ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the trajectory of my engagement with the work of Theo Hermans and some of the ways in which it impacted my intellectual and personal development over the past three decades. It focuses on specific areas of his scholarship that liberated translation studies from its traditional preoccupation with static concepts and neat systems of categorization, and highlights the cultural inclusivity and critical self-reflexiveness of his vision for the discipline. Two major thematic strands running through his prolific scholarly output are identified and discussed in some detail. The first focuses on the translator’s voice and subject position, and foregrounds the active, pervasive presence of translators in the text. The second details some of the ways in which translators can nevertheless be written out of the picture through various processes of authentication that endow the translated text with the authority of an original at the same time as removing all traces of its creator.
