O śmiałości tłumacza. Zofia Daszyńska i Aleksandra Bąkowska jako tłumaczki tekstów z dziedziny nauk społecznych

On the translator’s audacity. Zofia Daszyńska and Aleksandra Bąkowska as translators of social-science texts Summary Translators are often characterised as shy and invisible, even though their contri-butions to their target cultures have recently been increasingly emphasised both in translation studies, and in publishing practice. In reality, the shyness and invisibility was the effect of the Romantic approach to authorship and spanned the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the height of this period of invisibility, two Polish translators of social-science texts, Aleksandra Bąkowska and Zofia Daszyńska-Go-lińska, set out to violate the norm and left in the texts traces of their personal reading and translating process. The aim of the paper is to catalogue the ways in which the translators violated the invisibility norm and trace the reasons of the violations: Bąkowska followed a radically foreignising strategy, leaving in her translations scores of foreign phrases and adding erudite commentaries supplementing her authors’ texts. Daszyńska was even bolder – her interventions include changes of modality and explicitations to strengthen her authors’ arguments, additions to supplement or even ‘correct’ their claims, as well as copious footnotes to explain her translating choices, clarify, correct, and defend her authors from criticism or, inversely, criticise them herself. Since invisibility was the norm, the reasons for such clear subversion should be looked for in the translators’ own situation – Bąkowska was wealthy and well but informally educated, and her connection with her authors was personal, far transcending the purely translatorial sphere; whereas Daszyńska was one of the first women scholars in Poland, with a PhD in social sciences, but existing on the outskirts of the academe, unwelcome there as a woman. It seems that their practice is the result of this status of pariahs, being on the outside because of their gender. This status, according to Bourdieu, is what makes people revolutionaries, willing to violate norms precisely to gain visibility and a position.