Representations of translators in popular culture

Abstract

The “fictional turn” in translation studies has acknowledged the fact that translators/interpreters have been moved from behind the curtain to center stage. Whether this is a result of poststructuralist or postcolonial scholarship, the fact remains that translators/interpreters now figure as protagonists in film, theater, and especially popular literature. Does this “promotion” reflect a change of status? How are translators portrayed? How is their habitus portrayed? What function do they serve? Has there been a change in their portrayal/function in the last thirty years? Does the change reflect the different approach/es to the “hybrid” in this period? Has the “death of the author” theory and the promotion of translators/interpreters to the status of “authorship” changed their self-image? This essay is an attempt at answering these questions, diachronically and synchronically, with the help of various literary texts from the 1970s on.