Translations have long been understood as an important element and a central mechanism in the transfer of knowledge. These have traditionally been examined along individual languages or language pairs, which often supports a national perspective. At the same time, a qualitative approach dominates, which relies heavily on individual or a few artefacts and focuses on specific text types.

This project takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods in order to overcome national perspectives. The starting point is not a specific source or target language with regard to a single text type, but all known translations that were printed and published in the Habsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1918. For this purpose, a publicly accessible database is being created that brings together information on authors, translators and translations. This makes it possible for the first time to make structural statements about knowledge transfer in a multilingual and multicultural society. These include questions of multidirectionality (by whom and for whom are translations produced?), binary nature (who is involved in a translation?), simultaneity (what is the temporal relationship between source and target texts?) and spatial characteristics (between which locations do source and target texts occur?).

The innovative potential of this approach lies in the use of computer-assisted methods to collect and evaluate this data. Existing translation bibliographies are digitised and modelled in a knowledge graph. Both statistical analyses and network analyses are used for this purpose. Qualitative data visualizations (such as thematic maps and individually created forms of representation) are used to highlight relevant relationships, patterns and unusual groupings.

In addition to extensive quantitative analyses, individual case studies are conducted on relevant aspects, such as the relationship between peripheral languages, the spatial characteristics of these translations, the relationship between source and target texts, and new editions and parallel translations. Finally, the relationship between individual text types (such as fiction and non-fiction) and the role of individual publishing houses in the general transfer of knowledge are examined in detail. The research project is aimed not only at historically oriented translation studies, but also at other disciplines in the humanities, including individual philologies, literary studies and history.