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Compared with qualitative methods, quantitative methods can help detect and interpret patterns and regularities in translation history. However, quantitative methods rarely have been used in translation history research, mostly for lack of statistical data. The highly structured nature of bibliographical data and their availability make them an ideal data source for quantitative history. Drawing on the discipline of book history, this paper introduces bibliographical sources for quantitative translation history, presents techniques for retrieving, analyzing and presenting bibliographic data, reviews some existing quantitative studies related to translation history, and describes some of our own preliminary findings. Despite issues in data quality, the bibliography-based quantitative approach opens an avenue for investigating systematically how books were produced, translated and published, where they were distributed, and who was reading them.
Zhou et al. (Mon,) studied this question.