Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the expanding corpus of Arabic fiction translated into English, Spanish, and French, paratextual elements have become mainstays of the translation industry, ranging from glossaries and footnotes, to introductions and translator’s notes. Through an analysis of paratextual elements present in these texts, I consider how paratexts, and glossaries in particular, represent instances of translation in translation, that is, literary mechanisms embedded within the boundaries of the translation that participate in the hermeneutical life of the translated text. Over the course of the past decade, I have built a database of digitized paratexts drawn from a broad swath of translated Arabic fiction published since 1970. Moving beyond the tensions between big data and ‘close reading’, I developed a database that encompasses over 500 titles of Arabic-to-English, Spanish, and French translations that would allow me to look not only at the intricacies of individual glossaries, but also at larger lexical trends over time. The database, while useful as a tool for bringing specific words into focus, as well as panning outwards to look for lexical patterns in the glossary, has also forced me to contend with the challenge of avoiding reductive causation when using big data. In that vein, this paper also considers the limitations of bridging literary analysis with digital research methods, and asks how techniques for analyzing big data can be limiting on the one hand, while also creating new methodological possibilities for a humanities-based project on the other.