This article was downloaded by: [University of Ottawa]

On: 30 July 2015, At: 08:58

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG

The Translator
Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrn20

Towards a Redefinition of
Feminist Translation Practice
a
Françoise Massardier-Kenney
a
Kent State University, USA
Published online: 21 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Françoise Massardier-Kenney (1997) Towards a

Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice, The Translator, 3:1, 55-69, DOI:
10.1080/13556509.1997.10798988

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.1997.10798988

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
 forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015
 The Translator. Volume 3, Number 1 (1997),55-69

Towards a Redefinition of Feminist

Translation Practice

FRAN~OISE MASSARDIER-KENNEY
Kent State University, USA

Abstract. This article explores the ways in which translation can

be engaged at the service ofthe 'feminine' through an examination
of feminist-identified translation and an attempt to redefine the
term 'feminist' itself. It argues that 'feminist' translation, however
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

defined, adapts existing translation strategies rather than invent

new ones. These strategies are categorized as author-centred and
translator-centred. Author-centred strategies include recovery,
commentary and resistance; translator-centred strategies include
commentary, use ofparallel texts and collaboration. Each strategy
is discussed in some detail and exemplified. The article concludes
that in spite of weaknesses of definition, 'feminist' translation
practices present clear and significant gains rather than a re-
striction of the translator's activity.

In Maier and Massardier-Kenney (1996), Carol Maier and I pointed out the
destabilizing effect that translation can have on the idea of 'woman' as a se-
cure base, given that "gender definitions prove to be neither universal nor
absolute manifestations of inherent differences but relatively local, constantly
changing constructions" (ibid: 10). We called for an exploration of the ways in
which translation might lead one to rethink gender and gender identity, by
setting aside definitions that seemed 'natural' to the translator and by attempt-
ing to work with whatever definitions of gender the source text might present.
We also suggested that translators can use their practice as a vehicle for inter-
rogating the complexities of the bond that translation has with gender and chose
to use terms like 'woman-identified' and 'gender' rather than the term 'femi-
nist' , which we found problematic for anyone wanting to interrogate the very
category of gender. Our concern with feminism was that it imposed specific
definitions without recognizing that the source text might work from a differ-
ent set of definitions. 1 Thus the use of 'feminist' or 'woman' provides an unstable
point of departure for translation practice. Active translation does not depart
from predetermined gender definitions but must lead to an interrogation of
such gender definitions and roles.
However, this interrogation of gender in my activity both as a translation
practitioner and theorist has now led me to wonder if 'gender' might not have
its perils as well: the interrogation of gender has begun to reveal that what is

ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

 56 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

defined as the feminine or as woman/women tends to be viewed not only as

different but as something of lesser value than the other (implied or stated)
term. This devalued difference, to use a term now common in cultural studies,
is present in a variety of contexts, even though the definitions at work in these
contexts may differ. As European feminists like Braidotti (1994) and theoreti-
cians of sexual difference like Butler (1994) have recently argued, the notion
of gender "tends toward sociologism" (Butler 1994: 18); in other words it ig-
nores the radical asymmetry in the formation of the masculine and the feminine
(ibid) and thus, as I increasingly discovered in my translation practice, masks
the power imbalance between the two terms.
I would now like to explore the ways in which translation can be engaged
at the service, so to speak, of this devalued feminine, especially as a number of
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

translators and translation scholars do identify their work as 'feminist' . It may

be helpful to redefine the use of the terms 'feminist' or 'feminine' in a way that
acknowledges their complexity and perhaps the inevitability of their theoreti-
cal inadequacy. A redefinition and careful use of these terms can describe a
translation practice that is militant in its focus on the fact that the speaking/
writing subject (whether author or translator) is a woman (i.e. a 'devalued
difference'), whether woman refers to a set of cultural constructions or to pre-
symbolic, essential differences. 2 Such a focus will thus presuppose the
representability of a female subject, but with the understanding that although
the feminine is taken as a privileged element of identity, it may be inseparable
from other elements of devalorization such as class, racialization or nation-
alization. 3
Recent work presented as feminist has included discussions by a number of
Canadian critics and translators such as Godard (1990) and de Lotbiniere-
Harwood (1991). These scholars have explored the connections between
feminism and translation in the context of French translation. Feminist French
Canadian writer Nicole Brossard has commented that "[t]he question which
translation raises as does writing is that of choice. What signifier to choose to
activate a surface of multiple signifieds that vibrate invisible and effective in
the space of consciousness" (cited in Godard 1983: 197); and de Lotbiniere-
Harwood answered that for the feminist translator, the foremost goal is "to
make the feminine - i.e., women - visible in this text" (de Lotbiniere-Harwood
1991: 101).
This answer assumes that we are working with a set, stable definition of
the feminine that is independent of context. When de Lotbiniere-Harwood
mentions rewriting texts in the feminine or making the feminine visible, she is
speaking about the translation of source texts that are consciously working to
express this feminine, texts like those of Nicole Brossard for example, and that
allow the translator to work from "a place of commitment to a gynocentric
(i.e., woman-centred) world view" (ibid: 153). Likewise, Godard's discussion
of feminism and translation is placed within a specific tradition of French femi-
 Franr;oise Massardier-Kenney 57

