A historian's approach to quantitative analysis : The case of translated short stories in Italian women’s rotocalchi (1933–1938)

The study of translated short stories in Italian illustrated magazines can con- tribute to the creation of a homogeneous methodology for analyzing literature in periodicals. This chapter, based on the woman’s magazine Lei, argues that a quantitative analysis of translations should always result in a proportion between translated and non-translated texts and that it has to consider both the subjective dimension of the enquiry and potential disturbing features. At the core of the methodological proposal, stands the creation of sets of numerical results as an answer to the uncertain origin of many short stories, and a vertical close reading, which entails the identification of all the texts with the same origin in order to investigate the incidence of internal trends.