only the skills and insights of any
historian (including source evaluation and comparison, contextualization,
critical interpretation, the imagination to envisage new questions and
approaches), but also those of a data analyst. It involves considering who
created the digital material, for what purpose, when, what was excluded,
whether the digital source is “a coherent body of materials” since its origin or
an assembly from diverse sources (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 25), and
whether non-digital materials were altered during digitization, possibly without
readers being notified. Although digitized texts might seem to be a textual and
visual facsimile, they are often decontextualized. Hence Weller (2013, p. 7)
stresses the importance of noting “the original experience, the original
medium”, particularly because material is often shifted from medium to
medium nowadays.
So how can translation historians use DH to complement non-
computational methods in historiographically valid ways? What are the
advantages, implications and potential pitfalls of a partial shift from documents
to data (or documents as data)?

2. Advantages and potential

Digital media allow us to do history better in several respects:

Capacity and comprehensiveness: digital media make more of the
historical record available because of the low costs in saving it, while massive
data sets allow more extensive investigations than relying on random or
‘representative’ cases.
Accessibility: “once the initial expenses are met, reaching an additional
person costs almost nothing” (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 4). Moreover,
digitalization can include “details that are otherwise unavailable, forgotten,
ignored, or impossible to extract” (Jockers, 2013, p. 27) and can “conserve
fragile/precious objects while presenting surrogates in more accessible forms”
(Deegan & Tanner, 2002, p. 32).
Time-saving: “text-mining methods allow us to direct our scarce attention
to those materials in which we already have reason to believe we will find
relevant information” (Wilkens, 2012, p. 255).
Flexibility: digital media can handle sounds, images and moving pictures,
opening up translation and interpreting history beyond the textual medium.
Diversity: digital media enable more public engagement, allowing “experts
and users alike to comment on original source material” (Terras, 2012, p. 49).
Digital historians can also do things differently because of the following
features:
Manipulability: electronic tools allow searches not otherwise (readily)
possible, particularly across documents. Nevertheless, Jockers (2013, p. 9)

2 http://www.perso-indica.net/index.faces
3 https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rcc/
4 http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/main/
5 http://tetra.letras.ulisboa.pt/tetra/en

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 133

argues that “the sheer amount of data now available makes search ineffectual as
a means of evidence gathering. […] What are required are methods for
aggregating and making sense out of both the nuggets and the tailings.” DH also
provides tools for this.
Interactivity: user-generated content is a feature of Web 2.0 interfaces,
which facilitate “multiple forms of historical dialogue – among professionals,
between professionals and nonprofessionals, between teachers and students,
among students, among people reminiscing about the past” (Cohen &
Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 6).
Hypertextuality: this allows non-linear movement through data or
narratives. Hyperlinks to other texts can enhance digitally published
translations. Calhoun (2017, p. 139) says “a digital edition might incorporate
supplementary material such as definitions, textual variants, and bibliographic
references, at a hypertext level; render primary sources searchable for specific
tokens and metalanguage; or enable users to define, isolate, and then save sub-
corpora.”
Time analyses: Robertson and Mullen (2017, p. 20) observe that
“computing affords a view of the longue durée otherwise obscured by
individual examples”, with the potential to problematize existing
periodizations. Time- and date-stamping of digitally created documents allows
“a new form of temporaneous comparison and analysis” (Weller, 2013, p. 8).
Challenge to canonicity: by minimizing bias in text selection, digital
approaches can supplement, even undermine, existing canons, which can be
somewhat arbitrary and self-perpetuating.
Identification of the typical, anomalous, (dis)continuities and clusters:
shifting away from the canonical allows greater focus on the ‘mundane’
translations that constitute the bulk of translation history. Software can help
identify the typical and the exceptional, cluster items into categories, and reduce
big data to a small dataset that represents the corpus more comprehensively than
standard sampling. If something of interest appears in the smaller set, the
computer can retrieve similar items. Researchers can go back and forth between
the two sets, “experimenting with new categories and groupings” (Manovich,
2012, p. 469).
Patterns: digital corpora can reveal systematicity – e.g. through corpus
approaches focusing on keywords (e.g. their different frequency from in other
corpora) and collocations.6 These patterns might not otherwise be apparent or
sufficiently delineated. Interpreting their significance, however, requires human
judgment.
Repurposing: with little time or effort, datasets can be “adapted,
supplemented and transformed” (Mussell, 2013, p. 87) or placed in new
contexts that can reveal “unexpected properties and relationships” (p. 90).
Metadata also offer a source for mining (although translations and translators
are not always assigned a field in databases).
Virtual unification: digital collections can bring scattered sources together.

