Andrei Fedorov’s impact: a scientometric analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a scientometric analysis of Andrei Fedorov's research publications. Fedorov, a preeminent Russian translator and translation scholar, was the author of the Introduction to Translation Theory, published in Russian in 1953. The book was highly influential and considered the beginning of translation studies as a discipline in Russia and in other countries, mainly of the Eastern Bloc. Fedorov's work has also been known to some extent in the Western European literature. Previous studies have emphasised the ideological divide between Fedorov and Western European scholars. While recognising the ideological barriers that did not facilitate free exchange of knowledge, this paper focuses on another perspective, bringing to light citations to Fedorov's works by European theorists, including those from the Western Bloc, thus reassessing his role in the scholarship. Adopting several methods of publication count and citation analysis, this paper is the first scientometric assessment of Fedorov's work.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation history
• translation theory
• bibliometrics
• scientometrics
• citation analysis
• scientific output

Introduction

Translation theory by the Russian scholar and translator Andrei Fedorov (1906–1997) has been recently attracting increased academic attention among other less known developments in the history of translation studies from non-Western European traditions. In Russia and in the Soviet Union systematic scholarly publications on translation issues appeared regularly starting from the early twentieth century; Fedorov was the first Russian scholar to approach translation theory as a specialised academic field to which he contributed as a theorist, lecturer, and translator. Starting from his early publications (1927, 1928, 1929, 1930) to his first monograph on literary translation (1941) and finally on translation theory (1953), Fedorov researched translation throughout his life, leaving a rich oeuvre that encompassed other research interests, including literary studies, stylistics, and lexicography. Fedorov’s Introduction to Translation Theory in 1953 was the first comprehensive work in Russian to define translation theory as an autonomous discipline with its own metalanguage and to summarise theoretical thought on translation. It was edited and republished in Russian three times during his life and once posthumously.

There is little scholarship so far investigating Fedorov’s research output besides his major publications. Few of his works have been translated into other languages. The first English translation of his monograph on translation theory was published in 2021 (Fedorov, 1953/2021). Previous studies have highlighted the importance of Fedorov’s work (Baer, 2020; Mossop, 2013/2019; Pym, 2016; Schippel, 2017; Shakhova, 2021); however much of the research up to now has approached Fedorov and his oeuvre in contradistinction to Western European scholarship in translation studies. For instance, Pym (2016) emphasises the ideological divide between Fedorov and Western European scholars, while Shakhova (2021) investigates Fedorov’s work as a theory missing in the Western European scholarship. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: firstly, it aims to interrogate the possibility of Fedorov’s work in fact being a part of this scholarship; secondly, it seeks to analyse Fedorov’s scientific output to assess the scope of his work besides his best-known publications and his contribution to translation studies, among other disciplines that his broad research interests embraced. This is achieved by conducting scientometric analysis of Fedorov’s publication outputs and citation analysis.

Scientometrics have been used in translation studies since the late 1990s, most notably developed by Pöchhacker (1995) and Gile (2000) (with earlier publications in French). Scientometric or bibliometric methods include production analysis, network analysis, and citation analysis (van Doorslaer, 2016). In translation and interpreting studies the terms ‘scientometrics’ and ‘bibliometrics’ are often used interchangeably (Grbić, 2013). In this study I use scientometrics rather than bibliometrics as a broader concept covering more methods, following Gile (2015, p. 243). Scientometrics has provided translation studies with a methodology to conduct quantitative analysis of data on research activities and outputs in the field.

