The Nordic Noir in Translation Database 2000–2020

Abstract

This dataset contains bibliographic records of all translations of Nordic crime fiction for adults, written in any of the five main Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) and published in translation during the period 2000–2020.

Related article(s): “On top of the world: mapping the Nordic crime fiction boom based on translation data,” Translation Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2024.2333737 

This dataset contains bibliographic records of (in theory) all translations of Nordic crime fiction for adults, written in any of the five main Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) and published in translation during the period 2000–2020. The dataset is delimited to include only first edition translations published in print book form. 

Data Table

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This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Significance and Context

Nordic Noir – crime fiction originating in the Nordic region – is one of the most significant international publishing success stories of the twenty-first century. It is often associated with Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy (2005-2007), which has morphed into an ongoing franchise with film adaptations and bestselling continuation novels. With global sales in excess of 100 million across all formats, this series ranks among the biggest megasellers of our time (Steiner 2014; Berglund 2017, 2022). The Millennium books, however, are not an isolated event. They form part of a wave of hundreds of books by Nordic crime writers which have experienced success beyond their country of origin. As such, the Nordic Noir boom is likely the biggest global publishing phenomenon originating outside the English language – far outstripping, for example, the Latin American literary fiction boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Nordic Noir is a prime manifestation of crime fiction as a literary genre that is not only based on transnational exchanges, but also circulates internationally at scale and with comparative ease (Gulddal and King 2022).

Despite its importance, Nordic Noir has not previously been mapped in terms of its circulation as world literature. To address this gap, The Nordic Noir in Translation Database 2000–2020 (NNTD) provides bibliographic information of the translation flows of all crime fiction from the five main Nordic languages during the period of the so-called “Nordic Noir boom”. Nordic Noir was already being translated beyond the Nordic languages prior to the 2000s – notable examples include Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series (1965-1975), Henning Mankell’s Wallander series (1991-2009) and individual novels such as Peter Høeg’s Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992; Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, 2003). However, it was only at the after the turn of the millennium that it became a mass phenomenon, and that the terms Scandinoir or Nordic Noir gained currency as global brands. The NNTD’s timeframe, 2000-2020, therefore captures the rise of Nordic Noir in the early 2000s and the genre’s peak following the global success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (2005-2007) around 2010.

While particularly relevant to crime fiction scholars, the dataset will also be useful for scholars in the fields of world literature, comparative literature, book history, publishing studies, sociology of literature and translation studies. The NNTD provides a unique resource for scholars studying the circulation of world literature in the 21st century, particularly in the context of genre fiction, bestsellers and other kinds of commercially oriented fiction as well as in relation to the structures and agents of the book trade. Since it charts translation flows from (semi-)peripheral languages, it offers useful data for scholars working comparatively with a focus on such language areas.

Specific (hypothetical) user profiles include:

• Crime fiction scholars interested in mapping and comparing international dissemination patterns as well as the overall extent of crime fiction circulating in translation. In particular, the data enables studies of the timeline, scope, reach and impact of the Nordic Noir phenomenon.
• Publishing studies scholars focusing on the international circulation of contemporary genre fiction as well as on bestsellers, international rights sales and industry drivers of global success.
• Comparative literature scholars working on global literary translation flows and their impact in the form of reception and formal/stylistic influence.
• Translation studies scholars interested in contemporary trends and translation flows on a macro scale.

In parallel with this this dataset, we have published a research article in Translation Studies (Berglund, Gulddal and King). In this article, we discuss some key findings related to the NNTD, including the exceptional volume of translations, the growth rates over the studied period, the Swedish dominance, and the impact of certain bestselling authors. At the time of writing, the data has not been used by anyone else. No other similar or overlapping datasets are available, publicly or otherwise.

Collection and Creation

Separate data sources and data collection methods have been used for each language. The data for Danish crime fiction was extracted from 1) the “Translators Database”, a bibliographic resource maintained by the Danish Arts Foundation (DAF) and covering translations of Danish literature across all genres, and 2) a dataset of international rights sales by Danish publishers and agents in the period 2010-2020, also acquired from the DAF. For Finnish crime fiction data was drawn from “Finnish literature in translation”, a database compiled by the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) listing all book-length volumes of Finnish, Finland Swedish and Sami literature in translation. The data for Icelandic crime fiction was provided by the National and University Library of Iceland (NULI), which has a long-standing policy of purchasing print copies of all translations of Icelandic books and hence has virtually complete records of translated crime fiction. The bibliographic data for Norwegian crime fiction was compiled using the Norwegian national bibliography – “Nasjonalbibliografien” – as it appears in the digital database Oria which, in theory, includes all Norwegian literature in translation. The bibliographic data for Swedish crime fiction in translation was based on LIBRIS, the catalogue of all Swedish academic and research libraries. For details, see the Bibliography and the methods and material discussion in the research article (Berglund, Gulddal and King).