3. New concepts of ‘text’, ‘author’ and ‘language’

Digital media have expanded textual notions to include multimedia forms that
differ in some respects from oral, manuscript and print texts. Websites, wikis,
blogs, email and tweets are subject to translation and can constitute historical
sources (sometimes with untraceable authors). Many sources are already
available only in digital form. This requires rethinking our concept of archives,

6 McEnery and Baker (2016, p. 4) note, however, that corpora “used to explore the past … are
typically small” – a problem when examining low- or moderate-frequency words.

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 134

the connection between medium and knowledge production, and how we
preserve, access and interpret these artefacts.
Digital texts are also affecting models of authorship and readership. Web
tools facilitate collaborative writing, so the meaning of author is changing. The
fact that “all digital work can be easily manipulated and remixed” undermines
textual authority (Eyman, 2015, p. 72). Readers can also “customize the
presentation of data to isolate issues of particular interest to them, rather
than depending on the author” (Theibault, 2013, p. 180).
The growing perception of programming languages as language and of
programming as writing acknowledges source code as a semiotic system with
its own stylistic elegance and as a signifying cultural object. This arguably
places computer programs within the purview of translation research,
particularly in terms of intersemiotic translation. The field of Critical Code
Studies applies literary analysis methods to computer code, and this can be done
within a historical context. Although studying the history of translation between
programming languages or between natural and computer language lies beyond
the interests and expertise of most translation historians, these possibilities
suggest how digital media broaden our object of study.

4. Building digital resources

Although the consensus seems to be that designing or building digital archives,

tools or methods – not just digitizing material, but knowing how to code – is
not necessary for qualifying as a digital humanist, “sensitivity to the capacities
and possibilities of working in a digital environment” is essential (What is
Digital Humanities, 2012).
The verbal, visual and structural design of resources can affect their
argument and use. If one is creating a website, for example, it is essential to
decide on its main purpose – “to share knowledge, to educate the public, to
appeal to donors, to connect to a wider research community, etc.” (Potts, 2015,
p. 259) –, its audience (e.g. translation historians, interdisciplinary researchers,
the public), and whether to take a hands-off approach, interpret the materials,
or mix archival materials with interpretive essays. Sample features for a
translation history website include biographical sketches, oral histories (audio-
or videotaped interviews, with or without transcripts), primary documents
(preferably searchable both within and across texts), background essays,
historic photographs, zoomable and pannable maps, a bibliography, links to
relevant websites, and a glossary.7 Cohen and Rosenzweig caution, however,
that
topical sites … sometimes lack focus and wind up being a hodgepodge of materials
centered on a particular theme. Often, it makes more sense to try to excel at one
thing – at providing access to a rich archive, offering an intriguing interpretive
exhibit, or supplying effective classroom tools or resources. (2006, pp. 49-50).

Preparing critical editions is one approach. Boyle (2015, p. 134) suggests

considering “as one corpus, the evolving relations between primary texts,
secondary scholarship, and tertiary commentary”. For instance, The Quintilian
Project 8 aims to compile “all the English translations alongside secondary
scholarship” regarding the classical Roman rhetorician, so as to offer “a
unique vantage point from which to visualize how Quintilian is taken up over
time, determine which passages are cited most frequently, and discover which
translations instigate the most responses” (Boyle, 2015, p. 134). Boyle also
mentions digital editions that emphasize contexts of text production and

7 For a website on Iraqi warzone interpreters developed by some of my students as a class project,
see http://www.translationhistory.com/iraqinterpreters/.
8 http://caseyboyle.net/project/the-quintilian-project/

