ABSTRACT
A provisional architecture serves as a heuristic, a conceptual aid, for the purposes at hand. Adopting a useful framework from French literary theorist Genette (1997), Munday, in his book Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (2012b), applies the metatextual terms ‘paratext’, ‘peritext’, and ‘epitext’ to the field of translation studies. Munday (2012b, 233) summarises that a paratext may take the form of a peritext “provided by the author or publisher” in the same textual location as the central target language text (TLT). For the present purposes, a peritext could be a commentary-type genre such as a translator preface or epilogue, which often stand on their own as theoretico-methodological metatexts (a text about a text). An epitext, in contrast, is “not materially appended to the text within the same volume”, and examples would include “reviews and academic and critical discourse on the author and text [read here for us as the TLT] which are written by others” (Munday 2012b, 233). Genette clarifies that the “paratext is ‘subordinate’ to the text but it is crucial in guiding the reading process” (Munday 2012b, 233). For us, the TLT becomes our main text from which metatextual and paratextual considerations such as peritexts and epitexts – literary translation criticism (LTC), reviews and assessment – issue.
