This book explores the role of gender in male- and female-produced efforts to translate a Chinese novel into English. Adopting the CDA framework and corpus methodology, the study examines the specific ways in which, and extent to which, a female British translator and a male American translator construct their gender identity in translation. Based on an analysis of the two translations’ textual and paratextual features, it reveals the fascinating ways in which language, gender and translation interact. The book is intended for anyone who is interested in gender and translation studies, particularly in applying the new corpus methodology to exploring the interface between gender and translation in the Chinese context.
Gender in Translation is a broad-ranging, imaginative and lively look at feminist issues surrounding translation studies. Students and teachers of translation studies, linguistics, gender studies and women's studies will find this unprecedented work invaluable and thought-provoking reading. Sherry Simon argues that translation of feminist texts - with a view to promoting feminist perspectives - is a cultural intervention, seeking to create new cultural meanings and bring about social change. She takes a close look at specific issues which include: the history of feminist theories of language and translation studies; linguistic issues, including a critical examination of the work of Luce Irigaray; a look at women translators through history, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century; feminist translations of the Bible; an analysis of the ways in which French feminist texts such as De Beauvoir's The Second Sex have been translated into English.
The last thirty years of intellectual and artistic creativity in the 20th century have been marked by gender issues. Translation practice, translation theory and translation criticism have also been powerfully affected by the focus on gender. As a result of feminist praxis and criticism and the simultaneous emphasis on culture in translation studies, translation has become an important site for the exploration of the cultural impact of gender and the gender-specific influence of cuture. With the dismantling of 'universal' meaning and the struggle for women's visibility in feminist work, and with the interest in translation as a visible factor in cultural exchange, the linking of gender and translation has created fertile ground for explorations of influence in writing, rewriting and reading. Translation and Gender places recent work in translation against the background of the women's movement and its critique of 'patriarchal' language. It explains translation practices derived from experimental feminist writing, the development of openly interventionist translation strategies, the initiative to retranslate fundamental texts such as the Bible, translating as a way of recuperating writings 'lost' in patriarchy, and translation history as a means of focusing on women translators of the past.
This book explores the ways in which translation deals with sexual and textual undecidability, adopting an interdisciplinary approach bridging translation, transgender studies, and queer studies in analyzing the translations of six texts in English, French, and Spanish labelled as ‘trans.’ Rose draws on experimental translation methods, such as the use of the palimpsest, and builds on theory from areas such as philosophy, linguistics, queer studies, and transgender studies and the work of such thinkers as Derrida and Deleuze to encourage critical thinking around how all texts and trans texts specifically work to be queer and how queerness in translation might be celebrated. These texts illustrate the ways in which their authors play language games and how these can be translated between languages that use gender in different ways and the subsequent implications for our understanding of the act of translation and how we present our gender identity or identities. In showing what translation and transgender identity can learn from one another, Rose lays the foundation for future directions for research into the translation of trans identity, making this book key reading for scholars in translation studies, transgender studies, and queer studies.
Since the “cultural turn” in the 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to ideological concerns and gender issues in relation to translation studies. This volume is a further illustration of this trend and focuses on the intersection of translation theory and practice with ideological constraints and gender issues in a variety of cross-cultural, geographical and historical contexts. The book is divided into three parts, with the first devoted to the health sciences, examining gender bias in medical textbooks, and the language and sociocultural barriers involved in obtaining health services in Morocco. The second part addresses the interaction of the three themes on the representation of gender and the construction of the female image both in diverse narrative texts and the presence of women in the translation of poetic works in Franco’s Spain. Finally, Part Three explores editorial policies and translator ethics in relation to feminist writing or translation in the context of Europe with special reference to Italy, and in the world of magazines aimed at a female readership.
Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives situates feminist translation as political activism. Chapters highlight the multiple agendas and visions of feminist translation and the different political voices and cultural heritages through which it speaks across times and places, addressing the question of how both literary and nonliterary discourses migrate and contribute to local and transnational processes of feminist knowledge building and political activism. This collection does not pursue a narrow, fixed definition of feminism that is based solely on (Eurocentric or West-centric) gender politics—rather, Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives seeks to expand our understanding of feminist action not only to include feminist translation as resistance against multiple forms of domination, but also to rethink feminist translation through feminist theories and practices developed in different geohistorical and disciplinary contexts. In so doing, the collection expands the geopolitical, sociocultural and historical scope of the field from different disciplinary perspectives, pointing towards a more transnational, interdisciplinary and overtly political conceptualization of translation studies.
By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre. Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular “originals”; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.
Of interest to scholars in translation studies, gender and sexuality, and comparative literary and cultural studies, this volume re-examines the possibilities for multiple intersections between translation studies and research on sexuality and gender, and in so doing addresses the persistent theoretical gaps in much work on translation and gender to date. The current climate still seems to promote the continuation of identity politics by encouraging conversations that depart from an all too often limited range of essentializing gendered subject positions. A more inclusive approach to the theoretical intersection between translation and gender as proposed by this volume aims to open up the discussion to a wider range of linguistically and culturally informed representations of sexuality and gender, one in which neither of these two theoretical terms, much less the subjects associated with them, is considered secondary or subordinate to the other. This discussion extends not only to questions of linguistic difference as mediated through the act of translation, but also to the challenges of intersubjectivity as negotiated through culture, 'race' or ethnicity. The volume also makes a priority of engaging a wide range of cultural and linguistic spaces: Latin America under military dictatorship, numerous points of the African cultural diaspora, and voices from South, Southeast and East Asia. Such perspectives are not included merely as supplemental, 'minority' additions to an otherwise metropolitan-centred volume, but instead are integral to the volume's focus, underscoring its goal of re-engendering translation studies through a politics of alterity that encourages the continued articulation and translation of difference, be it sexual or gendered, cultural or linguistic.
This book focuses on women and translation in cultures 'across other horizons' well beyond the European or Anglo-American centres. Drawing on transnational feminist connections, its editors have assembled work from four continents and included articles from Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Columbia and beyond. Thirteen different chapters explore questions around women's roles in translation: as authors, or translators, or theoreticians. In doing so, they open new territories for studies in the area of 'gender and translation' and stimulate academic work on questions in this field around the world. The articles examine the impact of 'Western' feminism when translated to other cultures; they describe translation projects devised to import and make meaningful feminist texts from other places; they engage with the politics of publishing translations by women authors in other cultures, and the role of women translators play in developing new ideas. The diverse approaches to questions around women and translation developed in this collection speak to the volume of unexplored material that has yet to be addressed in this field.