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 135

reception (p. 130) – e.g. by including the notebooks, manuscript fragments,
prose essays, letters and journalistic articles of a translator or theorist from the
past. With digitalized manuscripts, Calhoun (2017, p. 147) stresses the
importance of quality images, faithful transcription, and the inclusion of
annotations about “lineation, hand changes, scribal emendations and
abbreviations” – details whose omission hinders access to “the underlying
manuscript reality”.
An example of digital tools designed to compare retranslations over time
is the Version Variation Visualization project,9 where researchers have built
language-neutral tools for analysing parallel multi-translation corpora to
“uncover patterns relating to different types of translation, historical periods and
genetic relations and patterns relating to different sub-sets of segments” (Geng
et al. 2015, p. 274).

5. Distant reading

An alternative to creating digital resources is to make more effective use of

existing ones. Although the immersive reading long applied to print texts can
be used with digital texts, the extensiveness of big data can offer a different,
more comprehensive and representative picture. Franco Moretti (2005, 2013)
advocates ‘distant reading’ of massive numbers of canonical and unexceptional
texts, through text analysis methods such as word frequencies, sentiment
analysis10 (systematically identifying and classifying a writer’s attitudes on a
particular topic and comparing the results with norms identified in other texts;
this can be used to trace attitudinal changes over time), topic modeling, pattern
recognition, and visualization in the form of graphs, maps, trees and clouds. The
focus is on quantitative breadth rather than qualitative, interpretive depth, but it
is possible to drill down to more granular levels.
Although distant reading “can flatten the particularity and ambiguity of the
objects and processes that literary critics often seek to capture” (Long, 2015, p.
289), it complements close reading that focuses on singularities, facilitating
back-and-forth movement between the micro- and macro-scales.
Some reader-related websites of potential interest to translation historians
include the Reading Experience Database (RED) 11 and The Archaeology of
Reading in Early Modern Europe website (focusing on manuscript
annotations).12

5.1 Text analysis tools

One place to start looking for useful software is DIRT (Digital Research
Tools13), which helps with choosing a tool based on one’s aims – e.g. annotation,
collaboration, network analysis, publishing, statistical analysis, text cleaning or
visualization.
Corpus researchers already use text analysis software, and a corpus-
informed approach (e.g. concordancing; retrieving lexical clusters) can be
applied to certain aspects of translation history, such as analysing translated
works or paratexts, oral history transcripts, or “changes and constants in
language and vocabulary use” (Hudson, 2000, p. 241).
Textual analysis packages have four broad functions (Hoffman &
Waisanen, 2015):

9 www.tinyurl.com/vvvex
10 E.g. DICTION; www.dictionsoftware.com
11 http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/index.php
12 http://archaeologyofreading.org/
13 http://dirtdirectory.org/