Method

In this analysis I have adopted the micro-level scientometric method proposed by Grbić and Pöllabauer (2008). The method focuses on counting and analysing data on publications by one scholar only (Fedorov, in this case). In this study it consisted in analyses of Fedorov’s publication outputs and of citations to his works.¹

The analysis of publication outputs was based on the corpus of Fedorov’s published works. The corpus was compiled based on the data from Fedorov’s manuscript repository in the Central State Archives of Literature and Art in Saint Petersburg, Russia, together with a wide range of published primary sources (mainly in Russian), as part of the research for my PhD project. It is of today the most complete bibliography in English of Fedorov's works and it has been published as a dataset (Vasserman, 2022). The Central State Archives of Literature and Art in Saint Petersburg contain the main and largest collection of Fedorov’s manuscripts, most importantly his unpublished papers and correspondence. The materials used in this research from Fedorov’s manuscript repository in the Central State Archives of Literature and Art included bibliographies written by Fedorov himself (Fedorov, 1975, 1985) and a bibliographical reference booklet published for Fedorov’s 80th anniversary (Mokiyenko et al., 1986). Since these resources did not cover the last ten years of Fedorov’s life (1987–1997), I checked the bibliography against other resources, including the portal of the Russian National Electronic Library (rusneb.ru) and the Electronic Catalogue of the Russian State Library (rsl.ru). Several publications were also found in the process of citation analysis via Google Scholar. However, there is still a risk of undercounting publications during those last ten years, due to the lack of a record in the archives and the possibility that the libraries do not list some of publications.

Besides the publication count, the tools from Grbić and Pöllabauer (2008), such as the timeline and classifications of publications, were applied to analyse the corpus with the following adjustments. The tables of quantitative distribution of document types and languages of publication were presented similarly to Grbić and Pöllabauer (with different publication types, reflecting Fedorov’s oeuvre). The ‘timeline of overall production’ used by Grbić and Pöllabauer (2008, p. 11) to visualise the number of publications during different years within the period of interest was adjusted in this study to be presented as a bar chart, more suitable for the discreet data, rather than a line graph, and showed the counted numbers of different types of publications. The data due to its size was grouped into decades, rather than individual years.

The citation analysis, in the methodology by Grbić and Pöllabauer (2008, p. 8), consists in building a network where the centre is the publications by one author and citations to this author build a complex of links around this centre; this way it ‘illustrates the relationships between this author (ego) and his peers (alters) and can be visualised in network graphs.’ To conduct the citation analysis, the Publish or Perish software was used. Publish or Perish is free software designed by Anne-Wil Harzing for academic researchers which obtains and analyses citations from Google Scholar (and other data sources) and calculates several metrics, including total number of citations, average citations per paper, and a number of indices, such as Hirsch’s h-index (Harzing, 2007). Besides its suitability and availability the software was chosen as it retrieves citations from Google Scholar, ‘a free academic web search engine that indexes scholarly literature across a wide array of disciplines, document types and languages,’ rather than the previously monopolist Web of Science (Martin-Martin et al., 2017, p. 2). Previous studies have shown that the Web of Science is not preferable for research in translation studies and humanities in general, as it fails to mine citations from publications other than indexed journals, limits the scope of cited publications by their age, and heavily prioritises publications in English (Franco Aixelá, 2013; Harzing, 2020). Google Scholar also has limitations; among them is the absence of information provided on subject coverage (Gusenbauer, 2022). In this study it was not a factor since, due to the analysis being centred on one scholar, citations were checked against the cited sources. Another issue of Google Scholar is linked to its main advantage, inclusivity, and it is the abundance of duplicates with varying and/or incorrect bibliographic details. When focusing on one author, again, this issue is quite easily corrected.

The method of citation analysis used in this study consisted in counting all citations to Fedorov’s publications by other writers, found using Publish or Perish, which fed from Google Scholar database. To count the citations, I ran a search using Fedorov’s name in the search field ‘author name’ spelled in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabet with initials. The search results were limited by Google Scholar to 1,000 most cited publications. I narrowed down the range of cited sources to publications between 1927 (the year of Fedorov’s first published article) and 2021 (the year of the last publication which was the English translation of Fedorov’s 1953 book by Brian Baer).

Due to the fact that Fedorov is a very common Russian surname, the search results included an extensive number of entries referring to other authors bearing the same name. I manually selected only the entries referring to the required author which left 191 entries. There were also multiple entries of the same publications due to several types of faults:

1. mistakes in the citations: incorrect titles and incorrect use or omission of subtitles, including punctuation, or incorrect year;

2. inclusion of incorrect data in the title field by the software or search engine, such as the author’s name or the publisher;

3. different variants of transliteration and translation of the titles.

