The turn of affects over reason: a case of translatorial intervention ressignified

Abstract

“Ontological narratives are personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our own personal history”. This definition, among the four types of narratives presented by Mona Baker (2006), is the one she brings to translation studies, along with other concepts developed mainly in sociology. The author proposes socionarrative as a process encompassing several texts and enabling the narrator-translator to take a stand when faced with conflicting situations whose narratives are reproduced or built by means of translation and interpretation. After discussing the presence of affects and emotions in translation practice, we present an ontological narrative of an experience lived by one of the authors, which was, in a first moment, interpreted by herself as a reaction at the level of ethics and rationality, and that came to be ressignified, after a questioning from one examiner of the committee who discussed her Memorial, about what the author-translator had felt in that situation. With the help of reflections developed in the Human Sciences in general (AHMED 2014), and in the field of translation in particular (ROBINSON, 1991; 2003; 2020), the main objective of this article is to discuss the reactions of the translator and of some readers of the translated text, as well as their possible impacts on the conceptual narratives about translation.