Translation Studies has recently engaged with microhistory, drawing on archival holdings. Though this is a welcome development, it runs the risk of slanting research into translatorship since such archives tend to entail a degree of cultural gatekeeping and therefore reflect an atypically high degree of literary capital on the translator’s part, due to the translator’s own participation in prestigious forms of authorship and/or their association with authors with high literary capital. Seeking to account for the more typical experience of translators with low agency and low literary capital, the article outlines an alternative historiographical approach: prosopography, or collective biography. It first draws on the author’s research in archives devoted to other actors in the communications circuit, in which translators are a tangential presence. It studies nineteenth-century publishers’ archives at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine in Caen, France, focusing on the issue of translatorial agency in negotiating moral rights. The second approach reads an online translation community, the Emerging Translators’ Network, as a non-custodial participatory archive. This offers translation historians an opportunity to study the ambitions of aspiring translators at the outset of their careers and provides insights into the successful career trajectories of those who eventually earn an archival presence in their own right.