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 “[G]enerate basic statistics about a text, such as word count, average
sentence length, number of adjectives” (p. 171), to gauge lexical richness,
frequent syntactical patterns and readability indexes. This allows “simple but
substantiated generalizations” (p. 171) and comparisons of these features
between source and target texts and also over time. Features such as frequency
do not, however, necessarily correlate with (historical) significance. Nor does
the absence of a term in surviving texts necessarily mean it was never used or
that the concept was not in play (p. 172).
“[C]reate indexes and concordances”, showing expressions in context
(Hoffman & Waisanen, 2015, p. 170). This reveals usage patterns and, for
instance, positive or negative valences of culturally or theoretically important
conceptual words and how these have changed or spread over time and/or
space.14 The mass digitization of (mostly Western) books now under way – as
well as newspaper databases, which are disproportionately prominent – offers
rudimentary concordances, but these holdings are not representative of
commercially available works or the works of interest to translation historians.
Nor are they amenable to proper corpora searches such as those possible with
specialized software (e.g. Antconc15 or WordSmith Tools16).
Use preprogrammed or user-generated dictionary-based programs to
indicate “how common or deviant a text’s language is in comparison with other
texts” (Hoffman & Waisanen, 2015, p. 176). These programs cannot, however,
indicate “how the actual locations of various terms relate and link with other
terms” (p. 177).
“[D]o cluster analyses […] to determine the most important concepts in a
given text or group of texts and how they are related to each other” (pp. 170-
171) – e.g. not just how terms tend to collocate linguistically but also how they
are related conceptually, which might change over time. Pinpointing conceptual
clusters could be particularly useful, for instance, in examining historical texts
discussing translation theory. Automated semantic analysis can identify classes
of comments in paratexts, revealing patterns in how translators have
conceptualized the act of translating.
Topic modeling is a related technique for identifying recurring themes in a
corpus (rather than searching for predetermined keywords).17 A sample project
might involve exploring (changes in) the preoccupations and discursive
framework in a translation journal or theorist’s writing over time.
Stylometrics software such as the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution
Program could help ascribe translatorship of anonymous translations, based on
translations of known provenance. 18 Hung, Bingenheimer and Wiles (2010)
used a digital approach to show that 24 Buddhist sutras, traditionally attributed
to different Chinese translators, were translated by the same translator or group
of translators. Other uses include textual dating, verifying the authenticity of
historical documents and examining the relationship (e.g. stylistic diversity over
time) among different translations by the same translator or among translators
from different periods, genders, locations, classes or educational backgrounds,
or among translations of the works of the same author. The assumption is that a
translator’s stylistic habits remain detectable through the style of the different
authors translated. As Jockers (2013, p. 63) points out, external factors (e.g.
genre, register, age, ethnicity, nationality, time period) might “influence or even
overpower the latent … signal”. Research suggests that features such as articles,

14 The Genealogies of Knowledge project at the University of Manchester (http://genealogiesofk

nowledge.net/genealogies-knowledge-corpus/) seeks to “explore the evolution and contestation
of key political and scientific concepts as they have travelled across centuries, languages and
cultures”.
15 http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/
16 http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/
17 E.g. Overview: https://blog.overviewdocs.com/; MALLET: http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/topics.

php. See Da (2019, pp. 625-629) for a critique of topic modeling.

18 https://evllabs.github.io/JGAAP/.

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 137

conjunctions and pronouns are most indicative of individual style (p. 64).
Forsyth and Lam (2014) found that inter-translator discriminability was
possible in their digital study of nineteenth-century French translations (i.e. the
translators’ ‘handprints’ were present, although less so than the authors’).
Historians might use stylometrics to explore questions such as the nature of the
differences between canonical and marginal translators, or whether women
translators have historically been more likely to use sentence fragments, for
instance, and how any such tendencies have changed over time.
Another relevant function is automatic extraction of places and names
(people, organizations) through named entity recognition (NER). Place names
identified in a corpus of texts about Translation Studies, for example, might
trace the shifting ‘balance of power’ in the discipline, or personal names in
translators’ correspondence might point to social networks. Other useful tools
are image-processing techniques and handwritten text recognition (HTR)
technology that facilitate the reading of old documents. For instance, SMART-
GS 19 is a tool for transcribing and studying digitized historical manuscripts
(mainly Japanese).

6. Information visualization

Grossman (2015, p. 42) points out that “Ironically, an excess of information

resists analysis and comprehension in much the same way a lack of it does.”
Data do not necessarily equate with knowledge and understanding. One aid here
is data visualization, the intersemiotic ‘translation’ of statistical or other
information into visual representations. Beyond merely displaying findings
more efficiently than in print, it can help tease out patterns and relationships in
ways that create new knowledge and facilitate public engagement.
Historians have long made use of tables, graphs, dynastic and genealogical
charts, timelines, maps and cartograms, but less static possibilities are now
available, such as animated maps or interactive timelines. Visualization
packages include Wordle, Many Eyes and Phrase Net, but simple word-cloud
tools can lead to erroneous conclusions. As noted above, frequency does not
always equate with significance, and word length and the space around words
can distort relative importance. Other possible problems with visualization
software include unclear legends, “false visual cues” and “unnecessary clutter
and contrived images that [make] visualizations confusing” (Theibault, 2013,
p. 177). Ironically, complex visualizations can require textual explanations and
argumentation for historians lacking visual literacy.
Google’s Ngram Viewer is a search engine that helps chart the trajectory
of words and phrases in Google’s text corpora (8 languages) between 1500 and
2008. It could be used, for instance, to trace the changing interest value of
particular translators or theorists. However, “The only metadata provided are
publication dates, and even these are frequently incorrect. Different printings,
different editions, and the unaccounted-for presence of duplicate works in the
corpus complicate matters even further.” (Jockers, 2013, p. 120). Jockers
concludes that Ngram Viewer