After duplicates were manually merged, the entries showed 60 publications. The number of citations to these publications and their analysis is presented in the citation analysis section below.

In scientometric studies, there is a potential for bias from equating the number of citations to quality of research outputs as well as from comparing citation counts between different disciplines and periods (Franco Aixelá & Rovira-Esteva, 2015; Rovira-Esteva et al., 2019). Normalisation of data may be required to compare scientometric indicators across different fields (Waltman & van Eck, 2013). In this study scientometrics are interpreted with caution to measure only the impact of Fedorov’s publication outputs in the form of citations.

In order to assess citations specifically in translation studies databases I expanded the method in this study to perform several manual counts in addition to citation analysis with Publish or Perish. First, I searched and counted citations in the database of BITRA, Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation (Franco Aixelá, 2001–2022), which performs its own citation mining within it. BITRA as ‘the most comprehensive international database with bibliographic data for scholarly TS publications’ (Rovira-Esteva et al., 2019, p. 150), at the time of the research contained over 89,000 entries of publications in at least 15 languages, although English accounted for 52.2% of them (Franco Aixelá, 2001-2022). The database was searched for the author ‘Fedorov,’ ‘Feodorov,’ ‘Fyodorov,’ ‘Fjodorov,’ ‘Fiodorov,’ ‘Fédorov,’ or ‘Федоров’ and for mentions of his name in the text of abstracts.

BITRA does not cover all citations: it is acknowledged by the creators that the citation data is only ‘indicative’ but not exhaustive (Franco Aixelá, 2001–2022). Furthermore, there is a limitation in the scope of BITRA as to where citations are mined: since it was created as a database for translation and interpreting studies exclusively, it has focused on specialised journals in the field with some journals potentially left out if they do not focus strictly on translation. For instance, such papers citing Fedorov as Baer (2016) published in Slavic and East European Journal or Witt (2016) published in Baltic Worlds did not appear in the search, probably due to the fact that these journals were not yet included in the list of journals systematically mined by BITRA.

Another specialised database used was Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB). At the time TSB contained over 37,250 records (as of October 2022); while it was not specified from what years the database covered the publications currently, it stated that it aimed at working backwards from the last decade (Translation Studies Bibliography, 2022). TSB does not provide information about citations, unlike BITRA, neither does it allow searching lists of references. Therefore, the query here consisted in searching for Fedorov (with all spelling variants) in all fields, thus looking for his name in the titles, keywords, and texts of abstracts of the publications covered in TSB.

TSB contains information about articles in specialised journals of translation studies and interpreting. However, since it does not go back to the years of Fedorov’s major publications, I searched separately the databases of some of the major specialised journals existing at the time: Meta: Translators’ Journal and Babel. Meta was published since 1955 (first under the name Journal des traducteurs / Translators’ Journal). Babel after it was founded also in 1955 quickly became an influential journal published by the newly established International Federation of Translators (FIT, Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs) with the support from UNESCO.

Both journals now have their archives available online; however, while Meta has a searchable database and full articles online, Babel has more limited information published online which often consists only of the bibliographic details. The search in the journals consisted in searching for keywords (all spelling variants of Fedorov’s surname) in the online archive of the journal Meta, published since 1966 (Consortium Érudit, 2020b), and Meta’s predecessor Journal des traducteurs / Translators’ Journal, published between 1955 and 1965 (Consortium Érudit, 2020a). The same search in all issues of Babel was performed through the e-content platform of John Benjamins Publishing Company; the returned hits were verified in physical copies of the journal and only citations complete with full references to Fedorov’s publications were included. The results of the searches and queries in BITRA, TSB, Meta, and Babel were counted and the total sum of original publications citing Fedorov was calculated, as well as the number of authors who cited Fedorov in their publications. These findings were visualised as a network with Fedorov as the centre. The visualisation graph was created using the Explore Diagram function in the NVivo software.