nism which tends to essentialize feminine difference, a tradition represented

by writers like Luce lrigaray and Helene Cixous.

1. Feminism in translation as a contested concept

The question for me, however, is whether one can attempt to make the so-
called feminine subject visible in language without positing set definitions and
by working with texts which are not necessarily what a contemporary North
American or European would consider feminist, either because they were written
before feminism developed or because they come from a cultural context in
which feminism is not a viable strategy.4 Of course, the question itself of what
feminism is in the United States and elsewhere is controversial. As Schor (1992)
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

has suggested in an essay on the nineteenth-century French woman author

George Sand, feminism is the very debate between different demands; it is the
clashing between claims of equality and claims for difference, between the
denunciation of the inferior position of women created by cultural conditions
and the affirmation of a transhistorical nature (Schor 1992:28). Fraser de-
scribes feminism in a similar way when she says that "the movement in the
U.S. today encompasses a continuum of struggles in which demands for social
and legal reforms are inextricable from symbolic struggles over social identi-
ties and cultural meanings" (Fraser 1992:3). For Fraser, feminism is the
interrogation of the formation of social (i.e. gender) identities and of the pro-
cess by which women as a group are excluded from social institutions and
discourses. The goal of making the feminine subject visible in language may
thus mean a host of different strategies that derive either from the translator's
or the author's own subjectivities.
The problems that can arise from using the term 'feminist' to describe trans-
lation strategies without prior redefinitions are evident in von Flotow (1991),
an article which describes three main feminist strategies: supplementing, pref-
acing/footnoting and 'hijacking' . If we look at the explanation of these strategies,
we find that it is not the strategies themselves that are feminist, assuming the
notion of feminist itself is clear and non-controversial, but rather the use to
which these strategies are put. Von Flotow's notion of supplementing, which
"compensates for the differences between languages or constitutes "voluntarist"
action on the text" (ibid:75), looks very much like the old translation strategy
called 'compensation'.5 Moreover, as Delisle (1993) has pointed out, such
'voluntarist' action on the text is not specific to feminist translators; it was
typical of medieval translators too. What is feminist then is the use to which
this strategy is put in order to emphasize the woman's point of view that was
present in the source text and that the translator is determined to carryover.
The same observation can be made about the other two strategies noted by
von Flotow (1991). Prefacing and footnoting have been used widely for pur-
poses other than feminist ones. As for highjacking, this is correctly described
 58 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

as feminist since it consists of deliberately "feminizing the target text", as in

the (much quoted) example of feminist translator Gaborian, who translated
"Ce soir j'entre dans l'histoire sans relever majupe" (literally: Tonight I enter
history without lifting my skirt) as "Tonight, I shall step into history without
opening my legs" (cited in Voldeng 1984). And yet, the term highjacking itself
seems to suggest an act of terrorism involving physical violence by which the
source text is taken hostage for the purpose of 'feminizing' it. Von Flotow
borrowed the term from a critic who objected to the excessive interference of
Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood in the translation of Lettres d'une autre by
French Canadian Lise Gauvin, but such borrowing of terms contributes to the
view that feminism is an unnatural act of violence, that making the feminine
visible can only mean distortion and extortion, surely not what those who call
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

themselves feminist translators actually mean. Propagating the use of meta-

phors like 'highjacking' will only contribute to obfuscate further what "making
the feminine visible in language" means and prevent translators from reflect-
ing upon the actual process of 'feminizing' a text.

2. Strategies in feminist translation practice

I would suggest that feminist translation practice can start by acknowledging

that the notion of the 'feminine' is extremely complex and is a constructed
category; secondly, in order to reach the goal of "making the feminine visible"
in language, feminist translators should be aware that they are adapting existing
translation strategies rather than inventing new ones. The major strategies that
have been or can be adapted to advance a feminist agenda (i.e. to problematize
the minimization of what is defined as the feminine or as woman/women) can
be fruitfully categorized as author-centred or translator-centred. Author-centred
strategies include recovery, commentary and resistancy; translator-centred
strategies include commentary, use of parallel texts and collaboration.

