Self-presentation of the translators language personality in the paratext
The article deals with topical issues of paratext in translation studies with the interdisciplinary approach in mind, since both scholars and translators themselves have realized the richness, complexity and diversity of factors and influences inherent in the process of translating a text from the source culture to the target culture. It is the point that determines the insight into the language personality of the translator and its expression in such a speech genre as self-presentation. The personal characteristics of the translator, his worldview, professional activity and relationships with readers are the focus of the scientific interest. The research is aimed at the manifestations of the linguistic personality in the translation paratext. The study corpus comprises prefaces and afterwords to translated English and Russian works of literature and interviews with the translators. The authors believe that the plethora of translation paratext reflects the translator's role as not only of an expert of the translated text, but mainly as a person capable of creating a highly artistic translation text, as well as generating his own linguistically persuasive text, which exegetes and explains the author's intent, actualizes the translator's work; earning the author a certain literary capital in the target culture. The analysis of the material is based on the selected quanta of meaning (units of meaning, which, on the one hand, are multidimensional, multifaceted, polysemic, on the other hand, indecomposable, indivisible) derived from the translator's paratext. Discursive analysis was applied to interpret the data. The research has no claim of being pervasive, on the contrary, it is suggested that the findings should be seen as an initial step in studying the specifics of the translator's self-presentation speech genre as it reveals his language personality, social and professional status and habitus and the interaction of the translator with the reader.