Scientometric analysis of Fedorov’s publications

Analysis of publication outputs

The corpus was compiled as described in the method section based on published primary sources and data from bibliographies in Fedorov’s archives. In the compiled corpus I identified several document types and counted publications in each category. Table 1 presents the types of publications in Fedorov’s oeuvre and their quantitative distribution.

Table 1. Types of published documents.

Document type	Number	%
Monographs	16	8.1%
Co-authored monographs	2	1.0%
Posthumously published monographs	3	1.5%
Book chapters	83	41.9%
Articles in journals	37	18.7%
Reviews	29	14.6%
Edited volumes	25	12.6%
Newspaper articles	2	1.0%
Other	1	0.5%
Total	198	100.0%

18 books, 83 book chapters, 37 journal articles, and 29 reviews were published during Fedorov’s life. Out of Fedorov’s 18 books 2 were co-authored monographs. Among 16 books written by Fedorov without co-authors 2 publications were series of textbooks. 12 books out of 18 were in the field of translation studies, including four editions of the 1953 book and one translation of it into Chinese (translated by Li, L. et al. and published in Beijing in 1955 by Zhonghua Book Company, according to Tan (2019)). The first and the second edition of the book were entitled Vvedenie v Teoriiu Perevoda [Introduction to Translation Theory]; the third and subsequent editions had the title Osnovy Obshchei Teorii Perevoda [Fundamentals of the General Translation Theory] and all of them had different subtitles except the first one. Three more books were included in the corpus which were published posthumously: the fifth edition of the 1953 book (Fedorov, 2002), a collection of Fedorov’s articles and essays (Fedorov, 2006), and the English translation of the 1953 book (Fedorov, 1953/2021).

As Table 1 shows, the highest percentage of publications were book chapters (41.9%). The smaller number of papers published in journals compared to books reflects the situation in the specialised publishing market at the beginning of Fedorov’s career: books were the main publication venue. Out of Fedorov’s 152 papers (book chapters, articles, and reviews) at least 66 were directly dedicated to translation; however, the borders between different subjects were not always clearly defined. Some of the papers, while not focused on translation, were dedicated to subjects related to translation, such as studies of foreign literature translated into Russian, comparative literature, comparative stylistics, etc.

Most of Fedorov’s journal articles, until the middle 1950s were published in literary journals. Among them was Zvezda and the journals with names that showed their focus: Literaturnoe Obozrenie [Literary Review], Literaturnaia Gazeta [Literary Gazette], Voprosy Literatury [Issues of Literature], Literaturnyi Kritik [Literary Critic], and Literaturnoe Nasledstvo [Literary Heritage]. In 1952 the first issue of Voprosy Jazykoznanija [Issues in Linguistics] was published, indicating the turn towards linguistics in Soviet philology and a new publication outlet for translation scholars. Fedorov published in Voprosy Jazykoznanija starting from the first issue, with a total of 9 articles.

As Fedorov himself observed, in the 1980s there was still a lack of specialised journals dedicated to translation issues (Fedorov, 1983a). Fedorov praised the appearance of Masterstvo Perevoda (in Russian ‘The mastery of translation’) in 1959 as evidence of existing translation criticism; however, it was a series of books with contributions from translators, translation theorists, literary scholars, and critics, rather than a periodical. Fedorov contributed four papers to it between 1963 and 1970. In 1963 another collection of articles was launched: Tetradi Perevodchika (‘The translator’s notes’), first published annually, then with varying frequencies. Fedorov (1983a) believed their scope was limited and only had one article published in this collection in 1977.

The corpus also includes 25 academic volumes which Fedorov edited or co-edited. Figure 1 shows the distribution of Fedorov’s publications from the year when his first paper was published (1927) to the last found publication during his lifetime (1994). The timeline provides more insights into Fedorov’s publication outputs. It shows that Fedorov’s most productive years in terms of the number of published journal articles and book chapters were between the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time the highest number of monographs were published in the 1930s.

Figure 1. Publication timeline during Fedorov’s life.

