Translation and Gender: Translating in the 'Era of Feminism'

Preface

Preface This work on gender and translation has developed out of my interests in feminist explorations of gender as a cultural construct and in translation as cultural transfer. Over the past thirty years, and as a result of the women's movement, gender issues have become entangled with issues of language. Over the same period, translation studies has developed as a part of the more general turn toward cultural studies. The complexities of translational gender relations and the resulting critical work are the subject of this book. Gender studies and translation studies are both interdisciplinary academic fields. When they are brought into relationship with one another, a number of issues intersect: cultural gender differences, the revelation and formulation of these differences in language, their transfer by means of translation into other cultural spaces where different gender conditions obtain. Questions arise about the importance of gender politics in institutions, and the gender affiliations of the translator and the critic become an issue. Language is, of course, highly pertinent toboth areas of investigation;discussions of 'patriarchal language' haveplayed an important role in feminist research on gender, and language transfer is the basic element under discussion in translation studies. Given the political weight that both feminist thinkers and the 'political correctness' reaction have assigned to language, it is clear that gender must become an issue in translation. It is important to note thatalthough gender studies and translationstudies may be contemporaneous fields of scholarship, their development has not been parallel. Translation studies has seen rapid development in Europe over the past decade, a development doubtless fostered by a political and economic climate encouraging cultural and economic exchange between different language groups. This has also been the case in Canada, where official bilingualismhas been an important catalyst triggering translation as well as academic work on translation. In the USA, translation studies still plays a somewhat minor role, though the visibilityof the field has recently increased dramatically through the efforts of a number of active individuals. Gender studies has developed differently, achievingthe greatest influence in North America; the 'era of feminism' thatbegan inthe late 1960s and affected academic and public life as well as 'high' and popular culture has been instrumental in shapingthe historicaland scholarlycontext of itsgeneration. Feminist work has entered and had an impact upon almost every academic discipline. In many parts of Europe, on the other hand, there has been less academic interest in gender studies. While muchacademic work on gender is imported from North America (and translated),gender studies, women's 1 Preface studies programmes or the like - which might encourage research into specifically European situations- arerare. My purpose is to bring these two disciplines together, making disparate information available to students of translation on both sides of the Atlantic. By describing some of the links and inter-connections between gender issues and translation studies, I hope to inform, stimulate discussion and encourage further research into the intersections of these two fields. This objective reflects a feminist activist agenda on my part, as I demonstrate to what extent gender awareness affects international discussion, research and communication. But it also reflects an academic interest in cultural studies —in the differences between cultures and the individuals within them —and the way translation both promotes and hampers understanding and interaction. In writing this book, I have assembled diverse publications gleaned from primarily North American sources. I have also used a number of unpublished materials, most of which are of European origin. These materials were produced for the 1995 conference of the European Society for Translation Studies held in Prague, at which I organized and chaired a session on gender and translation. Since they will not be appearing in the conference proceedings, I have considered it important to cite them extensively. My perspective has, of course, been defined by my own experience and my limitations: a North American bilingual, bicultural (immigrant) background , academic work in French, German and Quebec literatures during the 'era of feminism', and literary translation. There is doubtless much material I have not been able to refer to, for instance work produced in Scandinavian countries. Still, the amount of contemporary material I did have access to has sufficed to provide an overview. The book is divided into seven chapters, starting with a historical introduction that summarizes the way the women's movement has problematized language. In chapter 2,1examine the influences that feminist thought and writing have had on contemporary translation practice. I look at a number of 'technical' questions such as translating 'the...