Translators, editors, publishers, and critics

Abstract

This chapter examines three recent Norwegian debates on translation sparked off by translation reviews, in which the various agents involved in producing translated texts were granted unusual visibility. The case reflects how discussions on translators’ agency may be of interest for the public sphere in three senses: in disputing unfair judgments on translations, in discussing the quality criteria of translations, and in gatekeeping when the publishers’ quality control mechanisms have fallen short.

Mapping Salience and Trajectory: On How to Situate Literary Translators in Publishing Legends of the Condor Heroes With Visualization

“…The first principle means taking ethnographic approaches to trace the object from the perspective of those actors who produce it, following their footprints and collecting ''inscriptions'' (or ''textual material'') that imply and record the ''making'' of knowledge. Typically, in ANT-inspired Translation Studies, the translator is always the starting point in charting the overall configuration of the actor-network (see, e.g., Bogic, 2010;Jones, 2009;Kung, 2009;Solum, 2017). Though some may disagree with this notion, arguing that ''all points lead one in a number of unilateral or multilateral directions and can be considered as 'gateways' into any given network'' (Tahir-G€ urc xag˘lar, 2007, p. 729), this paper insists on selecting translator as the starting point to enter the network and map the translational phenomena with the collected data.…”

‘Novelty’ through narrative and paratextual voice: The case of John Minford’s translation of ‘The laughing girl’

“…Moreover, in discussing translator's voice, scholarship to date has more or less separated narrative voice from point of view, both of which constitute the narrative perspective as an integral concept, for 'insistence on the difference between narration and focalization is a major revision of the theory of point of view' (Culler, 1983: 10). Concepts such as narrative voice (including narrator's voice and characters' voice), focalisation pattern, translator's and other agents' intratextual and extratextual voice are often discussed in isolation, such as topics on the translator's salient voice manifested by the content and stylistic changes in the original narrative discourse (Bosseaux 2018;Erkazanci-Durmus, 2014), the heteroglossia of multiple agents' voice that alters the ST's narratives in translation (Solum, 2017;Taivalkoski-Shilov, 2015;Whitfield, 2013), and changes in characters' voice types made by the translator (Taivalkoski-Shilov, 2015;Tahiri, 2020). Pekkanen (2013) explored how focalisation shift indicated the translator's voice, but her discussion only touched upon the shift in the fictional narrator's indirect speech without reporting the shift in characters' direct speech.…”