Translating, Revising, Editing: Finnish translations of Les Misérables

The present article examines the translation and retranslation of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables into Finnish. Several problems of the textual comparison of translations come into focus: identification of translations and their source or mediating texts, locating the texts, establishing connections between texts, and contex- tualizing research. One of the findings (and problems) is the mismatch between textual changes and paratextual clues. This phenomenon is connected to the larger theoretical and methodological issue of categorizing textual manipulation in translation research. Translating, retranslating, editing, and abbreviating are forms of textual change which are generally considered separately, even if they often overlap. Even the very process of determining what are valid categories can be questioned. Furthermore, the agents involved; publishers, translators and editors, as well as readers, may have had different aims and opinions about translating, which then lead to widely diverging conceptions about the nature of textual manipulation.