Translators have played an important role in introducing literary styles, and in some cases, forming a literary language, yet we tend to know little of the translators who actually wrote the books in the target language, and they are rarely taken seriously as part of the national literary history. Individual translators remain in obscurity even today.
Hence “the encyclopedia movement”, which seeks to bring individual translators’ contribution to national literature into the light by publishing translators’ biographies. The movement started with the Swedish translators’ encyclopedia launched in 2009, a project undertaken at Södertörns högskola under the leaderships of Lars Kleberg. In recent years similar projects have been started in Germany, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The encyclopedias consist mostly of individual translators’ biographies, in addition to selected thematic articles on topics such as translation from particular languages or cultures, of certains genres or types of literature, or of specific authors or works such as Shakespeare or the Bible.
While both the Swedish and German are established by academic institutions, the Danish and Norwegian ones are run by the translators’ associations. Articles are written by academics, translators, journalists and other free lance writers.