2.1. Author-centred strategies

Author-centred strategies seek to make the reader understand the source text.
Although strategies could be categorized in a number of different ways, for
example reader-centred, source literature-centred or target-literature centred,
the categories termed author-centred and translator-centred are particularly
useful within a feminist framework because they highlight the importance of
women as producers of texts (be it as authors or translators). The structuralist
dismissal of the notion of 'author' has primarily been possible because the
authors referred to were always gendered as males (and European and white,
we might add) and had enjoyed a long life before the critics declared them
dead. But the discourse about women as authors has just begun; of course, the
word author here is not understood as the old universal category of the man of
 Fran(:oise Massardier-Kenney 59

genius but rather as "producer of text", a notion which allows for the interplay
of an individual agency (i.e. the gendered author) with the cultural forces that
shape that 'author'. Similarly, we need to speak of 'translator-centred strat-
egy', rather than simply 'reader-centred strategy' because, here again, the
specificity of the translator's activities and motivations needs to be examined
more thoroughly, especially in translation studies.
The first author-centred strategy, recovery, consists of the widening and
reshaping of canon. One possible way to define what feminist means in the
context of translation is to take "women's experience as a starting point", as
de Lotbiniere-Harwood has suggested (1991 :73), and to contribute through
translation to a rethinking of the canon from which women's experience has
been excluded. To take but one example, that of nineteenth-century French
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

texts, this archaeological task of finding, publishing and translating texts by

women authors who were previously excluded from the canon has proved cru-
cial. Recently the works of two major women authors, Germaine de Stael and
George Sand, have been rediscovered and their contribution both to a tradition
of women writing and to French Romanticism and Idealism has been estab-
lished through the publication of translations of their works. One thinks in
particular of the translation of Madame de Stael' s Corinne by Avriel Goldberger
(published by Rutgers University Press in 1991), the group translation of George
Sand's autobiography Story ofMy Life under the direction of Thelma Jurgrau
(published by the State University of New York Press, also in 1991), as well
as the publication in French and in English of Fran~oise de Graffigny's Let-
ters ofa Peruvian Woman in the accessible MLA Texts and Translations series
(1992). Because these writers have been published and translated, the outline
of French literary history has shifted. But much remains to be done. Specific
works that show these authors to be interested in sensitive issues such as gen-
der and race have been left aside. For instance, the essay on women by George
Sand, 'Letters to Marcie' , is unavailable in a modern edition and its transla-
tion into English has been delayed even though some of her minor novels have
come out. Similarly, an engage short story by Madame de Stael, 'Mirza', was
all but unknown until the 1990s. In Spanish, the work of a major author like
Rosa Chacel, for instance, has only recently started to be translated into Eng-
lish. And although a number of anthologies of women authors have appeared
in recent years,6 many more Hispanic women writers remain untranslated and
unread. For instance, as the editing and translating of the works of Hispanic
nuns by Arenal and Powell (1989) suggest, there is a wealth of writing (es-
says, poetry, etc.) by Hispanic nuns that needs to be published and translated.
To this day, the poetry of a major poet like Eunice Odio is unavailable in
English, as is the work of nineteenth-century peninsular writer Emilia Pardo
Bazan.
Besides making a deliberate effort to extend the canon through the transla-
tion of women authors, one other strategy used by feminist translators is what
 60 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

I shall refer to here as commentary. This involves using the metadiscourse

accompanying the translation to make explicit the importance of the feminine
or of woman/women (either in terms of structural constraints or in terms of
women's agency) in the text translated. Venuti (1992) has shown that a number
of translators are now insisting on making their work visible by adding to their
translations prefaces or afterwords in which they reflect not only on the trans-
lation strategies they used but also on the significance of the writer whose
work they are bringing into the target language. For example, the afterword of
a recent translation by Carol Maier of Rosa Chacel' s Memoirs ofLeticia Valle
does much to introduce Chacel to the contemporary reader and to situate her
by discussing her relation to gender issues; but because of the author's "re-
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

