Animal Farm afterlife: epitextual values

Abstract

Purpose

The present article seeks to further the analysis by examining the epitext employed by the press seeing as the epitext in the digital spaces might have given Animal Farm and its Thai re-translations a new lease on life.

Design/methodology/approach

The interest in the study of translation and paratext has primarily been in analysing peritextual material of translated texts, not on the epitext, the distanced elements located outside the book. To add to a limited amount of research into epitext, this study focusses on the element that is external to the published re-translations: the news items published by the media in the Thai and English languages from May–June 2019, immediately after the Thai PM’s book recommendation.

Findings

These news items, as an epitextual element, primed, explained, contextualised, justified and tempted readers. The “Afterlife” of Animal Farm in Thailand is sustained by political upheavals and re-translations. Rather than through their textual qualities, the re-translations of Animal Farm compete with each other through epitext.

Originality/value

In discussing literary re-translation of Animal Farm in the digital age, Genette’s categories of paratextual field are not without their merits. The materials examined in this article are posted by web administrators with collective identity or institutional affiliation. In some of these news items or articles, materials created by different paratextual creators are selectively coalesced within a singular textual space. The site users or news readers encounter various elements in the texts that had been curated by journalists. In other words, these elements had been consciously crafted.