What is it about?
Against this backdrop, the current study examines translatorial peritexts in the first Korean translation of Three Guineas, an influential essay by Virginia Woolf (1938) on war and women. The Korean translation under investigation is 3기니 (literally, “three guineas”) by Hyesuk Tae, a renowned feminist scholar and Woolf researcher. First published in 1994, this translation was reissued in 2004 and 2007, each time with distinctive peritexts. Tae’s peritextual intervention in these three editions is analyzed in detail to uncover changes in her perspective on Woolf and her potential readers in Korean. The findings reveal not only significant paratextual reframing of the original text by the translator but also variation in the translator’s ideological stance on the author and, to use Woolf’s rhetoric, “the common reader.”
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Why is it important?
This study fills gaps in the existing literature in two areas. First, this comparative analysis of three editions of a Korean translation, focusing on the peritexts, reflects changes in the translator’s perceptions of the author and target-text readers over time. This analysis is significant for documenting the extent to which a translator’s attitudes toward an author and target readers can change. Second, the current study explores the ideological discrepancy between authorial text and translatorial peritext. Specifically, the epistolary postface in the second edition reveals how the translator may use peritexts as a vehicle for asserting a new ideology that challenges the author’s political stance. These findings can enrich our understanding of the translator’s role in mediating the reader’s engagement with the author.
Perspectives
This study has some implications for future research. First, it shows that the translator’s understanding of the author and readers significantly influences the way translatorial peritexts are (re)constructed. As shown above, the relational dynamics of key agents in the translation field, notably authors, translators, and readers, can be interpreted in terms of paratextuality. A thorough examination of paratexts is useful in revealing what prompts the translator to re-position themselves vis-à-vis the author and readers. Second, the study illustrates various facets of how the translator can exploit peritextual space to “voice reservations about the works they are translating” (Hermans 2014: 285) and to assert alternative ideologies that challenge their default roles. This resistant paratextual writing, which attests to the polyphonic nature of translation, may condition the way the translated message is understood. For ideological purposes, the translator can remove, relocate, reinstate, or rewrite peritexts, in which case they may perform an illocutionary act that is transparently obvious to readers, as illustrated in Tae’s postface. The translator’s paratextual writing may involve an active process of resignification or generate “a locus of clash and tension between competing narratives” (Yalsharzeh et al. 2019: 116). Finally, this study affords the opportunity to ponder the temporal dimensions of the translator’s rewriting of paratexts. As demonstrated in the previous section, a diachronic examination of paratexts has the potential to reveal the trajectory of the translator’s epistemological paradigm. The translator and their worldview can be better understood when their paratexts are examined in conjunction with both their professional habitus and the socio-cultural context that governs their behavior.
Professor Sang-Bin Lee
HUFS
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This page is a summary of: Changes in the translator’s position on the author and readers, Translation and Interpreting Studies, March 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tis.23001.lee.
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