fusal of any efforts to define and create a 'feminine' identity", the translator
finds it inappropriate to focus a discussion of her work solely on "women is-
sues" (Maier 1994: 187). In this instance, the translator uses her afterword not
only to stress the importance of gender in Chacel' s work but also to problematize
words like "feminist" that may be "less international than some critics and
translators acknowledge" (ibid: 189). Although feminist Hispanists may not
consider these comments 'feminist' in the traditional sense, those comments
do focus on the importance of the feminine even as they point out the limits of
specific definitions. This type of metadiscourse reminds the reader that trans-
lating is an activity which creates authority for the writer translated, that the
translator is a critic responsible for introducing and marketing a specific 'im-
age' of that writer.
The presence of such metadiscourse makes it possible to counteract the
immediacy of the translated text and the feeling of familiarity which a transla-
tion necessarily induces to some degree; this immediacy and familiarity often
lead us to forget about the difference that the source text presented. Spivak
(1992) has pointed out the danger of a false sense of familiarity with a foreign
text or author, especially with the translations of Third World texts that obvi-
ously focus on women writing. In that case, the feminist 'bond' existing between
translator and author must not be used to erase the culture gap. When translat-
ing texts like 'Mirza' , an eighteenth-century negrophile story by French writer
Germaine de Stael, this metadiscourse is all the more important because the
styIe of the story is fluent; in other words the story does not call attention to
itself through obvious experimentation, and it is therefore difficult to avoid
producing a translation that is transparent.
Lawrence Venuti (1992, 1995) advocates what he calls resistancy in trans-
lation, i.e. making the labour of translation visible through linguistic means
that have a defamiliarizing effect and that work against easy fluency. This
notion can mostly be applied to modernist or post-modernist source texts that
already challenge the literary/linguistic conventions of their source languages;
but, as we shall see, it can also be fruitfully adapted to serve the objectives of
'feminist' translation, however defined. Indeed, resistancy works well with
 Fran~oise Massardier-Kenney 61

experimental feminist writers like Monique Wittig, whose texts challenge the
(patriarchal) linguistic conventions of French through a reworking of French
grammatical gender (le genre) as expressed, for instance, in subject pronouns
and male/female endings of substantives. Wittig's texts do indeed resist the
structure of her native French, and Venuti's concept of resistancy encourages
the feminist translator to find ways to similarly challenge the norms of stand-
ard English. Likewise, the notion of resistancy can be applied to the works of
Quebec feminist writers who, as von Flotow has explained, produced "work
that was highly experimental, and constituted efforts to attack, deconstruct, or
simply bypass the conventional language they perceived as inherently misogy-
nist" (1991 :72). 7
However, the notion of resistancy needs to be adapted to deal with texts
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

that do not use stylistic innovations to explore gender (this includes most pre-
contemporary texts). When texts do not invite stylistic tactics of estrangement,
the matter surrounding the translation can become an integral part of the text
and contribute to its resistancy, pushing against its automatic insertion in the
target culture. The notion of thick translation, proposed by cultural critic
Kwame Anthony Appiah, can also be fruitfully explored in the context offemi-
nist translation. Appiah (1993) uses the term 'thick translation' 8 to refer to a
translation "that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to
locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context" in an effort to attend to
"how various other people really are or were" (1993:817). He directly links
this understanding of "the reasons characteristic of other cultures" to a peda-
gogical project that aims at creating in students a new appreciation of and
respect for people of other times and cultures. Thus the notion of thick transla-
tion could be very useful in our current context in that it would allow the
translator to point out the importance of what is women-identified in terms of
literary production. Appiah rightly points out that this type of translation is
'academic' in the sense that it is associated with literary teaching; it is associ-
ated with the general objective of seeking to understand why people have spoken
or written the way they have. This academic mode of translation does not treat
the text as a thing made only to be bought and devoured but as a gendered,
linguistic, historical, commercial and political event. Appiah is speaking spe-
cifically in this instance about translating African proverbs, but his notion
of thick translation can obviously apply equally well to texts from other cul-
tural contexts.
Understanding the motivations of other times and other people is one of
the basic tasks of the translator, and that task can be achieved not only through
annotation but also through the kind of meta-translation discourse which I
mentioned earlier. For instance, Maureen Ahern's translation and editing of
Rosario Castellanos's works is a superb example of thick translation (Ahern
1988). In her introduction, Ahern focuses on the specificity of Castellanos as
a Mexican woman writer. She manages to describe Castellanos's feminist
 62 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

strategies and her use of intertextual references to other women writers while
showing how her own selection of translation strategies is guided by
Castellanos's feminist ideology and by the importance of "the exploration of
the other, whether that other be woman, indigenous culture, language, silence,
or writing itself' (1988:8). Specific examples of Ahern's thick translation
include her discussion of the ways in which Castellanos reworks the myth of
La Malinche, a figure usually represented as a traitor to Mexico and as a mon-
ster; there is also her analysis of Castellanos's mastery and parody of Mexican
bureaucratic formats, of Castellanos's critique of racial and cultural oppression
of the indigenous people in Chiapas. This rich context illuminates both the
source text and the translations. One also thinks of how fruitful thick transla-
tion would be with Caribbean writers like Maryse Conde, whose works
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

