Gender and Paratextual Visibility: A Case Study of Iranian Fiction Translators

Radical orientation in the feminist movement evoked numerous criticisms calling for a more neutral and non-political paradigm toward women. The urge for visibility is a long-established intersection between gender and translation. Paratexts, as elements outside the text proper, have created a promising avenue for redirecting translators’ visibility outside the textual background. This study sets out to investigate how male and female fiction translators employ their prefaces as an opportunity to elaborate on themselves as translators and their profession as a delicate and serious task. One hundred translators’ prefaces in the fictions translated from English into Persian were analyzed using thematic analysis. The contents of translation- and translator-oriented themes reflected female translators’ preference for speaking in the first person and asserting more personal accounts, whereas men preferred the third-person point of view and focused mostly on introducing the original authors and their works. The overall results of this study showed that female and male translators were mostly reluctant to talk about their translation process and its possible challenges or delicacies.