Multiple translatorship, voice, and translation as reinstantiation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to suggest an analysis model of the multiple voices in literary translation that integrates conceptual tools rooted in the sociology of translation with the linguistic analysis of the linguistic-discursive elements that reinstantiate such voices in the translated text. Section 1 explains the motivations behind this proposal and section 2 describes the main linguistic-discursive and sociological tools selected. Section 3 deals with the methodological details. Section 4 is a case study. It describes the translation process of the novel El maestro de esgrima, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1988), into German (Ein Stich ins Herz [Der Fechtmeister]), resorting to the sociological concepts of multiple translatorship, agency, and voice; to that end, the contextual voices in the German translation are reconstructed by looking at three interviews held with the executive translators and with the editor of the series where the German translation appeared. Then, the reinstantiations of such voices in the German translation are analysed, as well as the effects that such reinstantiations have on the individuation of the textual voices and of the implicit reader. This study claims that supplementing the sociological approach with a linguistic-discursive analysis of the translation product opens up new avenues to explore concepts of the sociology of translation in a systematic way, and permits us to understand the phenomenon of equivalence in translation.