Who Speaks in Translation? From the Death of the Author to the Birth of the Translator-Reader: A Comparative Study
Author : Dr. Amit R Prajapati
Abstract :
“. . . the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”, the very statement made at the end of the essay ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes dismantles the authority of the author, decentres the author from the creative field to allow the centre to the reader. The shift from the author to the reader relocates the meaning of the text, not in the text but in the very act of reading. In the light of the reader-response theories, particularly by the one given by Roland Barthes, this research paper tries to argue that be it an act of reading the Source Language text or an act of translating the Source Language text into the Target Language one, the reader and the translator get married/united in the very act of reading first, interpreting next and particularly for the translator, translating the last. The embedded meaning of the text regenerates itself in the engagement of the reader with the text while reading. It is attempted to argue and arrive at some conclusion by theoretical references: Who speaks in the text? The author? The reader? Who speaks in the translation? The author? The translator? Applying the very idea of Barthes, it is discussed here how from the death of the author till the birth of the translator-reader in the act of translating/re-creating the text, the text gets reborn.
Keywords :
Roland Barthes, Death of the Author, Reader-Response Theory, Translation Studies, Meaning Production.
