Translation and copyright: towards a distributed view of originality and authorship

This paper advances the concepts of translatophobia (the fear of translation) and translatophilia (the fetishisation of translation) to elucidate the tensions pivoting around translation in the development of copyright law. It addresses one specific issue at the intersection of these terms: ‘Does copyright law contradict itself in speaking of translations as original works?’ The paper argues that postpositivist theory conceives of originality and authorship as zero-sum concepts, hence positioning the translation and the original, the translator and the author in an irreconcilable relationship. It proposes a distributed view of originality and authorship, which allows us to appreciate how the author of an underlying work maintains a stake in the work over recursive scales of transformation, while allowing the translator(s) to share out that stake as the work distributes and scales itself across different languages, modes and media. The paper points out that the conception of translation and translators in postpositivist theory is as Romantic as how the author and the original are perceived to be constructed in copyright law, suggesting that for translation studies to engage the modern copyright regime productively, it must avoid turning translation into a fetish object.