Research Article Nadina Vișan* “‘Peewit,’ said a peewit, very remote.” – Notes on quotatives in literary translation https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2022-0195 received May 21, 2022; accepted June 24, 2022 Abstract: The present article focuses on strategies of translating fiction quotatives from English into Romanian. Starting from the definition of quotatives as structures that in their simplest form consist of a subject and a quoting verb and accompany a quotation, I have selected two samples of literary text and their respective multiple versions so as to investigate patterns in which these structures are translated. Because, as pointed out in the literature, fiction quotatives describe narrative-advancing events and con- tribute to the development of characters, the investigation of how fiction quotatives are translated (in particular how say, the most frequently used verb in quotatives, is treated in translation) might prove to offer valuable insight for literary translation studies, correlating tendencies that seem to be cross-linguistic. For instance, it has been demonstrated that in Spanish there is a tendency of replacing the generic quoting verb say with other manner of speaking verbs. This may be seen as a form of “enrichment” as a translation strategy. The article advances the hypothesis that a similar phenomenon can be attributed to Romanian and links this phenomenon to parametric variation in English and Romance. Keywords: say quoting verbs, manner of speaking verbs, quotative inversion, replacement, equivalence, explicitation, enrichment, omission. 1 Introduction The aim of the present article is to investigate strategies of translating quotatives in literary texts (narra- tives) from English into Romanian. I am especially interested in the translation of say quotatives, which are the mark of fiction in English, as proved in a series of studies (Rojo and Valenzuela 2001, Sams 2009 inter alia). It has already been shown that in the case of Spanish (Rojo Valenzuela 2001) say quotatives are frequently replaced by other structures, such as manner of speaking verbs (henceforth MoS verbs). I intend to look at a corpus consisting of samples taken from two fiction texts in English and their respective Romanian versions in order to see whether a similar phenomenon can be observed in the case of Romanian. Given the fact that, to my knowledge, there are no studies investigating what happens to quotatives in Romanian translations, I believe that this study might shed some light into this matter and offer a basis for future research that can be extended cross-linguistically.  * Corresponding author: Nadina Vișan, English Department, School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, 010451, Romania, e-mail: nadina.visan@lls.unibuc.ro ORCID: Nadina Vișan 0000-0001-8291-7848 Open Linguistics 2022; 8: 354–367 Open Access. © 2022 Nadina Vișan, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.