Translating Ancient Drama: Digital Developments

This page refers to the digital developments around our Translating Ancient Drama research project. Click here to find out more about the project and its history. 

French Translations of Ancient Drama

The APGRD began working in 2011 on translations of ancient plays into French, with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation and the University of Oxford's John Fell Fund. The new searchable online database of French translations, which is hosted within the APGRD production database, records the interconnections between performance reception and the translation of theatrical scripts. Entries provide information about translators and publication histories, and give links to editions of the translations whenever they are available online. The data is also cross-referenced with the existing production database, indicating when and how a particular translation was performed. This tool provides an unprecedented way of following the history of translation in conjunction with performance history.

Early Modern digital library

The ‘Translating Ancient Greek Drama in the Early Modern Period’ project also includes the creation of an early modern digital library, which was started in 2019 by Giovanna Di Martino (UCL) and Giulia Fiore (University of Bologna): the aim is to create a digital collection of early modern drama and translation both in Latin and the vernaculars, hosted by the APGRD database. The early modern library, currently under construction, has been cataloguing, curating, and preserving archival material donated to the APGRD research collection (most importantly, Peter Brown’s donations); editing the data relating to early modern productions in the online ‘productions database’; collecting data on early modern translations and creating entries in the ‘translations database’; creating new data entries inter-linking the translations database with the ‘productions database’, when the translation was performed. The early modern digital library aims at cataloguing translations, performances and adaptations of both Greek and Roman drama dated between the 15th- and the beginning of the 18th-centuries.