cannot tell us why a particular word was popular or not; it cannot address the
historical meaning of the word at the time it was used …, and it cannot offer very
much at all in terms of how readers might have perceived the use of the word.” (p.
122)

Moreover, the corpus changes over time; there is no way to find “words near
other words” or search for synonyms; and the interface is poor (Shea, 2014,
para. 39).

19 http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/smart-gs

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 One alternative is Bookworm,20 which “makes it easy to turn any collection
of texts into a richly searchable database; you can visualize trends, but with
many more ways to slice data than Ngram Viewer allows” (2014, para. 42).
Although word frequency-based conclusions about themes or significance are
open to error 21 and frequency results do not explain underlying causal
mechanisms, they might challenge existing ideas or narratives and trigger
questions or hypotheses for follow-up by other means.
Another use of visualization software is to show historical networks –
textual, conceptual, geographical and personal, as exemplified, for instance,
through ties and communications among translators, authors and stakeholders
such as publishers. Network analysis can be used to explore correlations
between position within a network and “strategies of translation and selection”,
as in Long (2015). The possibilities are suggested by network analysis software
such as Gephi22 and sites such as Mapping the Republic of Letters,23 while the
challenges are noted by Theibault (2013, pp. 182-183) and Da (2019, pp. 630-
631). Despite potential drawbacks, visualization tools help generate questions
and test hypotheses (e.g. about centrality and marginality). The translation
historian can then explore the underlying causes.

6.1 Spatial analysis

Visualization is particularly helpful with geographical data. Historical materials
often contain location information, and historians have long paid attention to
how space and place shape historical experiences and processes. Recent years
have witnessed a focus on “themes of region, diaspora, colonial territory, and
contact zones and rubrics such as ‘border’ and ‘boundary’” (Bodenhamer, 2013,
p. 24) – all relevant to translation history, as are questions of core and periphery.
Maps support spatially embedded arguments and narratives, and computer-
based spatial analysis helps historians formulate questions and identify patterns
that textual sources alone might not readily suggest. Putnam (2016, p. 398) adds
that “Visualizations of geotagged data can free us from reliance on
predetermined spatial units” (e.g. nation-states).
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software highlights aspects such
as scale and proximity.24 It “captures, stores, manages, displays, and analyses
information linked to a location on earth. […] It also is an intelligent or
interactive map that allows users to query the database and see the results
visualized” (Bodenhamer, 2013, p. 25), including in terms of temporal change.
GIS software integrates and interrelates not just quantitative data, but also
textual, image, audio and other qualitative data that share a location. For
instance, it would be possible to link population, publication and employment
statistics, oral histories, videos, or images of historical texts and translators
related to a particular site of translation. Information can be viewed separately
or together and at different scales, and different layers can represent different
themes.
An example of a text-to-map move would be georeferencing source text
publications in a given language and the site of their translation in one or more
target languages to highlight ‘hot spots’ or ‘blank spaces’. Mapping could also
be used, for instance, to identify patterns in translators’ locations. Other tasks

20 http://bookworm.culturomics.org/
21 For instance, a search for “Lawrence Venuti” would miss references to “Venuti” and “Larry
Venuti” (false negatives) or might include people with the same name who are not the translation
theorist (false positives). See Da (2019, p. 605) for a critique of word frequency-based studies.
22 https://gephi.org/
23 http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
24 ESRI ArcGIS is the most widely used GIS software. It is expensive, but many universities have

licenses. Free GIS software includes QGIS (https://qgis.org/en/site/). Sample mapping software
includes eSpatial (https://www.espatial.com) and iMapBuilder (https://www.imapbuilder.com/).
A helpful bibliography about historical GIS can be found at http://www.hgis.org.uk/bibliography.
htm.

