What do translators do when they choose to write a preface to the text they have just translated? Among other things, such as presenting the author and explaining how and why they came to translate him/her, they usually pass a few remarks... more
What do translators do when they choose to write a preface to the text they have just translated? Among other things, such as presenting the author and explaining how and why they came to translate him/her, they usually pass a few remarks on their own translation—be it to excuse, in advance, some debatable linguistic or theoretical choices, to complain about difficulties in the text or indeed the foreign language, or to shed some light on a few particularly difficult passages. Mostly, they tend to justify their work. Drawing from a corpus of more than sixty prefaces by poetry translators, we will establish a short typology of translators’ prefaces.
