A brief history of Aleš Tichý Bibliography (now part of the Database of Czech Literary Translation after 1945)

Aleš Tichý felt the need to tackle the difficulties with bibliographic data on translations that he repeatedly encountered during his work. Library catalogues are still unsatisfactory in this respect even today, and in the days of card catalogues, they were of very little use in translation history: it was impossible, for example, to find out what books a particular translator had translated. Therefore, Aleš Tichý and his students began to compile a bibliography of Czech translations from English literature. He used the printed bibliography of translations compiled by Helena Kunzová as a starting point (published as an appendix to the Czech translation of Craig's Dějiny anglické literatury [History of English Literature], Prague: SNKLHU 1963) and then checked its contents against library catalogues and, most importantly, kept expanding it with new translations over the next 25 years. The work was interrupted by his untimely death in 1988.
The card version of the database was later turned into an online database in a small digitization project by the Department; the resulting database was available online for several years. Then its data were incorporated into the newly created Database of Czech Artistic Translation after 1945, on which our Department cooperated. Thanks to the legacy of Aleš Tichý, English literature is the only one whose entries in this Database also contain translations produced before 1945.

Right: samples of the interface of the discontinued Aleš Tichý Bibliography.

Other DEAS digitization activities

The digitization of the bibliography, undertaken in the early 1990s, was not the only digitization project of the Department of English and American Studies. DEAS was the first department to have its complete library catalogue digitized. Kačenka, the first parallel corpus of literary translations from English into Czech, was also compiled at that time, followed by Kačenka 2 and later Kapradí, a project mapping and digitizing Czech translations of English drama.