The translator

Bourdieu (1999) pays special attention to the role of the translator in international book circulation and establishment of the global book market, even if he does not put the translator in the centre. On the one hand, globalization shows the importance of reevaluating and appreciating the role and status of translators as it contributes to the professionalization of the agents. It is obvious that no negotiations or bilateral relationships are possible without a translator. Larisa Schippel (2017) also underlines translators’ fundamental role in transculturality. They translate not only from one language into another but from one culture into the other. From the article it is clear that translators are protagonists, without them, no communication is possible in a modern transcultural world. On the other hand, globalisation stimulates cultural exchange and translation production – according to Index Translationum, translations worldwide increased by 50% between 1980 and 2000. Globalisation leads to the internationalization of the book market, which is one reason for the growing relevance and visibility of the translator’s job around the world. Translators gained more symbolic power in the fields of literature or publishing with the emergence of the international book market, they often acted not only as text-translators but as agents or mediators because there were few specially trained people who could do this job, primarily due to insufficient language expertise of the national book agents. This chapter shows the process in the first half of the 20th century in Austria and is an addition to numerous studies on the agency of the translators.