ABSTRACT
The idea of translators as active and responsible agents of the translation process has played a constant and central part throughout this course. Indeed, the personal responsibilities of translators are, in our view, of paramount importance. Although loyalties may genuinely be divided between responsibilities to the author of the ST, to the manifest properties and features of the ST (in particular, with a view to what is there in black and white in a written ST, as opposed to what its author may have intended), to the ‘paymaster’ by whom a TT has been commissioned, and to a putative public for whom the TT is meant, it is, in the end, the translator who is responsible for submitting a particular TT. Responsibility entails decisions, and it is with this in mind that we have insisted at every juncture on the key notions of strategy and decisions of detail, stressing the idea that decisions of detail should be rationally linked to the prior formulation of an overall strategy for translating a particular text in a particular set of circumstances.
