Translator’s prefacial discourse: an enunciative study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34019/1808-9461.2020.v18.27584Keywords:
Translation, Translator, Paratext, EnunciationAbstract
This paper proposes an enunciative study of translators’ prefaces, taken as paratexts (cf. Genette 1987), under Henri Mitterrand’s (1980) Linguistics of the preface, which was based on the enunciation theory of Émile Benveniste. Such text has recurring linguistic characteristics as Mitterand (1987) points out, and this allows us to talk about a “Grammar of the preface”. Inspired by Benveniste, Mitterand considers that the preface carries the characteristics of the discourse as a whole. The corpus we studied is composed of eight (08) prefaces which address the translation process. As a conclusion, we highlight the relevance of the enunciative aspects present in the instance of the translator’s preface – which contains a fragment of the translator’s experience when describing their practice and justifying their decisions - as an index of the visibility and the presence of the translator in the work they translate