sometimes come to us so fluently translated that the specificity of her Guade-

loupean culture is blurred and her complex relation to her native tongue is
obliterated. Appiah's suggestion that glossaries and explanations be system-
atically used would allow the translator and the reader to recover the rich
meanings of the Guadeloupean context; Appiah would include in this category
anything from glossaries of foreign plants and animals to explanations of
proverbs and idioms. Here thick translation would allow the translator to attend
to Conde's specificity not only as a woman writer but as an educated Guade-
loupean woman writer; in short it would expose and analyze the systematic
aspects of the text translated and attend to the issue of gender. 9
Thus, while translations of 'transparent' earlier texts like Germaine de
Stael's 'Mirza' or contemporary texts like those of Conde make the text en-
gaging to the reader, they can also provide the context in which it was written,
even though - or perhaps because - that context may be difficult for modern
readers to understand. For instance, elaborating the cultural context of 'Mirza'
is crucial if we are to avoid simplifying the ideological complexity of Madame
de Stael's situation. Madame de Stael wrote a negrophile piece of fiction in
which the issues of gender and race merged, but a description of the historical
context helps the modern reader understand the inevitably Eurocentric charac-
ter of the text and the fact that it was perceived as radical by her contemporaries;
it also helps the reader understand the author's use of traditionally male em-
powering textual strategies, such as a frame narrative where an aristocratic
white male narrator presents and mediates the story of the African title charac-
ter Mirza. Such a context needs to be read along with the translation itself if
the reader is to acknowledge the value of the text while also experiencing a
discomfort in the presence of elements that have been assimilated by the cur-
rent Western discourse of racism and sexism.

2.2. Translator-centred strategies

The strategies discussed so far aim to make the source text accessible; they are
thus author-centred strategies, even if they include a reconstruction by the
 Franroise Massardier-Kenney 63

translator of the cultural context of the author. To these must be added strategies
that are translator-centred. The first strategy, commentary, is essentially the
same as that discussed under author-centred strategies, but it serves a different
purpose here. If the metadiscourse that is part of the thick translation strategy
aims to bring the text closer to us while preserving its difference, it should also
describe the factors that affect the performance of the translator as well as the
stakes that the translator has in making the translation. In other words, the
feminist translator must describe her motives and the way they affect the
translated text in order to avoid reproducing a textual power structure which
genders the translator as the male confessor of the text. In her seminal essay,
'Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation' , Chamberlain (1988) shows how
the metaphorics of translation are deeply marked by gender differences.
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

However, the feminist translator can adopt standpoint theory, that is

acknowledge her "positionality, ... identity politics and the awareness of the
necessary losses that such politics inevitably entails" (Bauer and McKinstry
1991:4); or, as Antoine Berman suggested when he called for an examination
of the "desire" of the translator, that translator can take responsibility equally
for her own ideological/psychological boundaries as well as those of the text
that she translates.
Such discussions of the motivations of the translators either by the transla-
tors themselves or by translation scholars need to be part of any feminist thick
translation if a feminist approach is going to mean more than moving into new
territory and acting exactly as the male tradition has acted. While this posi-
tioning may seem to weaken and relativize the translator's status, it can also
be considered as a way of elevating the translator (Diaz-Diocaretz speaks of
the translator both as 'super-reader' and as author). It is equally a way of
including the feminist questioning of universal categories in the translation
project. Moreover, it can be part of a larger project geared at documenting the
way translators make choices by examining how the factor of gender affects
these choices. 10 Diaz-Diocaretz (1985) offers a major example of the kind of
documentation and self-analysis a feminist translator can provide. She sug-
gests that "[a]uthors consciously writing from a woman-identified perspective,
who are creating texts in order to widen the semantic possibilities for the fe-
male speaker, call for the translator's additional cooperation" (ibid: 156). For
instance, she notes that Adrienne Rich's writing contains an assertion of sexu-
ality and that her (i.e. Diaz-Diocaretz's) strategies as a translator were guided
by the need to carry across the presence of sexuality and to avoid making
Rich's text conform to the accepted norms of Spanish culture and language, in
other words to a view of women's sexuality as a muted or negative force. Here
the translator lucidly acknowledges her desire to expand the possibilities of-
fered by the target language in order to make room for what she sees as a
woman's voice.
Another strategy that may be drawn on in a feminist approach involves the
 64 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

use of parallel texts, by which I mean texts in the target language which have
been produced in a situation similar to that in which the source text was pro-
duced. The term 'parallel texts' is not used consistently in the literature and
can mean different things to different people: from source texts and their trans-
lations to original texts of the same genre in the source language, to texts of the
same genre in the target language; however, it will be useful here to restrict the
definition of 'parallel texts' to texts in the target language that were produced
in a similar situation or that belong to the same genre as that of the source text.
Parallel texts are usually associated with training in specialized translation,
but every literary text is also specialized in that it belongs to a specific genre,
period or style and has specific features that are reproducible in the source as
well as in the target language.
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

