Fifty Years of Literary Translations from nordic Languages into Icelandic.

Abstract

Every year a great number of books are published in Icelandic, original titles in Icelandic as well as translations. The purpose of this article is to take a close look on literary translations from Danish, norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Faroese into Icelandic, taking into account genre and the ratio of translations from each of these languages. This data will also be compared to the number of other literary publications, written in Icelandic or translated from other languages. In order to see if there are any changes in what kind of books are translated and from which languages data has been collected for each of the years 2000–2010 as well as for the years 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990 and 1995. The translated novels were categorised by content and original language to see if there was a pattern to what is translated and from which language. The results indicate that although it is hard to find a pattern each period has its characteristics.