"To be continued..." Dutch newspaper translations of Russian literature, 1840-1970.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, large amounts of readers were acquainted with foreign literature in their daily paper. Out of reach, gathering dust on library shelves and considered lowbrow literature this medium was until recently neglected. Thanks to digital archiving periodical studies are now gaining scholarly interest, although newspaper translations are yet to be examined. Unique in its kind, this research project focuses on translated Russian literature in Dutch newspapers. Using the digital archive of the National Library (The Hague) a corpus of 853 translations, published between 1840 and 1970, has been compiled. The project considers newspaper translation as elements used by the editors for specific purposes and will examine 4 purposes for publishing translations. The translations contribute to news facts (e.g. a story on the civil war next to an article on the Russian revolution) and are not randomly picked. This establishes a dialogue between the fictional and the news. Translated fiction is used as an educational agent when translations are providing information on e.g. the celebrating of holidays in Russia. Newspapers printed translations that were to appear in book volume. The selection was likely to reinforce editorial policies. Publishing feuilletons, the common name for literature in newspapers, was also a matter of enhancing customer loyalty as readers had to read the next installments. Doing so it attributed it to creating a community of readers.