Remove "pubdate" attribute from Submitted Time tag in Drupal 7
So `$variables['submitted'] is the one you want to override in your theme's preprocess_node function. Try this as a starting point:

function ThemeName_preprocess_node(&amp;$variables) {
  $variables['submitted'] = t('Submitted by !username', array('!username' =&gt; $variables['name']));
}


Which will replace the $submitted variable with "Submitted by username" (where the username will be linked to the user's profile page).