ABSTRACT
The study of narrative has traditionally been first and foremost the domain of literary theorists and has thus largely focused on the forms and functions of fictional storytelling. Since the early 1990s, however, translation scholars have argued that much of this early body of work tended to overlook the impact of translation on fictional narratives, an area of study that could provide intriguing insights, both for translation studies and literary theory. Hermans uses the term contextual overdetermination to describe cases where the translator is left with no space to manoeuvre because of the strictures of the narrative context. The methodological difficulty associated with systematically identifying and keeping track of shifts in narrative structures across extended bodies of text remains a concern for researchers working in this area. M. Baker’s Translation and Conflict is widely considered the first major application of the ‘socio-narrative’ theory in translation studies.
