I’m a translator and I’m proud: how literary translators view authors and authorship

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relationship of literary translators with ‘their’ authors and with the source text. The issue has been dealt with from different theoretical perspectives. I will focus instead on the practitioners’ own views, setting these against the scholarly voices and looking for possible similarities and discrepancies. In 1998, Simeoni stated that ‘the more vocal calls for translational emancipation’ had originated not among the translators themselves, but among ‘peripheral observers’, such as translator scholars. Does this claim still hold true, or are translators nowadays more concerned about emancipation, more prone to claim ownership and/or authorship than previous generations? A first glance at the results of a survey among literary translators in Scandinavia seems to indicate that they are not: most respondents apparently do not perceive the translated text as ‘their text’. The free text comments, however, reveal a more differentiated picture. My claim is that to understand literary translators’ ethical stance vis-à-vis the text they are working on, and to give them the rightful credit for their work, we need to revise some of the traditional dichotomies within translation studies, such as creativity versus fidelity, and take a more nuanced stance towards the notions of ownership and authorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary translation
• translator-author relationship
• codes of ethics
• authorship
• practitioners
• survey

Acknowledgements

The elaboration and execution of the survey that constitutes the empirical foundation of this article, was carried out as part of the research project Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in a Scandinavian Context supported by the Research Council of Norway [project number 213246] and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo. I would also like to thank the participants at the Voice, Translation and Ethics conference in Oslo, March 2017, the two anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, and last but not least, the respondents of the survey without whose answers this study would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hanne Jansen has a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen (1999) and has since 2005 been Associate Professor at the Dept. of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the same university. Here she teaches translation theory and practice and coordinates the graduate programme in Translation Studies. She has worked with literary translation and contrastive linguistics; her present focus is on collaborative practices in literary translation, and on the selection, distribution and reception of translated literature. She has participated in the research project ‘Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in a Scandinavian Context’ 2012–2017 (Research Council of Norway, project number 213246). She has published extensively on literary translation. She has worked as literary translator (Italian/Danish) since 1985.

Notes

1. The questionnaire was formulated in English, but the respondents were free to use their mother tongue, that is Danish, Norwegian or Swedish, in the free text comments. When needed, I have translated them into English.

2. For more details on the survey, see Jansen (2017a), in which the data on the collaboration among fellow translators are employed to discuss whether the traditional image of the solitary literary translators still holds true, or if the translators, not least due to modern communication modes, rather feel like members of a community.

3. For the survey “Collaboration in Literary Translation” and the quantitative data, see https://engerom.ku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/86805 (under Current Research, b). Questions 6, 14–37, and 69–71 are related to the translator-author relationship.

4. A similar classification in ‘clarifying comments’, ‘recommendations on translation strategies’, and ‘bonding’ was used in Jansen (2013) to characterize what three Italian literary authors (Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris, and the co-authors Monaldi & Sorti) chose to share with the translators in their ‘collective letters’ sent to all the translators along with the text to be translated.

5. See Jansen (2013), mentioned above, in which this practice of authorial assistance/interference is illustrated.

6. Greenall (2018, p. 7) also mentions Tolkien’s guide (the ‘Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings’), referring to it as an example of an author subscribing heavily to an ‘ethics of fidelity’.

 

Additional information

Funding

The elaboration and execution of the survey that constitutes the empirical foundation of this article, was carried out as part of the research project Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in a Scandinavian Context supported by the Research Council of Norway [project number 213246] and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo.