Agency in translation: Hispanic Literature in France 1980-2002

1. Agency in translation:Hispanic Literature in France 1980-2002 Sandra PoupaudUniversitat Rovira i VirgiliOctober 2006 spoupaud@arrakis.es

2. Summary • Qualitative study of the mediator’s agency in the translation of Hispanic literature in France from 1984 to 2002 • Mediators: publishers, translators, literary agents • Theoretical framework: Bourdieu’s sociology of culture • Agency is studied by retaining three dimensions: • Ressources : what people can do • Performance : what people do • Discourse : what people say they do

3. Literature overview • Overview of the literature available within Translation Studies: equivalence, DTS, German functionalism, the “cultural turn” • The concept of agency is relatively neglected and has not been clearly conceptualized

4. Translation and sociology • Sociological approaches within Translation Studies: • Bourdieu (Simeoni, Wolf, Gouanvic) • Luhmann (Hermans) • Actor-Network Theory (Buzelin) • What (mostly French) sociologists have to say about translation: • Centre de sociologie européenne, Sapiro and Heilbron • Casanova

5. Bourdieu’s cultural sociology 3 main concepts : • Field • Capitals • Social • Economic • Cultural • Symbolic • Habitus

6. The structure of the French publishing field • Bourdieu: “Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition” (1999) • 2 main poles in the publishing field: literary and commercial • Classification of publishers according to amount and structure of capital • Antagonistic functions of translation: • Economic speculation: short-term strategy, best-sellers • Literary discovery: long-term strategy

7. Research questions and hypothesis • Research questions: • How does the mediator’s agency vary and according to which factors? • How is the mediator's agency expressed through discourse? • What are the values transmitted by the mediator's discourse? • Hypotheses: • The mediator's performance correlates with the resources they possess and with the position they occupy at a given moment in the publishing field • The translator's agency will be greater at the literary end of the field, while it will be reduced at the commercial end • The representation of agency conveyed by the mediators' discourse may not correspond to their performance • The translator's lack of symbolic or social capital limits their agency.

8. Methodology • Multiple data-collection methods: • Data on translation flows from the UNESCO Index Translationum • Data from the ELECTRE database (for Spanish) • Identifying informants: citation analysis of bibliographical data • Triangulation with available literature • Interviews

9. Translation Flows Spanish into French

10. Translation Flows Catalan into French

11. Hispanic literature in France since 1984 • The end of the Latin American boom? • The rise of contemporary Spanish literature • Translations from Catalan

12. A few explanatory factors • Expansion of Spanish literature in France: • Quality of Spanish literature • Weakness of French literature • General rise in translated titles in France • Low translation fees • Key role of translation subsidies

13. A few explanatory factors Expansion of Spanish literature in France: • Quality of Spanish literature • Weakness of French literature • General rise in translated titles in France • Low translation fees • Key role of translation subsidies

14. The Hispanic community in France • Spanish immigration : 19th century and Spanish Civil War • Important Latin-American community, especially in Paris, since the end of the 19th century: diplomats, journalists, writers, academics, publishers, Severo Sarduy (Le Seuil, Gallimard), Gustavo Guerrero (Gallimard), Milagros Palma (Indigo) • Various publications, eg Annuaire des écrivains latino-américains en France • Paris as a place of consecration (Casanova)?

15. Translators and publishers Sources of information: • Round tables on literary translation in Barcelona (writers, publishers and translators) • Interviews (2 publishers, 2 translators)

16. Function of the interviews and round tables • Identify mediators, e.g. literary agents • Seek explanatory factors • Highlight the mediator’s performance and their interactions • Underline the role of economic capital • Isolate phenomena which had not been taken into account (eg censorship, publication in French prior to publication in Spanish) • Test and refine preliminary hypotheses

17. Le Seuil (Annie Morvan) Translators are no longer initiators Literary agents: suggest manuscripts Only good working relationships with translators Subsidies are very helpful Acknowledges the importance of commercial criteria Corti (Bertrand Fillaudeau) Translators are always the initiators : trust is fundamental Literary agents: only to negotiate rights Translators who are also academics are a problem… Subsidies are vital: no subsidies = no translations Rejects all commercial criteria in selection of translations Two different publishers

18. General profile of translators • Male • Academics • Publishers

19. What translators have to say • They nearly always suggest potential translations : book review + translation sample (10 to 30 pages) • Sometimes chosen by author but this is very rare and only if the author is famous • It is very difficult to promote an author • Power differential • Some rather negative comments about publishers: • “They are rude and very self-confident” • “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”

20. "She's a Terminator"

21. The role of economic and symbolic capital • The commodification of French publishing • The key role of subsidies given by the CNL • The interplay of economic and symbolic capital

22. Conclusion • Preliminary results have partially confirmed some of our initial hypotheses • Further data are needed before any conclusions can be drawn • Further insights into the mediator’s agency should help us gain a better understanding of the conditions of their practice • How will the current transformations in the publishing world affect the agents ?