To date, no complete or cohesive edition of these translations has been published, although they are surely of major significance for an understanding of Lessing’s overall oeuvre.
The Lessing-Akademie and the HAB have therefore joined forces to assemble the complete translations by Lessing in machine-readable form and to present them paragraph by paragraph alongside synopses of the often rather inaccessible original texts (in French, English, Spanish, etc.).
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, version P5) was used to tag the texts, making them searchable by name and title and according to a limited index of key terms (c.250) pertaining to the theological, philosophical and aesthetic discourses of the 18th century.
The digital edition will appear in an online Lessing portal supported by a database. The portal will include the index of titles of Lessing’s works already compiled by Lachmann and Muncker, along with a pagination convertor (Werkkonkordanz) for the most important Lessing editions. It can also be linked to other database modules (e.g. entries listed by the Lessing-Akademie about Lessing’s impact on his contemporaries).

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG)
Project participant: Marcus Baumgarten