Abstract
Translators’ agency is defined in this paper as the willingness and
ability to act after active negotiations with various actors (humans and
non-humans alike), highlighting the translator’s power over other actors
involved in each translation activity, namely, his or her intentional
acceptance or refusal of the influence from external constraints. What
is being investigated, is not what influence the translator’s agency
exerts, but the extent to which its influence (or ‘weight’) is exerted
upon the final product. We bear these two questions in mind: (1) Does
the translator’s agency influence all stages of the translation
process[1]? (2) If it does not, in which stages does it exert
influence and to what extent? Which stages does it not exert influence
and what other agencies exert their influences at these stages? Drawing
on available studies and archival primary sources and adopting Latour’s
Actor-Network Theory to make sense of the findings, this article tries
to assess the different extents to which a translator could exercise
their agency, by determining the interplay between translators and other
actors in the translation network of Chinese Literature. The
findings of this report are that translators can exercise no agency in
the selection, editing and revision stages, because they can’t
participate in these. It is in the translation stage, that translators
can participate and have the chance to negotiate with other actors.
Translators can often exercise their agency to the largest extent, here,
regardless of how powerful other actors might be.