Marie Franzos’ (1870–1941) extratextual translatorship. : Archives and biographies croisées

Despite the increased attention in translator archives in recent years, studies based on archival sources in Translation Studies have generally focused on male writers who occasionally translated. The present article investigates the extratextual translatorship of the Austrian translator Marie Franzos (1870–1941), who dedicated over forty years to introducing Swedish writers to a German-speaking readership. In this paper, the combination of the multi-perspective approach of biographies croisées (Großmann, 2014) and the method of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013) is tested on over 1,700 letters collected from several European archives. The correspondence sheds light on Franzos’ outstanding contribution to cultural exchanges between Sweden and German-speaking countries and gives visibility to the working dynamics of a woman translator and her authors. The results show that biographies croisées and thematic analysis are productive to identify patterns of interactions between a translator and her authors. The tested approach addresses the limitations of traditional biographies by incorporating multiple viewpoints on one biographical subject. However, while patterns are useful to identify broader trends, they do not capture single biographical details. For this reason, a combination of traditional biography with biographies croisées is suggested for future research.