Publications

Publication details [#14296]

Mossop, Brian. 2007. The translator’s intervention through voice selection. In Munday, Jeremy, ed. Translation as intervention (Continuum Studies in Translation). London: Continuum. pp. 18–37.
Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English

Abstract

The article focuses on the translator’s perspective, most specifically on the ‘voice’ that is selected by the translator to represent the discourse. ‘Voice’ is to be considered here as the lexical–syntactic choices that seek to make the target text conform to a particular discourse. The translator’s voice is therefore a projection of the self, most particularly in the ‘neutralizing’ voice, which, as Mossop says, may be the ‘least deliberate’ (and thus, one might argue, the closest to idiolect). A novel aspect of the chapter is that voice projection enables both a productive alternative to source/target-oriented translation and a reassessment of the role played by the different players in the performance of communication. Voice is independent of such considerations and is a function of the general orientation adopted by the translator to his/her intervention in the communication. It is also ‘hierarchical’. Mossop asserts that ‘(t)he leading actor, so to speak, is the translator-rapporteur. The supporting actor is the reader, whom the translator is addressing. In the wings, off stage, is the writer of the source text’. The existence of a ‘fourth voice’, from the commissioner, can at times be decisive, as those who translate would doubtless agree, but Mossop feels that this control is generally ‘limited’ and that the translator ‘has considerable leeway’. Mossop sees translation theory ‘as an account of the acts of translators, as well as their products and the effects of these products’ (emphasis added); the focus on translation as language-production as intervention from the individual translator, projecting a voice in a hierarchical communication process, is for Mossop more ‘manageable’ than the attempting to juggle simultaneously the multiple viewpoint of translators with other actors in the process.
Source : Based on publisher information