Listening to the voice of the translator: A description of translator's notes as paratextual elements

Abstract

Translator's notes are paratextual elements in which the translator makes his or her voice heard, thus giving up his or her invisible position in order to address the reader directly. Together with other paratextual components, translator's notes accompany the text and influence how it is read and interpreted. In the framework of descriptive and historical translation studies the analysis of translator's notes, as well as other types of paratext, may provide a privileged source of information for the contextualisation of translation processes and the reconstruction of the translation norms and policies in force at a specific moment. Furthermore, it may lead to a better understanding of the position and reception of literary translated texts. This paper shall provide a description of some of the contextual, pragmatic and functional features of translator's notes as evidence of the richness of the practices and procedures that are hidden within this type of paratext in order to reveal the often under exploited potential of such data for Descriptive Translation Studies; for illustrative purposes, examples are provided from eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Spanish translations of English novels.