Introduction

Translators’ agency, networks and soft power in the publishing field are the key issues of this volume. Switching focus from the publisher or the author as the protagonist at the publishing company, I place translators at the centre of investigation, and study the history of a publishing house from a translatorcentred perspective. This approach shines a new light on the company’s development in publishing studies and book history, it enriches translation history with new data on historical developments of the profession, and offers an example of networks-based and biographical methods to study translator agency to translation sociology. Furthermore, this book provides a new approach to reconstructing a historical translation culture, which implies investigation of both networks and following the intersection between micro-, meso-, and macro-levels showing the Paul Zsolnay publishing company as an independent component of the Austrian translation culture.