Translator’s notes and enunciative heterogeneity in journalistic discourse: Salvador Mañer and Mr. Rousset in the Spanish version of Mercure historique et politique (1738-1744)

Abstract

This paper studies a corpus of journalistic texts written by Salvador Mañer, who introduced in Spain one of the most important newspapers during the earliest stages of the Spanish press, Mercurio histórico y político —which he translated between 1738 and 1744 from an original that was published in French in The Hague by Jean Rousset. The aim sought consists in analyzing the functions performed by the Translator's notes in the transmission of information and in the construction of a diaphonic relationship between the translator, the original author and the rest of the enunciative sources present in this work. Starting from the conceptualization of notions such as conceptional orality, interaction in absentia and diaphonic reformulations, offered by various authors in the field of linguistics of varieties and enunciation, our analysis reveals that, in his role as Translator's notes author, Mañer is a highly committed instance that interacts with the author of the original source through the mediation of the translated discourse to create a variety of structures in which the enunciative heterogeneity of the whole is explicitly shown.