The Materiality of Mediated Translations

Abstract

In the existing scholarship on mediated translation, there is a significant gap in the field’s understanding and exploration of the shaping power of the material-textual. These elements include the paratexts accompanying the translation – such as title pages, prefatory and dedicatory materials, appendices, marginalia – and the design elements of the incarnated text – the overall mise-en-page – as well as bibliographic codes like typeface and ornamentation. In Maialen Marin-Lacarta’s important article on methodological possibilities for indirect translation research in a 2017 special issue of Translation Studies, she gives five reasons for the usefulness of studying paratexts, ranging from examining cultural attitudes towards indirect translation to information about translators’ views on translations.1 Marin-Lacarta’s emphasis, however, is predominately focused on the paratext’s documentary or informational purposes, when paratexts and bibliographic encoding are central for the expression of a text’s meaning, and can be studied as texts themselves. Translation does not exist in some ethereal state but is embedded in and consumed via specific material conditions. In this area, Translation Studies has much to gain from a group of early modern scholars, represented by members of this Talking Point, who have been part of a pioneering movement towards making the liminal central and the paratext, text.2