Several literary translators have discussed their use of parallel texts and
these discussions suggest that gender can often be a decisive factor. In his
preface to Crossing the Mangrove, Richard Philcox (1995) explains that he
turned to writers like Faulkner, Naipaul and Garcia Marquez to find a parallel
voice in English, but, not unexpectedly within the framework of a feminist
approach, he found Virginia Woolf to be the most compatible parallel to Maryse
Conde. ll The translator admits he was surprised by this compatibility, given
that these two writers seem too far apart, but of course the importance of gender
in their work brings them closer than one would expect. Similarly, in her
afterword to the Memoirs ofLeticia Valle, Carol Maier discusses the texts she
turned to in order to find the voice of a young woman, and the names of AnaYs
Nin and Anne Frank turn up. Maier's attentiveness to the importance of gender,
if not feminism, in Rosa Chacel's text makes her unravel the strands of a
tradition of women writing. To find a model for the tone of 'Mirza' that would
match the historical distance between the text and the contemporary readers, I
looked for Romantic texts with descriptive passages and dialogues, as well as
texts written by other women, in order to capture any possible intertextuality
that links instances of women writing but without assuming a specific ecriture
feminine. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein provided a glossary of Romantic
terms used by a woman writer who also wrote about an outsider (in the sense
of a creature who does not belong to the realm of the 'normal'). If, as de
Lotbiniere-Hardwood has convincingly argued, "feminist intertextual
knowledge is indispensable for translating feminist writers and for rewriting
texts in the feminine" (1991: 126), the reverse is also true: translating women
writers who may not be overtly feminist also requires a knowledge of women
writers in the target language even if their work has not yet been conceptualized
as a tradition. Since gender, like class and race, is an unavoidable factor in the
cultural production of human beings, selecting parallel texts on the basis of the
factor of gender is one of the ways in which a feminist translation can be effected.
The last strategy that can be used by the translator to achieve a feminist
translation is collaboration; this involves working with one or more transla-
 Franroise Massardier-Kenney 65

tors and/or with the author on a given text. This practice can reinforce the idea
of translation as cooperation with the text, the author and other translators,
rather than a lonely struggle to 'master' the text. Diaz-Diocaretz (1985) and
Levine (1991) provide particularly good examples of the kind of 'cooperation'
the translator and the author can share. Examples of collaboration among trans-
lators can be found in Kadish and Massardier-Kenney (1994). Suzanne Jill
Levine's and Carol Maier's collaborative translation of Severo Sarduy's El
Cristo de la rue Jacob provides a further example (Sarduy 1987/1995).
Collaboration in the context of feminist translation means that while the
translator claims her agency in the metadiscourse surrounding the translation
and the awareness of creating a tradition, she can also avoid the traditional
dichotomy between two subjectivities (author/translator) which seek control
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

of meaning. Collaboration with other translators emphasizes that meaning has

to be constantly negotiated since the translators collaborating in the task are
constantly comparing their interpretation of the same text. Perhaps it is the
connection between an interest in understanding how the discourse constructs/
deconstructs gender and this idea of negotiation, of the desire to avoid a strict
separation between author/translator, writer/reader, translator/scholar and
source text/target text that could be used to define the feminist approach in
translation. Not surprisingly, a number of translations/editions that have femi-
nist concerns have been published collaboratively. But we now need to
document in what ways these collaborations operate and translators should be
encouraged to discuss the very fact of their collaboration, as Levine and Maier
have done in the afterword to Sarduy's El Cristo de fa rue Jacob.