93.9 percent of the works written and edited by Fedorov were published in Russian. Table 2 shows the distribution of languages of publication among Fedorov’s published works. The publications in other languages (making 6.1 percent of the total) include the translation of Fedorov’s, 1953 book into Chinese, published in 1955, and into English, published in 2021, as indicated above. There was also a translation of the second edition of that book (Fedorov, 1958) into French; however, it was not included in the count here as it was not a commercial publication, but a mimeographed print of a translation produced by research students Deresteau and Sergeant at École Supérieure de Traducteurs et d’Interprètes in Brussels (Introduction à la Théorie de la Traduction, 1968). A Spanish translation by Claudio Klotchkov of an abridged part of Fedorov’s book of essays on translation (1983a) was published in 1994 as part of an anthology in Vega (1994).

Table 2. Languages of publication.

Language of publication	Number	%
Armenian	1	0.5%
Chinese	1	0.5%
Czech	1	0.5%
English	2	1.0%
German	3	1.5%
Karelian	1	0.5%
Russian	186	93.9%
Slovak	1	0.5%
Spanish	1	0.5%
Ukrainian	1	0.5%

Besides these translations of his monographs, Fedorov had three articles published in German (two translations from Russian into German and one written in German), all in East Germany in the 1960–1980s. The journals were Kunst und Literatur [Art and Literature], Deutsch als Fremdsprache [German as a Foreign Language], and Sowjetliteratur [Soviet Literature]. In West Germany, Fedorov’s first two articles from 1927 and 1928 were published in Russian as part of the 1970 facsimile reprint by Wilhelm Fink Verlag of Poetica, the volume which was initially published in Leningrad in the 1920s by Academia. Several papers were published in other languages: one article translated and published in Slovak, one in Armenian, Czech (translated by Božena Johnová), Karelian, and Ukrainian (the names of the translators not found). These accounted for 0.5 percent each in the total number of published works authored by Fedorov. While Fedorov could translate his articles to German himself (although there is no data confirming that he did), the publications in other languages must have involved work of other translators. The translation of Fedorov’s first article (Fedorov, 1927) published nearly 50 years later in Linguistics (Fedorov, 1927/1974) until the 2021 translation of his book by Baer remained Fedorov’s only work translated into English.

Despite the small number of works published in Armenian, Karelian, and Ukrainian and no records of publications in other languages of the Soviet Union, it is not an indication of Fedorov’s works not being distributed across the USSR (until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991). They were distributed in the original (Russian) language. This is additionally indicated by the data on publishers from different countries, as presented in Figure 2. Fedorov’s article in Babel (Fedorov, 1978) was also published in Russian. I found this surprising on several grounds. Firstly, Russian was not among major publication languages of Babel. Secondly, Fedorov could translate his article into the French himself but for some reason it was not translated, even though it could have increased his readership. One possible explanation could be Babel aiming at increasing its language coverage.

Figure 2. Distribution of outputs by publishers in different countries.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of publications by countries where the publishing houses that printed the respective monographs or collections were located. While only 6.1 percent of Fedorov’s works were printed in a non-Russian language, the data demonstrates that 16.2 percent of them were published outside Russia. This is significant from two perspectives. It demonstrates the reach of Fedorov’s works, covering 16 countries besides Russia where they were published. It also reflects the language policy in the USSR (as all Fedorov’s works, besides the three posthumously reprinted books and one book chapter translated into Spanish, were published during the Soviet Union period) and the colonising role of the Russian language; consequently, it shows that publishing in Russian was not a barrier to distribution in the Eastern Bloc. The divide between the blocs must not be approached very strictly: for instance, Fedorov’s paper in Babel was technically printed in the Eastern Bloc since Babel’s publisher at the time was in Hungary; however, its target audience embraced both sides.

