National e-resources of Shakespeare translations in Europe: (Dis)assembling the black box

Abstract This article discusses the construction, operation and scholarly usefulness of electronic resources of Shakespeare translations. In particular, it offers an overview of several existing European digital resources of Shakespeare translations by singling out trends, challenges and new vistas of research; describing the content, editing policies and functionalities of selected European projects, already in operation or currently assembled; and discussing the aims and major difficulties faced by the researchers, the choice of navigation and search tools, the possibilities of integrating national repositories with other resources and the relation of translation e-resources to adjacent disciplines, including corpus linguistics or stylometry.