The definition of crime fiction has been operationalised differently across the five languages in line with what was practically achievable. For Norwegian and Swedish, the points of departure are comprehensive crime fiction bibliographies compiled by genre experts. Covering almost all crime fiction published in their respective countries, these bibliographies use an “inclusive” genre definition that encompasses all sub-genres: whodunnits, hardboiled, detective fiction, spy fiction, thrillers, psychological suspense novels, genre hybrids, etc. For Danish, Finnish and Icelandic, genre categorisation is based on library and book-trade classifications available in the collected data. Yet, even though the agents are different, they base their classifications on similar definitions of crime fiction. The broad definition of crime fiction as fiction ‘focusing on crime’, which is favoured by crime fiction bibliographers as well as by most crime fiction scholars, is close to the “umbrella genre” of crime and suspense used in both contemporary book publishing and in libraries (cf. Berglund 2021). All sources used for defining crime fiction are listed in the Bibliography.

The data aggregated from these resources has been manually curated by the authors of the dataset, but this curation only involves aspects such as harmonisation, syntax, and spelling. In practice, this means that we have corrected misspelled name variations and harmonised syntax in the author column (e.g. changed “Camilla Lackberg” and “Läckberg, Camilla” to “Camilla Läckberg”); harmonised original titles and deleted occasional genre indicators (e.g. changed “Sorgenfri: En Harry Hole-thriller” to “Sorgenfri”) in the source_title column; and harmonised language names and corrected misspellings in the target language column (e.g. changed “Slovakian” and “slovak” to “Slovak”). For languages, we have followed the names given in the ISO language code list.

Description

The dataset contains information organized by seven variables:

author ⇒ The author of the translated book.

original_title ⇒ The title of the translated book in its original source language.

original_language ⇒ The source language of the translated book.

original_publication_year ⇒ The year of first publication in the source language.

translated_title ⇒ The main title of the translated book.

translated_language ⇒ The target language of the translated book. In the few cases (10 in total)  where the translated title was not available in the bibliographic sources used and where we were unable to retrieve it in other ways, we have either provided the name of the original title or identified the language of the title, i.e. “[chinese title]”.¹

translated_publication_year ⇒ The year the book was published in translation.

The NNTD comprises bibliographic records of – in theory – all translations of Nordic crime fiction for adults, written in any of the five main Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) and published in translation during the period 2000–2020. The dataset is delimited to include only first edition translations published in print book form. We have included the “in theory” qualification because we acknowledge that quantitative investigations of bibliographic data involve statistical loss, and that this general problem is exacerbated in the translation context because compilers of national bibliographies tend not to prioritise outbound translations. Accordingly, we concur with previous scholarship on global translation patterns (Heilbron 1999; Lindqvist 2016) that exact numbers are impossible to produce, and that any dataset related to global translation flows – including the NNTD – should be understood as evidence-based indications of tendencies. The international sources available for studying translation, such as the Index Translationum (IT), unfortunately suffer from severe methodological problems and have large gaps (Heilbron 2000; Svedjedal 2012). Because the NNTD draws only on bibliographic information at the national level, which is generally much more reliable than the IT, we are confident that it is as complete as can be achieved. For further discussion, see our research article based on this dataset (Berglund, Gulddal and King).

The dataset is available in a matrix format as one csv file, consisting of 8,886 rows (one row per translation event) and seven columns. The columns cover the key parameters: author(s); original title; original year of publication; source language; title in translation; target language; and year published in translation. The dataset thus covers 8,886 translation events of Nordic crime fiction during the period 2000-2020, distributed over 408 unique authors and author constellations, and 1,588 unique translated titles. Further descriptive statistics concerning the composition of the dataset can be found in the associated research article. These parameters are with very few exceptions complete for all rows in the dataset. All information has been checked manually against national biographical databases. The only exception is the column “title” (in translation), where such checking was not always possible for practical reasons.

