Laura Folica: "Social Networks of the Past. Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Modernity through Literary Translation in Periodicals"

Within the context of the Lorand Chair for Spanish, Prof. Laura Fólica (UOC) will give the following lecture:

Abstract: In this conference, I will present my research in literary translation in modernist Ibero-America, from a transnational, big scale, and digital approach, applied to the realm of books and periodicals (1898-1959). Firstly, I will focus on the concept of “cultural mediator” to show the potential of a Social Network Analysis of these agents. Secondly, I will propose the concept of “Big Translation History”, which will be useful to analyze the catalog of the Spanish National Library. I will describe some methodological problems when building a dataset of translations with the metadata of a library. Finally, I will focus on my current work on digitized Ibero-American periodicals from the beginning of the 20thcentury. I will discuss preliminary data as well as methodological challenges when dealing with historical archives and unstructured sources.

Laura Fólica is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She is a member of the Global Literary Studies Research Group (GlobaLS), and of the ERC project “Social Networks of the Past. Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity1898-1959”. She specializes on Sociology of Translation, Latin-American Studies, Periodical Publications, and Digital Humanities. She is currently working on literary translation in Ibero-American periodicals using digital-tools and with a large-scale and transnational approach. She has recently co-edited a special issue (“Fictional turn in Translation Studies”) of Doletiana. Translation Journal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019) and she is co-editing the book Literary Translation in Periodicals. Methodological Challenges for a Transnational Study (John Benjamins, forth., 2020). She has published around thirty articles and book chapters related to Translation Studies. She translated books for Ibero-american publishing houses focused on Literature, Humanities and Social Sciences (Chartier, Sapiro, Roudinesco, Shaeffer, Traverso, Péguy, Goscinny, among other authors).