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might involve creating a translation history layer for Google Earth or mapping
translation theorists’ institutional affiliations using Neatline.25
Bodenhamer (2013) presents several valid criticisms of GIS as a tool for
historians. There is now a trend toward simpler mapping software, such as
databases with mapping capabilities and the even simpler web mapping (Google
Maps, etc.). Some governments make digitized maps available to researchers.
Despite the drawbacks of spatial approaches, translation historians can benefit
from giving greater consideration to spatial relationality. Although this concept
underpins connected history, translation historians have been slow to explore
digital tools that help to reveal such connections and construct spatial
arguments.

7. Digital oral history

Oral histories can offer embodied, unmediated voices from people involved in
recent translation history, thereby sharing authorship/authority in generating
knowledge. Digital technologies can enhance oral history through improved
recording and new engagement modes, such as allowing listeners to add their
voices to online oral histories in an evolving ‘conversation’. The Internet has
opened up access to oral histories in terms of distribution, archiving and content
management. Boyd and Larson note that

Media outlets such as YouTube or SoundCloud offer near instant and free
distribution of audio and video oral histories, while digital repository and content
management systems like Omeka or CONTENTdm, or even Drupal or Wordpress,
provide powerful infrastructure for housing oral histories in a digital archive or
library. (2014, p. 4)

Although creating an online oral history database is a major undertaking, 26

translation-related searches of existing oral history repositories can prove
beneficial.
Nevertheless, digital oral history raises issues such as the “increased
vulnerability of narrators, infrastructure obsolescence, and a host of other
ethical issues, particularly with heritage collections” (Boyd & Larson, 2014, p.
5), so it is important to balance availability with an ethical approach. Oral
recordings are also difficult to search or navigate, so descriptive metadata in
textual form are necessary. Boyd and Larson (2014, pp. 4-5) note that systems
such as OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) “enhance access to oral
histories online, connecting a textual search of a transcript or an index to the
correlating moment in the online audio or video interview.” Transcription – an
expensive process – raises issues such as whether to correct grammatical errors,
which affects the reliability and unmediated nature of accounts. Preservation
costs are another aspect.

8. Collaboration and publicly engaged scholarship

DH makes information more freely sharable and lends itself to participatory,

multi-authored forms of knowledge production with other researchers and the
public. Translation historians wishing to build digital resources will find it
helpful, even essential, to collaborate with information sciences colleagues and
can in turn contribute “qualitative and interpretive perspectives” (Grossman,
2012, para. 5), not to mention linguistic and area studies expertise. Digital
translation history, particularly large data-driven studies, can benefit from

25 http://neatline.org/about/
26 A useful resource is the Oral History in the Digital Age website at http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 140

collaboration, since it is difficult for single researchers to ‘cover’ the relevant
materials and skill sets.
Another focus of DH is scholarship that engages the public more, as well
as more directly. This can help break down barriers between translation
researchers, professional translators and the community by making research
more relevant, personalized and accessible (e.g. blogs and podcasts). For
instance, CommentPress, a WordPress plug-in, “allows users to read a
document and comment on specific paragraphs, thus forming communities of
discourse around discrete zones of text” (Liu, 2013). Potts (2015, p. 256) argues
that rather than data-driven experiences, what is needed is more user-centred
experiences and design. Even without direct interaction, DH projects typically
encourage readers to interpret the information for themselves.
There is democratic potential in crowdsourcing (e.g. of text transcription27)
and user-generated content. Online platforms for collaborative volunteer
research (e.g. annotating and tagging documents for projects at Zooniverse.org)
have similar potential. Wikipedia-like approaches can augment professionally
written or archived sources. Davidson (2012, p. 480) suggests that “users might
contribute information about the projects in which they are using the archive ...,
or engage in theoretical debates in an open forum, or even contribute digitized
content to the archive itself.” Wikis offer an opportunity for dialogue between
researchers and the (professional translation) community. Digital outreach
projects can go beyond knowledge production and knowledge-sharing to
collective activism, participating in broader cultural debates driven by a social
purpose. Nevertheless, despite the potential of more publicly engaged
scholarship, public participation in online translation history projects is likely
to be low even among translators, and it might hinder innovative research that
runs counter to accepted norms.

