“‘Peewit,’ said a peewit, very remote.” – Notes on quotatives in literary translation

Abstract

Abstract The present article focuses on strategies of translating fiction quotatives from English into Romanian. Starting from the definition of quotatives as structures that in their simplest form consist of a subject and a quoting verb and accompany a quotation, I have selected two samples of literary text and their respective multiple versions so as to investigate patterns in which these structures are translated. Because, as pointed out in the literature, fiction quotatives describe narrative-advancing events and contribute to the development of characters, the investigation of how fiction quotatives are translated (in particular how say, the most frequently used verb in quotatives, is treated in translation) might prove to offer valuable insight for literary translation studies, correlating tendencies that seem to be cross-linguistic. For instance, it has been demonstrated that in Spanish there is a tendency of replacing the generic quoting verb say with other manner of speaking verbs. This may be seen as a form of “enrichment” as a translation strategy. The article advances the hypothesis that a similar phenomenon can be attributed to Romanian and links this phenomenon to parametric variation in English and Romance.