Citation analysis

Citation analysis conducted in this study to measure the impact of Fedorov’s publication outputs using Publish or Perish found citations to 60 Fedorov’s publications. The total number of their citations was 7,718. For comparison, a search for publications by prominent linguist and translation scholar Jean-Paul Vinay, living and working during the same period (mostly publishing in French) returned 7,509 citations, which was only slightly lower than Fedorov’s 7,718. To provide another point of reference, the total number of citations to publications by French linguist and translation scholar Gerges Mounin was 9,697. Mounin also worked during the same period and wrote in French but had 26 translations of his works into other languages (Whitfield, 2019). His major work Les Problèmes Théoriques de la Traduction [Theoretical Problems of Translation] (1963) has been one of the most cited publications in translation studies in BITRA, as will be discussed in the next subsection. In contrast, the total number of citations to the scholar publishing mostly in English, J. C. Catford, showed 16,516 citations. These results were to be expected: previous studies had shown the effect of the language on citing patterns, showing that publications in English attracted more citations (Franco Aixelá & Rovira-Esteva, 2015). It is important to acknowledge that citations can differ in their importance and value, but as an analytic tool citation counts provide valuable data.

The top five of Fedorov’s most cited publications were his monographs. The high number of citations to Fedorov’s monographs as compared to other types of publications is indicative of the value of his books, but it also correlates to the global trend in translation studies: monographs and book chapters gain more citations than journal articles (Rovira-Esteva et al., 2019). Among the five most cited publications, the fourth edition of Fedorov’s book on translation theory (Fedorov, 1983b) ranked the highest with 4,477 citations. Two other editions of his monograph on translation theory (1953, 1968) ranked second and third; in total three editions of this book gained 5,878 citations or 76.2 percent of the total number of citations, demonstrating the paramount place of the book in his oeuvre. Fedorov’s other most cited publications included his study of stylistics and comparative stylistics in their relation to general linguistics and translation theory (1971) and a collection of essays on the history of literary translation, beginnings of translation theory, poetry translation, and world literature (1983a).

Representation in specialised databases

In order to get a more specific insight into the citations to Fedorov’s works in the field of translation studies, besides the overall citation count, a search for citations in specialised databases for translation studies was conducted. Citations were manually counted in the databases BITRA and TSB and in publications of two journals: Meta: Translators’ Journal and Babel, as described in the method section.

First, the search was performed in the BITRA database. The search for Fedorov as the author returned 9 Fedorov’s publications (after incorrect ones were dismissed) with a total of 48 citations. The search for Fedorov’s name in the text of abstracts added 8 more citations to Fedorov’s texts. Thus, the total number of citations to Fedorov’s works found in BITRA was 56. These citations were found in 41 publications from between 1958 and 2021, starting from the book by Cary (1958), in which he discussed the linguistic approach to translation theory proposed by Fedorov in his 1953 monograph. Besides Cary, among the authors citing Fedorov’s works, found in BITRA, were such important translation scholars of the middle and late twentieth century as Levý, Mounin, Newmark, Toury, and Wilss, as well as contemporary theorists. The publications were journal articles, monographs, and book chapters; only two of them were encyclopaedias (Baker, 1998) or anthologies (Vega, 1994). In Baker (1998) two entries included references to Fedorov: on ideology and linguistic approaches, and they were both written by Peter Fawcett.² Vega (1994), an edited anthology of Spanish translations of key contributions to translation studies, featured two essays from Fedorov (1983a): on the development of translation theory in Russia and on the contemporary ideas on translation theory, translation process, and the concept of translatability; references to Fedorov were also found in the introduction by the editor.

56 percent of the publications citing Fedorov found in BITRA were in English, 17 percent in French, 10 percent each in Spanish and in German, with only 2 percent each in Czech, Polish, and Russian. Franco Aixelá (2013) has pointed out BITRA’s bias towards Western European publications. Besides this bias, there may be several factors and limitations determining the results, including the popularity of certain subjects. However, the language of publications remains the major one: previous studies on BITRA scientometrics have shown that publications in English receive the highest dissemination and visibility (Franco Aixelá & Rovira-Esteva, 2019). Fedorov’s publications were predominantly in Russian, and therefore, were limited in such visibility. Similarly limited due to the language were the Eastern European publications citing Fedorov.

