UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation analyzes recent literature featuring translators and interpreters as characters published in Spanish, Portuguese, or English. The goal is to examine literature that specifically speaks to the subjective experience of individual translators and interpreters to see how a general public understands these figures and how this representation is changing. I argue that the trend of recently published works featuring translators and interpreters as characters increasingly represents an evolution of older, negative tropes to offer a more optimistic, nuanced portrait of translators and interpreters that takes into account their identities, agency, and subjectivity. The first chapter offers an overview of both the scope of works included in this dissertation as well as a brief history of the prevalent ideas that led to negative, stereotyped portrayals of translators and interpreters. Scholarship from within the “cultural turn” of Translation and Interpreting Studies field(s) is then presented to explain the subsequent “fictional turn” and representation and further contestation of these negative portrayals of translation in fiction. The chapter then explains the usefulness of fiction and narrative in particular for both raising awareness and presenting a more nuanced representation of translators and interpreters to a wider, non-specialized audience. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of other scholarly works that have laid the groundwork for studying translation and interpreting through fiction, as well as an overview of literature that has previously appeared in Spanish and Portuguese featuring translators and interpreters. The second chapter explores the evolution of negative, gendered stereotypes as applied to translators, and how the evolution of these tropes reflects a reevaluation of the understanding of a translator’s agency. The chapter offers a survey of some of the most prevalent negative gendered tropes applied to translators throughout history and provides an analysis of both Julio Cortázar’s “Carta a una señorita en París” and Andrés Neuman’s El viajero del siglo to track changes in gendered tropes as applied to translators in contemporary fiction. The third chapter explores the agency and ethics of the interpreter separately from that of the translator. To do so, I analyze Yuri Herrera’s 2009 novella Señales que precederán al fin del mundo and the historical and literary portrayal of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who served in a chain of interpreters for Hernán Cortés during the conquest of present-day Mexico. Historically, many of the same negative (and gendered) tropes implying a lack of agency as applied to translators have also been applied to La Malinche in particular and to interpreters generally. However, Herrera’s novella represents a re-evaluation of these tropes and presents a more nuanced portrayal of a Malinche-esque character. The fourth and final chapter uses three works from Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (Los ingrávidos, Los niños perdidos, and Lost Children Archive) to examine the emotional aspect of translation/interpreting. When considered as a whole, all three works help to demonstrate the inherently deep emotional involvement a translator/interpreter has with the work that they translate/interpret; the effect that this emotional connection produces on the translator/interpreter and their work; and the textual and psychological strategies that translators and interpreters use to cope with translating/interpreting emotionally harrowing material.