Aim and Research Questions

The project “Mapping German Fiction in Translation in the German National Library (DNB), 1980-2020” (Teichmann 2025) revealed a pronounced gender disparity: works by authors identified as “female” in the catalog account for just 20% of all translations. In this paper, I ask: how can we look beyond the gap to make women writers visible? Who are the ten most translated women writers and which factors do they have in common that contribute to the transnational and translingual circulation of their literary works? This paper aims to look beyond the gender imbalance and highlight women writers who have played significant roles in the literary transfer of German fiction. I present the first dataset extracted from the DNB as well as initial figures on women writers of German fiction in translation. First, I apply the concept of “translationalism” (Teichmann 2022, 8), a measure for the linguistic distribution and the geographic reach of an author’s translations, with a view to identifying the top 10 most translated authors in my dataset. Second, I discuss common factors driving their translationalism: bestselling titles, literary prizes, the languages in which they are translated, and the publishing places of their translations. Last, I group authors into four categories based on common factors. By presenting new findings for women writers of German fiction in translation and drawing on bibliographic data and translationalism as an analytical model, I hope to help visualize the trajectories of women writers on the map of literary transfer.

State of the Field

Scholars such as Bergenmar and Leppänen (2017, 243) and Nicole Seifert (2021) have highlighted that women have been left out, ignored, marginalized, unreviewed, and uncommented on compared to male authors in the translation canon and in literary scholarship. They argue that the systemic underrepresentation of women writers across these various canonization mechanisms is a symptom of a larger issue, that of the (in)visibility of women writers as well as translations in the recent historiography (Belle and Guénette 2024, 36). As my study shows, this is also the case at the German National Library, where both women writers and translations are difficult to identify (see Teichmann and Roman 2024).

As a response to the institutional invisibility of women writers and their translations, digital bibliographies such as Orlando, the Bibliography of English Women Writers (1500-1640), Canada’s Early Women Writers, American Women Writers: Bibliography 1820-1829, the CCC subset: Women in translation and print 1641-1660 (Belle and Guénette 2025) push towards visibility and data accessibility. To counter the lack of a dataset or digital bibliography for German literature by women writers, this study draws on the largest resource for translations of German literature and bibliographic translation data, the German National Library (DNB), which serves as a space in which we can both observe the gender gap in translation and further utilize its data to make women writers in national collections more visible.

Method

Based on the compiled dataset of bibliographic data for 1,742 women writers and their 7,103 translations in the DNB that have been published between 1980 and 2020, I summarize the gender gap in percentages (% of titles by women writers versus male writers). I then present preliminary results on the most translated women writers in the DNB as well as a categorization modeled after Norrick-Rühl and Bold (2016) based on the factors that drive their translationalism (linguistic and geographic reach). To identify the top translated authors, I group authors based on the number of languages the author has been translated into, the sum of their translated titles, and the sum of their publishing places (where their translations were published). The ten most translated authors’ positions and categories are visualized as a scatterplot with axes corresponding to their titles and languages. Important works, publishing places, and languages, as well as additional factors (literary prizes and TV or film adaptations) of authors and their categories, are then discussed in detail.

Findings

My results confirm that we can observe a similar gender gap in national libraries such as the DNB as in bestseller and reading lists, literary prizes, and translation databases, with a 20/80 ratio of women writers and an upward tendency in translated titles by women after 2014. Secondly, I found that only a few of the authors are linguistically diverse and have a broad geographic reach, which calls for further investigation into the top ten translated women writers in the DNB.

Combining Norrick-Rühl and Bold’s categorization of authors with my measures for linguistic distribution and geographic reach, revealed four main categories: a) authors with single successes and literary prizes (Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, Christa Wolf), b) authors with wide linguistic and geographic distribution (Charlotte Link, Sarah Lark, Corina Bomann), c) authors with geographically distributed translations and single-success novels (Nele Neuhaus, Ingeborg Bachmann, Juli Zeh).

All except the most translated author (Hedwig Courths-Mahler), who is specialized in publishing places and languages, fall into one of these categories. Looking at the common factors that drive the most translated authors’ translationalism underscores the role of international prizes and TV and movie adaptations. Further, seven of the authors are contemporary, which contradicts Norrick-Rühl and Bold’s argument that there is a lack of women writers in current literature.

Implications

By presenting the first dataset on women writers of German fiction in translation, extracted from the DNB, and by employing exploratory methods to categorize authors according to what drives their translationalism, this study is a starting point for discussing gender in the context of the DNB’s collection and cataloging practices. In the digital humanities, where gender remains a marginal topic, I hope the proposed method for visualizing women writers can be an important asset to the DH toolkit for other projects on bibliographic translation data.

As my study illustrates, the data is there, and so are the methods. Making data on women writers accessible and available is an initial step to explore what “digital humanities have to offer that can promote specialized, localized, and gendered knowledge (Bergenmar and Leppänen 2017, 233). Future studies that draw on my dataset could address questions regarding the network of women in translation work, as translators, editors, or collaborators, as well as feminist or independent publishing houses and their role in pushing translations by women writers in certain markets.