In the TSB database (Translation Studies Bibliography, 2022) the query returned 8 hits, including three of Fedorov’s publications of which two were duplicates, thus leaving two books by Fedorov (2002; 2006) and 5 other sources. These other sources were recent publications (from 2015 onwards) referring to Fedorov’s works, all published in English as journal articles and book chapters. 3 of them were publications not covered in the BITRA search, including two book chapters in one edited volume and one journal article. They were all published recently (in 2021) in English.

The search for keywords in the specialised journals of translation studies, as described in the method section, produced the following results. The search in the online archive of Meta and Meta’s predecessor Journal des traducteurs / Translators’ Journal returned 25 articles. The keywords were found in the main texts and references. The earliest result was the article by Smeaton (1963): the article included English translations of two quotations from Fedorov (1958).

The search in all issues of Babel returned 42 hits; however after I checked the publications manually, I dismissed some of them as irrelevant (these were either citations to another person with the same surname or mentions of Fedorov out of context of his publications). As a result 33 papers with citations were left, including indices and bibliographies, but mainly articles (28 papers), published in English, French, and Italian. Only three articles found in Babel duplicated the results already found in BITRA. Thus, 30 new publications were added to the count. The earliest one dated 1956 and the latest one 2011. Starting from the publication year of the the earliest source, there was one or several citations every year (except 1958 and 1966) until 1969 after which citations occurred less frequently; however, they were still regular and in 1979 there were four papers citing Fedorov. After 1979 there were no citations until the 2000s, for more than 20 years, when citations resumed. However, since the results from Meta show a different trend (the majority of papers (15) were published in the 1980-1990s) this cannot be indicative of the fluctuating interest in Fedorov’s work; it rather demonstrates other factors, such as the journals’ change in the focus (this could be linked to the change in management following the death of FIT founder and president and Babel director Pierre-François Caillé in 1979 (Lilova, 1979)).

It is noteworthy that the only article published in Babel which was written by Fedorov (1978) does not appear in any of the searches. It is also absent in the table of contents of the issue of Babel on its e-content platform of John Benjamins Publishing Company. Nevertheless, it does exist in the hard copy of the journal. The article was published in Russian, in the section ‘Translation theory and history.’

In total, as visualised in the graphic in Figure 3, the citations found in databases BITRA and TSB, and references from Meta and Babel, make a network of 99 original publications in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Russian (only one in Russian) that cited Fedorov’s works. The low number of publications in Russian among them and absence of publications in other languages supports the argument on the language bias of the databases, as well as the prevalence of publications in major Western European languages in the journals.

Figure 3. Fedorov’s network of authors citing his works in BITRA, TSB, Meta, and Babel.

The 99 publications were contributed by 71 different authors and author groups. It is important to note that five of these publications (Baker, 1998; Hurtado Albir, 2001; Mounin, 1963; Newmark, 1981; Wilss, 1977) have been listed among the 50 most cited publications of BITRA, according to a study on the impact factor in translation studies in 2000–2009 (Franco Aixelá, 2013). While the specific data might have changed since, this ranking highlights the importance of some citations as they expand the coverage of the cited work when included in the highly visible publications.

Discussion and conclusions

This scientometric study has been conducted based on the methodology for analysis of one author’s publications developed by Grbić and Pöllabauer (2008) and on the specifically introduced for this study manual search for references in translation studies databases and selected journals. The findings of this analysis of Fedorov’s scientific output allow making conclusions on Fedorov’s contribution to translation studies, supported by specific quantitative data.

The analysis was based on a corpus created as part of this study. This scientometric analysis showed the scope and characteristics of Fedorov’s rich oeuvre. Fedorov’s extensive research produced 195 publications during his life, including monographs, journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, with publications continuing posthumously. Among these types of published works, book chapters account for the highest percentage of total publications. While the majority of Fedorov’s works (93.9%) were published in Russian, the publishers’ locations were more diverse and covered 16 countries besides Russia, including those in Western Europe.

The citation analysis using Publish or Perish software based on Google Scholar as a data source showed interesting results. Top ten of Fedorov’s most cited publications were his monographs. Among them, the fourth edition of Fedorov’s book on translation theory (1983b) ranked the highest. The high number of citations to Fedorov’s monographs as compared to other types of publications is indicative of the value of his books, but it also correlates to the global trend in translation studies: in our field monographs and book chapters gain more citations than journal articles; the disparity between these publication venues was particularly high during the period of Fedorov’s research activities.

