ABSTRACT

This paper advances the concepts of translatophobia (the fear of translation) and translatophilia (the fetishisation of translation) to elucidate the tensions pivoting around translation in the development of copyright law. It addresses one specific issue at the intersection of these terms: ‘Does copyright law contradict itself in speaking of translations as original works?’ The paper argues that postpositivist theory conceives of originality and authorship as zero-sum concepts, hence positioning the translation and the original, the translator and the author in an irreconcilable relationship. It proposes a distributed view of originality and authorship, which allows us to appreciate how the author of an underlying work maintains a stake in the work over recursive scales of transformation, while allowing the translator(s) to share out that stake as the work distributes and scales itself across different languages, modes and media. The paper points out that the conception of translation and translators in postpositivist theory is as Romantic as how the author and the original are perceived to be constructed in copyright law, suggesting that for translation studies to engage the modern copyright regime productively, it must avoid turning translation into a fetish object.

摘要

本文提出了翻译恐惧症（对翻译的恐惧）和翻译癖（翻译的恋物癖）的概念，以阐明版权法发展中围绕翻译的紧张关系。它用这些术语的交集解决了一个具体问题：“版权法在将翻译视为原创作品时是否自相矛盾？” 本文认为，后实证主义理论将原创性和作者身份视为零和概念，因此将翻译与原著，译者和作者置于一种不可调和的关系中。它提出了一种关于独创性和作者身份的分布式视图，这使我们能够了解基础作品的作者如何在递归转换范围内保持作品的利益，同时允许翻译在作品跨不同语言，模式和媒体进行分配和扩展时分享自己的利益。论文指出，后实证主义理论中的翻译和译者这一概念与著作权法中作者和原著的构想一样具有浪漫色彩，这表明，要使翻译研究有效地参与现代著作权制度，就必须避免转向翻译成恋物癖对象。