Los agentes de la traducción: las ficciones del traductor como relatos de mercado

Abstract

Based on the Fictional Turn of Translation studies framework, this article focuses on three novels with translators as protagonists, highlighting translation’s critical and metaphorical potential as literary theme. El traductor by Salvador Benesdra, El testamento de O’Jaral by Marcelo Cohen, and La ciudad ausente by Ricardo Piglia were written in Argentina during the 1990s and they shed light on a deteriorating publishing market where translators play a fundamental role but hold a vulnerable position where their jobs are endangered. Translation is therefore thematized as a monetary transaction enabling the relation between translation and the market, and where mistranslation is practiced as a subversion and resistance tool. The translator’s fictions analyzed here dismantle ideas of an unscathed globalization and revise translation’s part in keeping the illusion of a successful communication.