It's easy to forget that the world knows about Irish literature largely because of translators. Michael Cronin explains how a new online database is raising their profiles.

What do one of Spain's greatest living writers, a former president of Hungary and a German bankrupt have in common? Javier Marías, Árpád Göncz and Felix Paul Greve have all translated works by Irish writers and contributed to the strong reputation that Irish literature enjoys today.

One of the often forgotten paradoxes of writing is that it is translations rather than the originals that make writers famous. Without the work of translators most of the world's readers would be unaware of the writings of Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, Ní Dhomhnaill or Doyle. Yet in Ireland we are often unaware of the extraordinary amount of translation of Irish writing in English and of Irish into other languages that is going on. In addition, the labours of those who do so much to promote Irish writing abroad through translation are generally unsung.

More than three years ago a group of researchers at the centre for translation and textual studies at Dublin City University decided to build a public online resource that would present the first true picture of the extent of the translation of Irish literature abroad and give a public profile to the translators of the literature. The purpose was not only to provide information to scholars but also to help organisers of Irish literary festivals in other countries to compile reading lists and bibliographies, help translators to identify whether a work has already been translated and what works need to be translated, help strengthen the growth of Irish studies in non-English-speaking countries and highlight domestically an often invisible dimension of Irish writing.

The project was named Trasna, from the Irish word for "across", as the aim was to emphasise the way literature crosses boundaries of nation, language and geography, and in 2002 the team won three-year funding under the major-project grants scheme of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. .

There were two parts to the project: the online bibliography, which lists details of Irish works in translation, and the online biographical database, known as Trasnabio, which gives biographical information on translators of Irish literature.

For the researchers, Caoimghín Ó Croidheáin and Rita McCann, the scale of the project was daunting, as, despite Ireland's small size, with writers such as Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, John Millington Synge, Edna O'Brien, Maeve Binchy and Seamus Heaney the number of translations was certain to run into the thousands.

Not only did research involve searching library catalogues the world over, but it was also necessary to build up a network of informants from Tallinn to Osaka and from Nairobi to Oslo, to provide much-needed information on translated titles and on the lives of the translators of Irish literature.

The scale of what the research team has unearthed shows how extensive the impact of Irish literature has been in translation. The online bibliography as it currently stands includes more than 15,000 entries on 350 writers who have been translated into more than 60 languages. It is now the largest national database of its kind in the world. Jonathan Swift, for example, with 1,161 entries, has been translated into 47 languages.

Among the languages into which Irish writing has been translated are French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Portuguese, Urdu, Serbian, Croatian, Catalan, Icelandic, Assamese, Sinhala, Gujarati, Bengali, Georgian, Persian, Romanian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Danish, Galician, Finnish, Macedonian, Kyrgyz, Azeri, Telugu, Malayan, Tajik, Kannada, Basque, Albanian, Tamil, Indonesian, Moldovan, Slovak, Slovenian, Czech, Flemish, Scots Gaelic, Hebrew, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Marathi, Occitan, Welsh and Uzbek.

The 200-plus online biographies of the translators show that they come from all sectors of society, from presidents to revolutionaries, and are often acutely aware of the importance of bringing Irish writing to their own countries in their own languages.

As Trasnabio was the first database of its kind, it was important to provide as much information as possible on the translators who do so much for the literature of a country that only rarely acknowledges their achievements or their contributions to the spread of Irish literature.

As Rose-Marie Vassallo, a French translator of Peadar O'Donnell and Siobhán Parkinson, put it in an e-mail to one researcher: "What I think is crucial is to make translation visible at long last! Dammit, people read translated texts every day and never realise that those were born in another language! Our little persons are not that important, although, of course, translation being a living thing, we translators certainly are part of the context."

Part of the context of how we think about Ireland must be how Ireland appears in different contexts. Over the past decade there has been much talk about the Irish diaspora and, subsequently, about Ireland as one of the most globalised countries on the planet. But a great deal of the attention on Ireland's relations with elsewhere is bound up with the anglophone world, as can be seen in the kinds of news stories and celebrities that appear on our television screens and the kinds of literature that get into our bookshops.

As a result, Irish interest in how others respond to us tends to focus almost exclusively on British and US reactions or opinions.

All this may be understandable because of language economy - no need for translation - but it does the country and its literature a great disservice, in that other forms of reaction, other kinds of feedback, other ways of interpreting Ireland and its writing remain largely invisible here.

Part of this problem is to do with a lack of awareness, simply not knowing what is out there in other languages about Ireland and its culture. An aim of Trasna is to bridge the information gap, so that absence of knowledge about what others are doing is no longer a barrier to cultural self-understanding.

But what the project also shows is that the literary history of any country is at a very deep level not so much national as transnational.

In other words, we need to move away from obsessively concerning ourselves with what happens to Irish writing on the island of Ireland and look more closely at what happens when it travels elsewhere.

Looking at how translated Irish literature influenced Czech responses to totalitarianism or the development of the Brazilian novel may tell us as much about home as it does about away.

As changed economic and political circumstances make Ireland think again about its position in the world it is important to remember that in the very substantial body of Irish literature in translation we have an unique way of assessing not only how has Ireland has gone into the world but also how the world has come to Ireland.

Wilde at heart: Felix Paul Greve

Felix Paul Greve was one of the better-known translators of the work of Oscar Wilde into German during the early part of the 20th century.

Wilde's work enjoyed great success in Germany, even during the Nazi period, and Wilde would probably have been much taken by the eventful life in disguise of his German translator.

Greve was born in Radomno, which is now in Poland, in 1879 and grew up in the city of Hamburg. He went on to study classical philology in Munich and Bonn, and the first decade of the new century saw him translating work by Wilde and Jonathan Swift.

He was imprisoned in 1903 for defrauding a friend and was released a year later.

In 1909 he was again the subject of police interest, for failing to pay his debts and selling his translation of Swift's satires to two different publishers. To put police off his trail he faked suicide and escaped to the US.

He was joined there by his partner, Else Endell, in 1910, but he abandoned her a year later, on a farm in Kentucky.

Greve eventually made his way to Manitoba, in Canada, where he taught for 10 years under the name of Frederick Philip Grove. To explain his accent Grove claimed that his father was a wealthy Swedish aristocrat and his mother a Scot.

Under the name of Grove he published his first book of nature essays, Over Prairie Trails, in 1922, and there followed a series of novels and prose writings that made Grove a significant figure in Canadian English-language writing.

In 1946 he was awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in Canadian writing, a Governor-General's Literary Award.

Grove died in 1948, and it was 25 years before the full story emerged about his previous existence as Felix Paul Greve, translator and populariser of the work of Wilde and Swift.

Michael Cronin is Trasna's principal investigator and director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University. You can visit Trasna's bibliography and biographical database at  www.dcu.ie/~ctts/index.htm