3. Conclusion

Whether a feminist approach in translation relies on author-centred or translator-

centred strategies in order to bring out the importance of the feminine for the
formation of texts, it leads us to reconsider the object of translation not as a
text to serve or to master, but as a cultural event to re-present. The feminist
recognition that this re-presentation involves an elusive notion of the feminine
means that we need to examine the various ways in which gender is connected
to or disconnected from the text, and the way it relates to the specific mode of
representation claimed by feminist translators.
Some people may suggest that feminist translation represents a restriction
on the translator's activity, but I would argue that its gains are clear and sig-
nificant. Channelling translation through a feminist approach can bring out
aspects of a text that had been overlooked or even suppressed; it can change
literary history by bringing to light authors that were inaccessible before; it
can also lead to crucial points of interaction with the other factors I have dis-
cussed earlier (racialization, class, etc.) and allow translators to engage fruitfully
in work with the 'feminine' without getting lost in the essentialist debate. The
 66 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

notion and the interrogation of 'feminist' translation also contribute to an ex-

amination of the translating activity in general; by emphasizing the importance
of gender categories and the mechanisms through which the 'feminine' is ex-
cluded or is valued, it suggests that translation is a crucial form of cultural
production in which are played out the very notions that are key concerns of
cultural studies: authorship, authority and identity.

FRAN<;OISE MASSARDIER-KENNEY
Modern and Classical Language Studies, Kent State University, POBox
5190, Kent, Ohio 44242-0001, USA. FKENNEY@KENTVM.KENT.EDU
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

Notes

I would like to thank my colleagues Carol Maier and Doris Kadish for the sug-
gestions they have given me during the writing of this paper.

1. Of course, this is not to say that specific text meanings are 'deposited' in a
text, but rather that the text is the place where definitions are worked out
within the interactions between source text and reader, where certain defi-
nitions are encouraged. Although readers are time- and place-specific, the
definitions activated in the interaction between text and implied reader are
shaped by the cultural paradigms and the ideologies of the implied author
and the implied reader.
2. This is the position of feminists like Luce Irigaray who accept the psycho-
analytic explanation of the formation of the subject.
3. The inseparability of race, class and gender when considering women and
translation is what Doris Kadish and I argued in our Translating Slavery:
Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823 (Kadish &
Massardier-Kenney 1994). Although I acknowledged the "conscious val-
orization of gender" (ibid:25) in our translations, it seems now that what
was valorized was not so much gender as the devalued difference of the
'feminine' .
4. de Lotbiniere-Harwood alludes to this question when she notes that "in
mainstream translation, a feminist translator will seek to manifestly in-
clude women in the readership via nonsexist (aka inclusive) rewriting
strategies" (1991: 154).
5. See Vinay and Darbelnet's classic definition of compensation as a strategy
that attempts to keep the tone of the whole target text by using a stylistic
figure in another part of the text to replace the figure that could not be
translated where it was used in the source text. (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/
1977: 189).
6. These anthologies include Angelsey's work on Central American Wom-
en's poetry (Angelsey 1987), Ahem's (1988) book on Rosario Castellanos,
the short story anthologies of women writers from Costa Rica and Panama
 Fran~oise Massardier-Kenney 67

by Jaramillo Levi (1991) and of Latin American writers edited by Ross

and Miller (1991), not to mention the extensive anthology edited by Castro-
Klaren, Mollow and Sabajanes (1991).
7. Nicole Brossard's work, for instance the poem sous la langue (Under
Tongue), is a prime example of the kind of experimentation described by
von Flotow. For a discussion of specific aspects of this experimentation
and the translation challenges it poses, see de Lotbiniere-Harwood
(1991: 143-48).
8. Appiah is applying/translating Clifford Geertz's anthropological notion of
'thick description' here.
9. A step in this direction has been taken with the recent translation of the
novel Crossing the Mangrove, which comes with a short translator's pref-
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

ace and a number of footnotes. Ironically, a reviewer in the Women Review

of Books complains that the explanations "disrupt" the "fragile musing of
Crossing the Mangrove" (White 1995), although the footnotes are extremely
discrete and never exceed two lines of very small print. This feeling of
disruption is surely linked with the reader's fantasy of an immediately
accessible 'foreign'.
10. For examples of the way translators can document and comment on their
own work or that of others in terms of gender, see M. De Julio's 'On Trans-
lating Olympe de Gouges', Doris Kadish's 'Ourika's Three Versions: a
Comparison', and my essay 'Stael, Translation, and Race', all in Kadish
and Massardier-Kenney (1994).
11. Interestingly enough, Maryse Conde recalled in a recent interview that as
a young university student in Paris she read many British authors and that
one of her favourite authors was Virginia Woolf.

