Beyond invisibility: The position and role of the literary translator in the digital paratextual space

This thesis presents a new theoretical framework through which to analyse the visibility of literary translators in the digital materials that present translations to readers, referred to throughout as paratextual spaces. Central to this model is the argument that paratextual ‘visibility’ must be understood as including both the way translators and their labour are presented to readers, defined here as their position, and also their role in the establishment of that position. Going beyond Lawrence Venuti’s concept of invisibility as an inevitably negative position to be fought against, this thesis instead establishes paratextual visibility as a complex negotiation between the agency of individual translators, the needs of a publishing house and the interests of readers.

The value of this approach is demonstrated through a case study examining the visibility of translator Jamie Bulloch in the digital spaces surrounding his English-language translations of two novels by German author Timur Vermes: Look Who’s Back and The Hungry and the Fat. This analysis finds that even though Bulloch played an early role in creating the publisher’s paratextual materials, publisher MacLehose Press prioritised making the novels’ German origins and the foreignness of the texts visible over Bulloch’s status as the translator, or his translatorship. Bulloch’s limited visibility in the publisher-created materials was then reproduced in digital paratexts created by readers and third parties such as retailer Amazon, despite his attempts to interact with readers and perform his translatorship in digital spaces such as Twitter. Rather than challenging Bulloch’s limited visibility, then, digital spaces served to amplify it. This thesis therefore finds that the translator’s active participation in the promotion of their work does not always equate to increased visibility, thus demonstrating the need to go beyond Venuti’s invisibility and towards understanding the multifaceted roles played by translators in presenting literary texts to new audiences.