ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the use of bibliographical sources in translation history and offers a glimpse into the process of designing, compiling, and using a bibliography of retranslations. The bibliography in question is compiled and maintained by a team of researchers at Boğaziçi University as part of a multidisciplinary project on retranslations in the Ottoman and modern Turkish societies. The authors outline the main premises behind the project as well as the challenges brought on by the specific nature and context of retranslation in Turkey. They discuss the ramifications of major historical moments in the Ottoman-Turkish culture for literary translation, such as the emergence of the interculture of Ottoman literature, the rise of translations from Western literatures and their retranslations, the shift from Ottoman script to Roman alphabet, and the transformation of the book market in Turkey. The chapter presents a general statistical analysis of the bibliography and adopting a distant reading approach, discusses the findings as they correlate to the findings of qualitative studies on translation history in Turkey.
