New publication by Gabriela Saldanha in Contesting Translation: Studies in honour of Mona Baker.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003531098-3
Abstract
Baker introduced the concept of “translator style” and, with it, a new argument for studying translations as worthy of literary recognition in their own right. Baker’s proposal was also methodologically innovative; she suggested that, with the use of corpus linguistics, it would be possible to identify translatorial stylistic patterns in the translated text. Although Baker herself did not pursue this line of research further in her own work, the article paved the way for many other investigations, which further demonstrated the relevance of the concept of translator style and its empirical validity. This chapter brings the notion of translator style in dialogue with that of ethics and the political, drawing on later work by Baker. It argues that stylistic choices, as well as other translational decisions such as the choice of source text, where available to the translator, should not be assessed as either ethical or political per se, without taking into consideration the context in which they were made and their motivation. At the same time, stylistic choices do have the potential to be political, under certain circumstances. The argument is illustrated with two examples of feminist activism in relation to translation: Women in Translation and TEIFEM (feminist translators and interpreters of Argentina).