The literary translator as author: A philosophical assessment of the idea

Abstract

In contemporary scholarly literature on translation the idea that literary translators ought to be acknowledged as authors of the works that they produce (TA) is a recurrent one: numerous theorists have engaged with it approvingly, others have sought to undermine it. In this article I scrutinise existing theories and studies on authorship and on the ontology of literary works as undertaken in the field of analytical philosophy of art, in order to assess the notion of TA in the context of literary translations. My assessment affirms neither one of the current antithetical positions on TA: translators, I argue, can be justifiably called authors but, normally, not of the kinds of works that defenders of TA commonly assume; that is to say that, rather than being authors of literary works proper, even of a derivative kind, they are authors of constrained representations of literary works.

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