The total number of citations to Fedorov’s publications is 7,718. A comparison of citation counts between Fedorov and his contemporary scholars from other traditions showed that, on the one hand, the number of citations to Fedorov corelates well with the citations to French scholars Vinay and Mounin. The total number of citations to Vinay is almost the same as to Fedorov, while citations to Mounin’s works is 9,697 which is 25.6 percent higher than to Fedorov’s. Considering, however, that Mounin’s 1963 monograph has been translated into major Western European languages and ranked among the 50 most cited publications of BITRA, this difference is relatively low. On the other hand, when compared to the number of citations to scholars published in English, J.C. Catford taken as an example, it was more than double the total number of citations to Fedorov. This agrees with previous studies on the influence of the language on citing patterns, showing that publications in English attract more citations. In this study the citation comparison is admittedly limited and provided to contextualise Fedorov’s citation count; further comparative analysis with other scientometric instruments and an in-depth examination of citation indices between Fedorov and his peers studied against the number of their publications with details of their subject, publication time, place, and language could offer more insights into their impact and potentially the influence of factors besides the quality of the publications.

The analysis of citations in BITRA, TSB, Meta, and Babel showed 99 publications citing at least one of Fedorov’s theoretical works on translation. While this number is small compared to 7,718 citations retrieved by Google Scholar, these were verified publications strictly associated with the field of translation studies. They were contributed by 71 different authors and author groups and many of them were in turn highly cited, representing some of the most cited literature in the field, thus increasing the impact of Fedorov’s publications. References to Fedorov in the most cited publications also provide evidence of the familiarity of Western European scholars with Fedorov's works and of his contribution to the scholarship of translation studies. Among these most cited publications three appeared during Fedorov’s life and the years of his active production of research outputs (Mounin, 1963; Newmark, 1981; Wilss, 1977), showing an active transnational interaction with his work in the academic community of translation scholars. They were published in French, English, and German, respectively. These theoretical contributions sought to answer some of the same questions that Fedorov addressed (his monographs on translation theory in particular), interrogating the foundations of the discipline and theoretical framework of translation and building on previous studies, including those by Fedorov.

The chronological distribution of these and other publications citing Fedorov found in BITRA, TSB, Meta, and Babel shows that in every decade since the 1950s there have been references to his work in print. These books, book chapters, and articles were published predominantly in Western European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). I, therefore, argue that Fedorov’s contribution was never completely absent from Western European scholarship but contributed to its development and maturation of translation studies as an autonomous discipline.

The results of this analysis demonstrate a broad scope of Fedorov’s research output and its clear impact. This study has shown that Fedorov’s works have contributed to the Western European scholarship on translation studies as they have been consistently engaged with in the literature, although not sufficiently to be more widely recognised and to promote more translations of the original publications from Russian to English and other languages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Research Data Leeds Repository at https://doi.org/10.5518/1090.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as part of my PhD project, fully funded by Leeds International Doctoral Scholarship from the University of Leeds (October 2017–March 2021).

Notes on contributors

Elizaveta Vasserman

Elizaveta Vasserman was awarded a PhD in translation studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds for her thesis ‘Andrei Fedorov’s theory of translation and its place in the history of translation studies’ in January 2022. Her research project was an interdisciplinary study in the field of translation history and historiography of translation theories that investigated the figure and work of Russian scholar Andrei Fedorov, focusing on his translation theory and ultimately seeking to reclaim Fedorov’s place in the history of the discipline. It was supervised by Professor Jeremy Munday, Dr Jacob Blakesley, and Dr Bogdan Babych. Elizaveta is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds.

Notes

1 I initially conducted this scientometric analysis in 2020 during my PhD. I reran the analysis to update the data for this article in 2022.

2 It is noteworthy that subsequent editions, including the latest one, of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, unlike the first edition (Baker, 1998) had no references to Fedorov.