Look inside: the evolution(?) of the translator’s paratextual visibility in the historical novel published in Spain
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Abstract
Historical fiction is a best-selling phenomenon in our country that encompasses both Spanish and foreign works. In the case of the latter, translation becomes an obvious and necessary tool to fill the shelves of bookstores and homes up with these books. The present paper explores the paratextual visibility of the translator in this subgenre through a historic overview that runs from 1999 to 2020 and is divided into two planes: a peritextual analysis of 60 translated novels published during the aforementioned period, and an epitextual study of 230 reviews by critics and readers assessing the very same books. Our results show an extremely low presence of the translator in both cases. At the peritextual level, their name tends to appear on copyright pages and is seldom found on the inside cover, and translation notes are nothing but anecdotal. As for the epitexts, translators’ names are sporadically inserted in the data sheets of the books and few comments are made about the translation itself. This invisibility evinces the limited recognition of this figure in and beyond the publishing industry, conveys a transparent disregard for the complexity of their task and denies them the status they deserve as key agents in the circulation of literature.
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