Multiple voice translation research
It can be claimed that all published writing, literary or not, translated or not, is a product of multiple voices, but the topic of multiple voice translation has only recently begun to attract interest in English-language translation research. A survey of over 400 books with the Dewey catalogue number 418.02 at the University of Sydney’s Fisher Library in November 2019 confirmed this observation. Of a dozen or so books with titles indicating either encyclopedic coverage of translation studies or special attention to professional practice, all published since 1990, the great majority had no index reference to any kind of collaborative or team translation: they include In Other Words: a coursebook on translation by Mona Baker (2011); The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies edited by Carmen Millan and Francesca Bartrina (2013); and the Routledge Companion to Translation Studies edited by Jeremy Munday (rev. ed. 2009), which contains a 74-page section on key concepts. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies edited by Mona Baker (rev. ed. 1998) contains no entry on teamwork or co-translation, although the entry by Peter Bush on literary translation contains fleeting references to author-translator collaboration and to editorial intervention. There are no entries on collaborative translation, team translation, or co-translation in the Dictionary’ of Translation Studies (1997) by Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowie, even in an entry on multiple-stage translation. The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies edited by Kirsten Mahnkjaer and Kevin Windle (2011) has 17 references to team translation but nothing on other forms of collaborative translation. Most recently. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation (2018) overlooks MVT altogether as a subject of interest for research.
Monographs dating from the late 20th century also neglect this issue. The last chapter in André Lefevere’s classic Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary’ Fame (1992) gives an excellent analysis of re-writing through editorial intervention but is silent on collaborative translation. The final chapter of Contemporary’ Translation Theories by Edwin Gentzler (1993), on newly emerging trends in translation studies, is also free of any mention of collaborative translation. an indication that although the practice is certainly known to be in existence, it holds no theoretical interest.
There is better news in some recent works. An essay by Li Defeng, at the time of publication a lecturer in the Department of Translation at the Chinese University
Spontaneity in multiple voice translation 43 of Hong Kong, writes of the need for translation training to include “real world” situations such as teamwork or collaborative translating, although it refers chiefly to the notorious “translation factories” that operate in Hong Kong but more especially on the Chinese mainland (Li, 2001, pp. 85-89). There is a brief section on the need for classroom instruction on team translation in Pathways to Translation: Pedagogy and Process by Donald C. Kiraly (1995) but nothing on collaboration. Daniel Gouadec’s T-anslation as a Profession (2007) includes a comprehensive treatment of current practice in collaborative hanslation, and his notes on literary' translation are well informed, but there is nothing as such on collaboration in literary translation (Gouadec. 2007, pp. 85-89. esp. 90-91).
Although I have not been able to track down the first mention of the term MVT, it is unlikely that I invented it. The term "multiple translatorship” may have been inspired by Jack Stilliger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Stillinger, 1991) but Stillinger does not consider the role of chance or accident in writing partnerships. In Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation, edited by Harme Jansen and Arma Wegener (Jansen & Wegener, 2013, p. 4), however, the partnerships analyzed by contributors are those between a single translator and other agents such as authors, editors and so on.2 A website Google search on 15 October 2019 showed no entry for the term "multiple voice translation” but presented instead entries on “multiple translatorship” (a single translator with cooperation from other interested parties such as authors and editors), and on translation projects using new technologies that encourage simultaneous collaboration of a non-literary nature.
I assume that it is generally accepted that literary' translators have had a variety of experiences in collaborative translation. Now that research on translators (and not just on translations or translating) has become respectable, more information and discussion about their various forms of collaboration have become available (e.g. Sternberg, 2015). Why then this neglect of theories about or analyses of MVT? Is it seen as merely peripheral or inferior as a translation technique? Or is its very obviousness a deterrent to investigators? To a large extent, these are unanswerable questions, since it would be difficult (impossible?) to set up a controlled experiment to test their comparative effectiveness. However, a survey of the kinds of MVT that currently exist may give some idea of its advantages and disadvantages.
