Contextual factors when reading a translated academic text

This study builds on Taivalkoski-Shilov’s (2015b) work on the reception of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité in Finland, as translated by Kaisa Sivenius in 1998. It examines how two non-interdependent factors that proved central to the reception of Sivenius’s translation in Taivalkoski-Shilov’s study – paratexts and readers’ academic background – affect how readers react to a translated academic text. Our empirical study on Finnish university students reading Sivenius’s translation consisted of two parts: an eye-tracking study followed by short interviews and a reading task given to some participants with a request to write a narrative report. The participants were divided into five different groups with six to eight participants. We studied the effect of paratexts on three groups in an eye-tracking study, prior to which each group read a different paratext. The effect of academic background was studied by an analysis of narrative reports that two groups with different academic backgrounds (translator students and non-translator students) wrote about their reading experience. The analysis of the eye-tracking data gives some evidence that the paratexts read prior to reading the text sample influenced the participants’ perspective in regard to the translation. The narrative reports indicate that the participants’ academic background affected the way they reacted to Sivenius’s translation. Consequently, this study suggests that voices that surround both texts and their readers influence how these readers respond to translated academic texts.