It would have been valuable to include other parameters in the dataset, including original publisher; publisher of the translation; and translator(s). However, the nature of our sources made it impossible to collect this data in a structured and systematic way.

Ethical Considerations

The dataset contains no sensitive data. We cannot anticipate any possible negative impacts or harm that might result from the publication of the data, and we have therefore not undertaken any ethical reviews.

Versioning

We intend to update the dataset and correct errors once per year over the coming three years, if we identify errors ourselves or if we have been advised of errors or missing entries. This will be done by the dataset’s first author.

Licensing

The dataset is deposited under the open license CC-BY.

References

Danish Arts Foundation. (2023). Translated Titles. Retrieved from https://www.kunst.dk/english/art-forms/default-title. Accessed 10 May, 2023.

Danish Arts Foundation. (2023). Recently Sold Rights, 2010-2022 [unpublished].

DBC Digital. (2022). Bibliografi over dansksproget kriminallitteratur udgivet i Danmark i perioden 1990-2021 [unpublished bibliography].

Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI). (2023). Finnish Literature in Translation. Retrieved from http://dbgw.finlit.fi/kaannokset/index.php?lang=ENG. Accessed 5 June, 2023.

National and University Library of Iceland (NULI). (2023). Translations of Icelandic Books [unpublished].

National Library of Norway. (2023). Oria. Retrieved from https://oria.no/. Accessed 7 February 2023.

National Library of Sweden. (2023). LIBRIS. Retrieved from https://libris.kb.se/. Accessed 7 June, 2022.

Nilsen, O.-M. (2016). Bibliografi over norsk krim og spenningslitteratur i bokform 1811-2015 [unpublished bibliography].

Swedish Crime Fiction Academy. (2023). Deckarkatalogen. Retrieved from https://www.deckarakademin.se/deckarkatalogen/. Accessed 15 March, 2023.

Other sources referred in the curatorial statement:

Berglund, Karl. (2017). “With a Global Market in Mind: Agents, Authors, and the Dissemination of Contemporary Swedish Crime Fiction.” In Crime Fiction as World Literature, Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch & Theo D’haen (eds.), New York: Bloomsbury, 77–89.

Berglund, Karl. (2021). “Genres at Work: A Holistic Approach to Genres in Publishing.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 3: 757–776. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211006097 

Berglund, Karl. (2022). “Crime Fiction and the International Publishing Industry.” In Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King & Alistair Rolls (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 25–45. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614344.004

Berglund, Karl, Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King. (2024). “On Top of the World: Mapping the Nordic Crime Fiction Boom Based on Translation Data.” In Translation Studies,  Online First 11 April 2024, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2024.2333737.

Gulddal, Jesper and Stewart King. (2022). “World Crime Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2nd edition, Theo D’haen, David Damrosch & Djelal Kadir (eds.), London & New York: Routledge, 285-293.

Heilbron, Johan. (1999). “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System.” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 4: 429–444. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843199002004002.

Heilbron, Johan. (2000). “Translation as a Cultural World System.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 8, no. 1: 9–26.

Lindqvist, Yvonne. (2016). “The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field from a Global Point of View: A Peripheral (Sub)field?” In Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, Stefan Helgeson and Pieter Vermeulen (eds.), Abingdon: Routledge, 174–190. https://10.4324/9781315735979-12

Steiner, Ann. (2014). “Serendipity, Promotion, and Literature: The Contemporary Book Trade and International Megasellers.” In Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Culture, Jon Helgason, Sara Kärrholm & Ann Steiner (eds.), Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 41–66.

Svedjedal, Johan. (2012). “Svensk litteratur som världslitteratur: Litteratursociologiska problem och perspektiv.” In Svensk litteratur som världslitteratur, Johan Svedjedal (ed.), Uppsala, Uppsala University Press, 9-82.

Footnotes

1. An exception to this concerns the translations of Anders De la Motte, whose crime novels are within parenthesis in the original Swedish (e.g. “(Buzz)”, “(Bubble)”. In some languages, these parentheses have transformed into brackets (e.g. “[Plijen]” for the Croatian translation of “(Bubble)”), and we chose to keep these translations (6 in total) intact.