Panel: Class, Gender, Power, and Publication
Copanelists: Cynthia Huff and Eva-Marie Kröller
The starting point for my investigation is that, as a German scholar of British culture, I have noticed how few autobiographies in English have been translated into German. This is especially true for the life stories of ordinary people, women, and members of the working class, while memoirs of internationally famous persons do get translated.
The general thesis for this study is that decisions about the translations of autobiographies are part of wider cultural processes and discourses. They are informed not only by considerations of “literary standards” and Prospective readerships (buyers),” but also substantially by the cultural and political traditions and discourses of the country for which the autobiographies are to be translated.
This study intends to investigate the process of making decisions about the autobiographies that are to be published in translation. To determine the factors that run into these decisions, I interviewed editors/scouts who work for German publishers and who are involved in such decisions. The sociological concept of gatekeeping is applied to these people because they function as guards of the standards, profiles, popularity, and profits of the publishing houses. The interviews will be analysed with regard to these gatekeepers’ criteria for the selection of autobiographical texts for translation, and their views on the specific issues surrounding the cross-cultural travel and the translation of autobiographical texts for German markets. Insights from the interviews will be compared with the current lists of books in print by the respective publishers (e.g., S. Fischer Verlag). The list of autobiographies in translation provides the backdrop for the interpretation of the interviews.
Gabriel Linke studied English and German at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where she also did her PhD in Applied Linguistics (1987) and her post-doctoral (Habilitation) in Comparative Cultural Studies, resulting in the book Popular literature as cultural memory: A comparative study of contemporary British and American popular romances, published in German in 2003. Since 2001, she has held a professorship for British and American Culture and English Language Teaching at the University of Rostock. In her research, she has recently dealt with the teaching of culture, film studies, and media representations of cultural contact, and autobiography. She has been especially interested in contemporary Scottish autobiographies. Her research has focused on connections between autobiography and the nation—the “new Scotland”—on representations of gender, and on transformations of autobiographical texts on their way into the public sphere, such as museums.