References

Angelsey, Zoe (ed) (1987) Ixok Amar, Go: Central American Women's Poetry
for Peace, Penobscot, ME: Penobscot Press.
Ahem, Maureen (1988) 'Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contexts, Voices, and
Signs', in Maureen Ahern (ed) A Rosario Castellanos Reader, Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1993) 'Thick Translation', Callaloo 16(4): 808-19.
Arenal, Electra and Stacey Schlau (eds) (1989) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns
in their Own Words, translated by Amanda Powell, New Mexico: University
of Mexico Press.
Arenal, Electra and Amanda Powell (eds/trans.) (1994) Respuesta a Sor Filotea
de la Cruz! The Answer by Juana Ines de la Cruz, New York: Feminist Press.
Bauer, Dale M. and S. Janet McKinstry (eds) (1991) Feminism, Bakhtin, and
the Dialogic, Albany: SUNY.
Berman, Antoine (1994) L'epreuve de l'etranger. Culture et traduction dans
l'Aliemagne romantique, Paris: Gallimard.
Braidotti, Rosi (1994) 'Feminism By Any Other Name', Differences 6(2-3): 27-
61.
 68 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice

Butler, Judith (1994) 'Against Proper Objects', Differences 6(2-3): 1-26.

Castro-Klaren, Sara, Sylvia Molloy and Beatriz Sarlo Sabajanes (1991) Women's
Writing in Latin America: an Anthology, Boulder, Colo.: Westview.
Chamberlain, Lori (1988) 'Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation', Signs
13(3): 454-72.
Delisle, Jean (1993) 'Traducteurs medievaux, traductrices feministes: une meme
ethique de la traduction?', 1TR 6(1): 203-30.
Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam (1985) Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on
Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Flotow, Luise von (1991) 'Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theo-
ries', 1TR 4(2): 69-84.
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

Fraser, Nancy (1992) 'Introduction', in Nancy Fraser and S. Lee Bartky (eds)
Revaluing French Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Godard, Barbara (1983) 'The Translator as She: The Relationship Between Writer
and Translator', in Ann Dibylowski, Victoria Freeman, Daphne Marlatt,
Barbara Pulling and Betsy Warland (eds) In the Feminine: Women and Words,
Edmonton: Longspoon Press.
------ (1990) 'Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation', in Susan Bassnett
and Andre Lefevere (eds) Translation, History and Culture, London: Pinter
Publishers, 87-96.
Jaramillo Levi, Enrique (ed) (1991) When New Flowers Bloomed: Short Stories
by Women Writers from Costa Rica and Panama, Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin
American Literary Review Press.
Kadish, Doris and Franc;oise Massardier-Kenney (eds) (1994) Translating Slav-
ery: Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823, Kent: Kent
State University Press.
Lefevere, Andre (1990) 'Translation: Its Genealogy in the West', in Susan
Bassnett and Andre Lefevere (eds) Translation, History, and Culture, Lon-
don: Pinter Publishers, 14-27.
Levine, Suzanne Jill (1991) The Subversive Scribe. Translating Latin American
Fiction, Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.
de Lotbi ni ere-Harwood, Susanne (1991) Re-belle et Infidide. La traduction comme
pratique de reecriture au feminin/I'he Body Bilingual. Translation as a Re-
writing in the Feminine, Quebec: Les editions du remue-menagelWomen's
Press.
Maier, Carol (1994) 'Afterword' to Memoirs of Leticia Valle by Rosa Chacel ,
trans. Carol Maier, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
------ and Franc;oise Massardier-Kenney (1996) 'Gender inlAnd Translation', in
Marilyn Gaddis Rose (ed) Translation Horizon: Beyond the Boundaries of
Translation Spectrum, Binghamton: SUNY Press.
Philcox, Richard (1995) 'Translator's Preface' to Crossing the Mangrove by
Maryse Conde, trans. Richard Philcox, New York: Doubleday.
Ross, Kathleen and Yvette E. Miller (eds) (1991) Scents of Wood and Silence:
Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers, Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin
 Franr;oise Massardier-Kenney 69

American Literary Review Press.

Schor, Naomi (1992) 'Le feminisme et George Sand: Lettres it Marcie', Revue
des Sciences Humaines 226: 21-35.
Spivak, Gayatri (1992) 'The Politics of Translation', in Michele Barrett and
Anne Philipps (eds) Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debate,
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Thomas, Viola G. (1996) 'Maryse Conde' (interview), Belles Lettres 11(1): 20-
23.
Venuti, Lawrence (1992) Rethinking Translation, London & New York:
Routledge.
------ (1995) The Translator's Invisibility, London & New York: Routledge.
Vinay, J.-P. and J. Darbelnet (1958/1977) Stylistique comparee du franr;ais et
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 08:58 30 July 2015

de l'anglais, Paris: Didier.

Voldeng, Evelyne (1984) 'Translata/Latlls', Room of One's Own: A Feminist
Journal of Literature and Criticism 8(4): 82-96.
White, Sarah (1995) 'Scarred by History', The Women's Review ofBooks 12(10-
11): 42-43.