The Voice and Image of the Translator. An Interdisciplinary Study

MARÍA LAURA SPOTURNO

Nancy

Congreso; INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ?Linguistics and Translation Theory: Stakes in a complex relationship?; 2013

Universidad de Lorraine

In the past thirty years, the singularity of minority literary discourse has aroused the interest of scholars and researchers in the fields of Sociolinguistics, Cultural Studies and Translation Studies (Lipski, 1982; Bruce-Novoa, [1980] 1999; Arteaga, 1997; Tymoczko, 1999). While these scholars have focused on key aspects of minority literary discourse such as language contact phenomena, interlingualism, hybridity, heteroglossia, the parallelism between minority writing and literary translation, their studies do not generally explore the actual linguistic materialization and discursive mechanisms related to these aspects. With this respect, a central question concerning the nature and constitution of the enunciative subject in minority literary discourse, both in the source and target texts, still remains to be addressed. Accordingly, this paper aims at exploring the configuration of the discursive image or ethos attached to the discursive subject (Ducrot, 1984; Amossy, 1999) in a corpus of Chicano literary texts and their corresponding translations into Spanish. Following Ducrot?s formulation, the notion of ethos can be preliminarily defined as the discursive image associated to the discursive subject or Locuteur who assumes the responsibility for the enunciation of the utterance. This image results from the Locuteur?s discursive activity and involvement. Our concern is to elucidate the configuration of the ethos linked to the Model Author (Eco (1979) 1999), i.e. the textual and discursive entity responsible for the global enunciation of the literary text, in order to see how this configuration operates in the translated literary discourse. In other words, the focus of attention will be the study of the modeling of ethos affecting the Translator, understood here not as an empirical subject but as a discursive one. This question becomes of particular relevance in the case of minority literary texts as these often read as a translation. Thus, when translating a Chicano text into Spanish the translator is faced with the need to design strategies that best convey the hybrid nature of the source text into the target text, and this, in turn, may entail the duplication of certain translation strategies already present in the original. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the analytical level, we wish to examine the nature and constitution of the ethos attached to the Model Author in a set of literary texts by the Chicano writer Sandra Cisneros, and to assess how the ethos is reconfigured in the Spanish translation of those texts. On a theoretical and methodological level, this paper intends to articulate the notion of Model Author and the concepts of discursive ethos and previous ethos (Amossy, 1999) in an attempt to further explore an already posed question in the field of Translation Studies: ?Exactly whose voice comes to us when we read translated discourse?? (Hermans, (1996) 2010: 197).