Translations and the gender gap in the German National Library: A case study for women writers

From the German National Library's (DNB) online catalogue, I curated a dataset of all translations between 1980 and 2020 by authors who have "female" as their gender tag in the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND). My analysis shows that only 20% of the translations in my dataset are by authors tagged as "female". The absence of women writers in the translated canon is therefore immediately apparent. How can we contextualize this gender gap in the national canon, and how can we make visible women writers and their role in the literary transfer of translations? In this article, I address these questions and make the gender gap in the national canon of translation, as well as its women writers in the DNB, visible. By presenting new findings on the gender gap and drawing on bibliographic translation data and statistical analysis, my aim is to visualize the trajectories of women writers on the map of literary transfer.