Kathryn Batchelor is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at UCL, UK. She is the author ofTranslation and Paratexts (2018) and Decolonizing Translation (2009/2014), and has co-edited four volumes of essays, includingTranslating Frantz Fanon across Continents and Languages (2017) and China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (2017).

ABSTRACT

TRANSLATION AS PARATEXT

In his seminal work on literary paratexts, Seuils, Gérard Genette suggested that one of the areas that he had left unexplored was the paratextual function of translations. The idea of conceiving of translations as paratexts to original works is not one that has received much attention in translation studies, conflicting as it does with views of translations as creative works in their own right. However, interrogating Genette’s suggestion and in particular the epistemological and conceptual assumptions on which it is based offers a springboard for a fresh discussion of the nature of translation and its relation to literary criticism. In this paper, I contrast Genette’s views with those of Jacques Derrida, focussing in particular on Derrida’s discussion and – crucially – use of translation in Spectres de Marx. I argue that Spectres offers an important example of Derrida’s practice of speaking, teaching and writing ‘dans l’épreuve de la traduction’ [through the trial of translation] and suggest that the ability of translation to function paratextually may depend primarily not on a particular ontological view of translation (what translation is) but on one’s pragmatic perspective (what translation does).