Odpowiedzialność przekładoznawcy, czyli o normatywności i granicach interpretacyjnej swobody tłumacza (przypadek Johna le Carré)

Abstract

The Responsibility of Translation Studies Scholar, or Reflections on Normativity and Freedom of Interpretation (the Case of John le Carré)

The translatologist – as an academic researcher – rarely faces the necessity to take legal responsibility for the results of his or her scholarly analysis. Especially today, in the western culture of the second decade of the 21st century, the freedom of theoretical reflection is regarded as an essential element of intellectual development of an individual and as a sine-qua-non condition for the change of discursive, and perceptive, paradigms sensu largo. However, when the translator assumes the role of an expert in the course of legal proceedings related to cases of possible translation plagiarism – the results of his or her intellectual exploration can no longer be construed merely as “theoretical proposals”. In the case presented in this article, such awareness resulted in the fact that the authors, considering themselves poststructural scholars, chose to return to structuralist methodological approaches (variantivity), norms in translation, and to the concept of the tertium comparationis, which, in the context of a comparative analysis of two translations, is the source text.