Translators' paratextual visibility and the functions of paratexts: A mixed-methods study

The study goes beyond the translated texts to analyze the often-overlooked area of translatorial paratexts, specifically examining the understudied corpus of English translations of Arabic novels published in the United States. Previous research in this area has predominantly employed qualitative methodologies. In contrast, the current study develops, for the first time, a quantitative methodology that employs digital corpus tools to explore the functions of translatorial paratexts and the paratextual visibility of translators. In addition, the complex mixed methodology adopted in the study allows the examination of the impact of four key variables on the data: time of publication (post-Nobel Prize phase vs. post-9/11 phase), type of publisher (academic vs. non-academic), translators’ professional profile (academic vs. non-academic), and translators’ gender (male vs. female). In line with previous studies in literature, the findings underscore the invisibility of translators, as evidenced by the absence of translator-provided paratexts in three-fifths of the Arabic translated novels within the dataset. It also underscores the predominance of the informative function as the most recurrent feature within the data, emphasizing the pivotal role of translatorial paratexts in providing insights into the source text, its contextual background, and authorship, thus fostering enhanced cross-cultural literary understanding. The study significantly advances research on translatorial paratexts by offering a sophisticated methodology that can be replicated to analyze the paratexts and investigate the interplay of various influencing variables.