GENDER AND THE PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION – LOUISE VON FLOTOW

 Effects of translating in an era of feminism:

1. Translators have sought out cotemporary women’s writing in order to translate
it into their own cultures. The experimental nature of this work made them deal
with enormous technical challenges in the translations.
2. Because the women’s movement has defined language as a powerful political
instrument, many women face issues of intervention and censorship in
translation. To what extent is does the translator’s role become overtly political
3. The interest in the lineage of important women writers and thinkers has created
an impressive corpus of ‘lost’ works. Having these text been recuperated, the
work of the translator moves beyond the bounds of translations and
incorporates annotation and criticism.
 Questions of gender awareness in translation practice:
1. Links between social stereotypes and linguistic forms
2. Politics of language and cultural difference
3. Ethics of translation
4. Reviving of inaccessible works for contemporary readers

EXPERIMENTAL FEMINIST WRITING AND ITS TRANSLATION

o The radical feminist writing in 1970s was experimental. It sought to undermine, subvert,
and even destroy the conventional everyday language maintained by institutions.
Feminists viewed this language as an instrument of women’s oppression and
subjugation which needed to be reformed, if not replaced by a new women’s language.
o Radical feminist writing in the late twentieth century explores new grounds, seeking to
develop new ideas and a new language for women. Writers have tried new words,
constructions and metaphors to get beyond the conventions of patriarchal language
that determine what women can think and write.
o Language will influence their creativity, affecting their ability to think inr evolutionary
terms and their capacity to produce new work.
o NICOLE BROSSARD  radical deconstructive mode. Through neologism she combines
words forming new meanings that deconstruct some ideas about the role of women
related only to motherhood and nurturing qualities. His approach is based on punds that
play on the fact that many words have similar sounds in French.
o MARY DALY  concerned with the way words that were once important to women, or
have once expressed women’s historical power and autonomy have been degraded in
patriarchy. She highlights the importance on linguistic innovation and on the renewal
and rehabilitation of gynocentric terms that have been derogatory meaning in
patriarchy.
o The female body has played an important thematic role. Much of the feminist work is
the recuperation of the objectified, obscured, vilified or domesticated female body. This
body is the source of women’s creative energy, a largely unknown entity that has long
been silenced and needs to be written.
Translating the body

 When women write the female body, they write on a subject that has been described in
terms of the stereotypes of the lover, the devoted and unsexed mother, or the
untouchable Holy Virgin.
 Feminists have identifies sexuality as the factor underlying these stereotypes and have
responded by breaking open these stereotypes and moving beyond these clichés.
 Writers have looked and developed vocabulary for censored or denigrated parts of the
female anatomy and tried to create erotic writing that appeals to women.
 French writers have been particularly innovative and bold in this regard, but translating
this French ‘body work’ into English causes distinct problems of word choice and opens
translators’ eyes to the limitations of their own languages. It also raise issues of self-
censorship and decorum.
 LOTBINIERE-HARWOOD  the specification needed in the transaltion of some words
indicates to what extent the terms for women’s sexual body have been thoroughly
colonized by male use and abuse. Translation in the feminine is a political act, and an
act of women’s solidarity.

Translating puns on cultural references

 For 1970s writers, women live in exile in patriarchal language; punning expresses
their pain, but it is also a way to fight back. Translating puns, on the other hand, has
proven to be a form of ‘pun-ishment’ in much feminist work.

Translating experiments with language

 Feminist experiments with language have raised another set of problems for the
translator. When the grammar of a language such as French dictates that nouns,
adjectives and participles need to be gender-identified, feminist writers can subvert
this gender requirement and the symbolic system that underlies it by applying the
grammar system differently  feminized neologisms.
 When the syntax of a language or its conventions of style are too restrictive for
women’s vision, the writer can change it.
 Brossard disrupts these power relationships in language by challenging our normal
expectations about punctuation, spacing and typography.
 The perpetual process of interaction that reading such texts implies is in some
danger of being lost in translation, where the translator makes definitive language
choices which may render the text less ambiguous.
 Experimental feminist writing has foregrounded the issue of gender in language and
caused translators to respond to the resulting technical and theoretical challenges.
When confronted with texts full of wordplay and fragmented syntax, translators
have had to develop creative methods similar to those of the source-text writers.
They had to go beyond making up for the differences between various patriarchal
languages.
INTERVENTIONIST FEMINIST TRANSLATION

o Translators may develop sympathies for experimental feminist writing, but thare are
certain translators who are already politicized that may take offence at texts that are
politically unacceptable  Newmark.
o NEWMARK  translators should ‘correct’ source material in the name of ‘moral facts
as known.’ He thinks feminists correct texts that they translate in the name of
‘feminists’ truths.
o Many women translators decided to query their source text from a feminist
perspective.
o Overt interventionism by translators is rather controversial since translators are
expected, even assumed, to keep their politics out of their work. However, as
translation historians know, deliberate changes have been made in rewritten texts,
and frequently in the name of some ideology.
o When feminist translators intervene in a text for political reasons, they demonstrate
how easily misogynist aspects of patriarchal language can be dismantled once they
have been identified as well as their decision making powers.

Translating machismo

 CAROL MAIER  translating Cuban male writers has raised issues of sexism. She
focuses on the sexist content of poems by Cuban poet Octavio Armand. These works
refer to the image of his birth “from my father’s womb”.

She had to review both the mother’s role in Armand’s work and her own relationship
to that role. In the work she founds a continual appearance of a strong father and
the faint trace of a mother who is almost a shadow.

The cultural context of the feminist era encourages her to express her criticism and
her standpoint as a translator.

The issue of intention becomes entangled with her identity as a North American
woman translator. She cannot reproduce the sexism of this Cuban male writer.

 SUZANNE JILL LEVINE  she faces similar differences when translating Guillermo
Cabrera Infante whose writing she describes as “oppressively male”, misogynist and
manipulative. He uses language to obscure and mocj women and their words.

Both of them react to the stereotypical postures of authority assumed or assigned to

male figures in the texts. None of the considers censorship as an option and choose to
undermine the text here and there, reinstating the mother or diminishing the man, but
keeping the texts available to readers.

Assertive feminist translation

 SUSANNE DE LOTBENIERE- HARWOOD  her tone is less conciliatory. She openly

practises feminist translation and for her no actof writing or translation is neutral
and rewriting in the feminine is an act that puts its card on the table from the very
 beginning. Translation becomes a political activity that has the objective of making
women visible and resident in language and society.
 Problems of sexism need not only to be pointed out but solved. And censorship is
definitely an option. She chooses to translate only female authors and this becomes
“the paradox of censorship in the name of feminism”, analogous to the rejection
suffered traditionally by women writers in patriarchy.
 She does not mitigate her interventionist measures with explanations about her
discomfort or dismay at patriarchal language, contrary to Maier and Levine.

RECOVERING WOMEN’S WORKS ‘LOST’ IN PATRIARCHY

o Feminists point out that the patriarchal canon has traditionally defined aesthetics
and literary value in terms that privileged work by male writers to the detriment of
women writers. A consequence is that much work has been ‘lost.’
o Translation begun to play an important role in making available the knowledge,
experiences and creative work of many earlier women writers.
o MASSARDIER-KENNEY  Translating Slavery, Gender and Race in French Women’s
Writing. The anthology assembles, translates and discusses the works of three late
eighteen and early nineteenth century French women who were prominent public
figures in their day. The source texts are translated and located in their historical
and cultural context. They are accompanied with commentaries in which the
editors and translators discuss why these texts have been ignored or denigrated by
scholars working in the patriarchal tradition, and present their arguments for
reviving these works.