9. Limitations

Digital possibilities are seductive, but translation historians need to consider the
following limitations and adopt an informed approach complemented by non-
digital historical procedures and arguments. The “technical problems, logical
fallacies, and conceptual flaws” in computational literary analysis – many of
which are also relevant to computational historical analysis – are detailed in Da
(2019).
Complexity: many meaningful aspects of translation history (e.g. causality)
are too ‘messy’ for the quantitative approaches underpinning many (not all28)
digital tools. Digital history also tends to rely on homogenous sources
(Robertson & Mullen, 2017, p. 18), rather than the range of sources typically
used by historians. Another challenge is the fluidity of categories over time.
Country names and borders shift, and social changes mean that labels (e.g.
socioeconomic labels) from one period might not reflect realities at other times.
Although this fluidity also presents challenges in non-digital approaches, it
makes it “difficult to insert any kind of authority control” into database fields
(Crone & Halsey, 2013, p. 104).
Quality (and authenticity): all historians face questions of how and where
to source reliable material, the completeness, accuracy and impartiality of
sources, and how much constitutes an adequate sample. Apart from the
possibility of digitally forged or manipulated documents, many digital materials
do not exactly match the archival materials (e.g. in terms of selection,
presentation or completeness) 29 , and optical character recognition errors

27 E.g. Scripto at http://scripto.org/.

28 Information technology can handle not just quantitative data and structured textual information,
but also unstructured texts such as books, web pages, sounds, and images.
29 For instance, the physical properties of manuscripts and printed media – signifiers in their own

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 141

(particularly with older texts) or human input errors can lead to incorrect
conclusions.30 Borgman (2010, p. 217) concludes that page images (rather than
digitized texts) are “better for comparing features of the original artefact”. The
archivist’s selection of keywords can skew searches. Large datasets might be
collected on an ad hoc basis and contain gaps and errors, often inherited from
smaller datasets, but users might be unaware of this unless already
knowledgeable about the topic. Nor might they realize how interpretive
decisions – the selection (and exclusion), collation, structuring, and presentation
of resources – shape their understanding or privilege particular ways of
interacting with the materials (Crone & Halsey, 2013, p. 96).
Failure to exploit the potential: data collection and storage modes can limit
the kinds of analysis possible, and some modes of online interaction can be
rather passive or foster unnuanced responses (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2006, p.
12). Users usually need to know in advance what they are looking for, and this
must be describable in a search query, which is not always easy with the
interpretative research typical of the humanities. Research questions need to be
scaled appropriately, and the data needs to be organized using useful conceptual
frameworks.
Durability: Terras (2012, p. 50) notes that digitalizing historical texts is
“not a substitute for proper preservation” and might even “damage or
compromise fragile or rare original materials”. Moreover, there are challenges
as to which aspects of the digital present to preserve for future translation
historians. The ephemerality and sheer quantity of digital evidence (e.g. email
correspondence between translators, authors and publishers) has implications
for archiving born-digital material. Translators’ successive drafts might not be
available unless efforts are made to retain each electronic iteration. Similarly,
online texts have multiple instantiations, so stable data capture becomes
important. “Version control systems such as Git or Subversion trace changesets,
or iterative development histories of live digital projects. All these forms (and
many others) contain metadata that may be mined for research purposes.”
(Kennedy & Long, 2015, p. 142). There will be an ongoing need to recopy
digital materials to new storage media and convert them into new formats to
ensure continued accessibility. Another problem is link rot, so it is good practice
to use permanent links.31
Culture blindness: since text production is in part a social process, cross-
cultural differences are to be expected. Robertson and Mullen (2017, p. 20)
point out that “Text analysis algorithms, for example, rely on cultural
assumptions regarding language and its use that have repercussions for
historical analysis.” Anglo-American and European languages and cultures are
over-represented in digitalized sources. Differences in access to technology in
different parts of the world also risk perpetuating imbalances between scholars
from the North and South.
Ethics: DH raises issues of privacy, cultural heritage, interpretive control
and the right of representation. Relevant here are the Association of Internet
Researchers 2012 guidelines on ethics and the 2006 Protocols for Native
American Archival Materials, for example. It is possible to give varying levels
of access to different groups (e.g. not allowing non-Aboriginals access to
sensitive Aboriginal sources).32

