When we enter the narrative box, preferably formulated by O’Sullivan’s model, we can come across two participants: the implied author and its counterpart, the implied reader. As early as 1961, when the concept of the ‘implied author’ was introduced by Booth (1961) in his Rhetoric of Fiction, there has been an increasing fuss over this concept. The list abounds , but it is not in the scope of this study to discuss the concept in detail, and sufficient it will be to give a general picture of this notion in order to set the scene to discuss its counterpart in the translation. To begin at the beginning, let me start with Booth’s original definition of the concept. Booth talks about the category of the author as a category of hypothetical subject …show more content…
Whether we call this implied author an ‘official scribe’, or … the author’s ‘second self’, it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner -- and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values (pp. 70- 71).
This definition raises some points. First, Booth emphasizes on the creative process of writing. It means that when a writer wants to create something, he is completely different from a common man. And it is in this process that he makes a version of himself. In other words, this version is an invented image of the writer in the process of the creation, not in the process of, for example, doing daily chores. In this sense, this new version of the real writer would be different from the versions of other men’s work. Booth designates this version or image as an ‘implied author’. Second, …show more content…
Naturally, when a writer is creating his/her own work, he thinks less about the target readers than the original ones. She is writing for her own readers who share with her the same language. Now, the real translator, as less an implied reader than the real reader, takes the role of the original author and tries to re-create the original work in a new language system, completely different from the real author’s language system. In fact, the translator, as one of the real readers of the work, becomes the second writer of the work for a new readership in a new context. If it is the case, what Booth has said with respect to the implied author can be also true for the real translator as an implied translator: just as the real author tries to leave an image of him in the work, the real translator can leave an image of him in his translation, and tries to figure out the kind of readership in the process of translating, as a creative activity. As one of the countless members of the real readers in the target language, this readership will be, in turn, the implied reader of his translation. As it is clear this implied reader of the target text will be different from that of the source text, since the ‘discourse’ plane, in which the implied reader has been embedded, is now operating in a new pragmatic context in the target language and culture. In this sense, as