The Role of the Translator

The aim of this article is to offer a reflection on the role and responsibility of the translator that goes beyond the seminal sense of carrying over and across expressed by the Latin etymology of translation as translatio and transferre. A translator initiates a risk-taking act of renegotiation of meaning that is very similar to the author’s one in its subjectivity and relativity of judgement. Moreover, the present work focuses on the importance of metaphors in describing and shedding new light on the role of the translator. Going beyond the multiplicity of existing tropes, both processes of ‘doing translations’ and ‘making metaphors’ are characterized by the impossibility of conveying total equivalence of meaning and yet as necessary human activities in their attempt to interpret, transform and represent reality despite their imperfect, incomplete and never exhaustive nature. Through the experience of mainly female writers and translators, this article offers theoretical and empirical backing to the necessity to operate a metaphorical shift from translation as transportation to translation as transformation, deconstructing the conventional distinction between the original and its translation