right – are easily lost in digital versions unless precautions are taken (e.g. specifying the
dimensions). Other facts might also be obscured (e.g. a book’s borrowing history) or altered (e.g.
how readers navigate through the work).
30 Standardizing spellings before input affects source integrity. “If it becomes necessary to code

or standardize in order to speed processing or create algorithms, this is added (rather than
substituted for column fields) at a later stage.” (Hudson, 2000, p. 231).
31 For instance, see https://perma.cc/.
32 The Mukurtu project (http://www.mukurtu.org ) is a “platform built with indigenous

communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage” (Sano-Franchini, 2015, p. 161). It

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 142

 Other issues are that intellectual property gates hamper access, rights to
reproduce material from archives and books are expensive, and books still in
copyright cannot be subjected to large-scale data-driven investigation. Large
datasets relevant to translation historians’ concerns, particularly with ‘minor’
languages or cultures, might not exist, and research on social media sites (e.g.
networks of translation activists) might face bans on “scraping” material. A lack
of interoperability with other interfaces is another constraint on access.
In addition, computational history “tends to work on a scale that elides
individual historical actors” (Robertson & Mullen, 2017, pp. 18-19). Conley et
al. (2015) point out such “big-data pitfalls” as reverse causality (Y causing
changes in X, rather than the expected direction of X causing a change in Y),
unobserved heterogeneity (relevant variables that correlate with observed
variables but are unobserved), sample-selection issues, aggregation bias
(inappropriate extrapolation to a sub-group or individual from data aggregated
for a group), or “spatial or temporal autocorrelation” (similarity between nearby
observations as a function of spatial or temporal proximity). More
fundamentally, DH risks a reductionist, positivist or uncritical approach with
banal results. It is important to avoid fetishizing big data, which needs to be
complemented by case studies and conventional sources. Lara Putnam (2016,
p. 392) points out that digitized sources make it possible to bypass contextual
browsing, which can lead to negative results. Adequate theorization is also
essential if the data are not to seem trivial. Although digital approaches create
new intellectual possibilities, they risk occluding others.
Digital translation history also presents practical challenges. One involves
the necessary skills, although not all projects require advanced computing skills.
Another is the sheer work involved in digitalizing and describing items in an
existing collection or creating digital projects. Labour and infrastructure costs
make DH challenging for researchers with little funding.

10. Closing thoughts

Digital resources and methods offer additional tools for exploring historical
experiences of translation. Naturally, the tool must fit the purpose, and not all
research projects or paradigms lend themselves to digital approaches.
Nevertheless, in the early stages of any project it is worth considering such
possibilities. If appropriate and implemented thoughtfully, DH can add a
dimension to how we understand translation history. In addition, Gibbs and
Owens (2013, p. 159) argue that

[T]he new methods used to explore and interpret historical data demand a new
level of methodological transparency in history writing. Examples include
discussions of data queries, workflows with particular tools, and the production
and interpretation of data visualizations. At a minimum, historians’ research
publications need to reflect new priorities that explicate the process of interfacing
with, exploring, and then making sense of historical sources in a fundamentally
digital form – that is, the hermeneutics of data. This may mean de-emphasizing
narrative in favor of illustrating the rich complexities between an argument and
the data that supports it. It may mean calling attention to productive failure – when
a certain methodology or technique proved ineffective or had to be abandoned.

Although digital tools (no matter how carefully chosen) do not replace
‘analogue’ research or critical thinking, I hope this preliminary examination of
the transformative potential of digital translation history will encourage further
explorations. Ultimately, however, what is of interest is the results of research

uses cultural protocols that allow users to “define a range of access levels for digital heritage
objects and collections”.

Translation & Interpreting Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019) 143

enabled by these tools, rather than the platform or methodology or
unsubstantiated promises.

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