(Semi)peripheries in contact

Abstract

This article widens the perspective of indirect translation (ITr) research by focusing on the range of mediating languages and with a corpus of all indirect translations into a specific language (Swedish) during 2000–2015. The following issues will be described and explained: which languages are used as mediating languages (MLs), what their respective proportions look like, and which possible reasons for using a language other than English as the ML can be identified. The corpus reveals that out of all novels translated into Swedish during the period under study, 1.3% (70 novels) were indirect translations, and out of these 70, more than two thirds have English as the ML. A search into the cases where English has not been used produced a list of suggested reasons regarding the choice of ML. The most often occurring explanation seems to be that no English translation existed, or that such a translation was already indirect.