Gender In Translation
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Table of contents
Abstract: 2
i. The ‘Translatress’ 3
ii. The Metaphorics of Translation: The Career of ‘Les Belles Infidèles’ 8
iii. Challenging Grammatical Gender 9
iv. Feminist Translation? 12
References and appendix： 15
Abstract:
The combination of gender and translation continues to be a productive and stimulating area of research that takes people into many areas. I would love to find a way to combine research on film translation with gender issues. The power of the image is so overwhelming that the kinds of comparative translation studies techniques we apply to literary and other texts seem beside the point. Film translation seems to be more about rendering the gist, than about differentiating the minutiae of language use. It may make more sense to work on that problematics in the field of adaptation, for instance, on the American/Hollywood remakes of other cultures’ movies.
Contemporary feminist theory has stimulated interest in issues which are vital to the understanding of translation practices. It is hardly a coincidence that the period (1970s and 1980s) which saw the development of feminist and then gender studies also witnessed a remarkable growth in translation studies. The entry of gender into translation theory owes much to the increased importance given within a wide range of disciplines to subjectivity and ideology in language.
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There are at least four important, but quite different, areas of concern through which gender issues have become relevant to translation studies:
1. investigation of the historical and contemporary role of women as translators;
2. critique of the language traditionally used to describe translation and especially the metaphorics of translation which feminize the translator in relation to the author;
3. analysis of the particular technical difficulties and ideological questions involved in translating gendered language;
4. promotion of feminist translation as a set of principles guiding translation practice.
Translation and feminist studies have several common concerns, in particular the distrust of hierarchical, gendered roles, and the deep suspicion of rules defining fidelity (who decides what being faithful means?).
Both feminism and translation studies question the way ‘secondariness’ comes to be defined and canonized as ‘inferiority’ (why is the translation almost always ‘inferior’ to the original?).
Translation studies also explore critically the ways in which gender differences are expressed in language and transferred from one language to another.
1. The ‘Translatress’
Despite its historical status as a weak and degraded version of authorship, translation has at times emerged as a strong form of expression for women—permitting them access to the world of letters, allowing them to contribute to the intellectual and political life of their times and to engage in stimulating writing relationships. Translation was a particularly important writing activity for women during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when they were otherwise excluded from public writing careers. During this long period, translation was one of the few writing activities that were socially approved for women. Of the five women whose names we know who wrote in Middle English [see I.b.1]—Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Juliana Berners, Eleanor Hull, and Margaret Beaufort—three were principally known as translators (Barratt 1992: 13).
We must recall that to publish or to appear in print was considered aggressive behaviour for females during this period in European culture. Authorship was seen as a distinctly male activity and the female writer, exposing herself to the public eye, was vulnerable to accusations of presumption (Krontiris 1992: 17–18).
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Translation offered an opportunity for women to become involved in literary culture in a way that did not openly challenge social or literary power arrangements. Women could become involved in the production and circulation of texts without being perceived to have overstepped the bounds of propriety.
Paradoxically, religion (which reinforced the sub-servience of women) emerges as an area through which some women were able to contribute to the cultural activities of their age (Krontiris 1992: 10).
In England, for example, during the Reformation, women were strongly discouraged from writing, but they were encouraged to translate religious texts. And so the great majority of existing texts and translations by English women of the period are on religious subjects.
Even the learned women at the very centre of cultural life of England published only translations: this is notably the case for the revered patroness of letters, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (c.1555–1621), sister of Philip Sidney. It is evident that Mary Sidney’s translation work was very much involved with the cultural and political conflicts of her age, though the very fact that she confined herself to translation was perceived favourably. The example of Mary Sidney was used as a weapon to silence her goddaughter, Mary Wroth, who had the ambition of being a writer and publishing the first known full-length work of fiction by a woman. Wroth was admonished to imitate her ‘vertuous and learned Aunt, who translated so many godly books’ rather than create ‘lascivious tales and amorous toyes’ (Hannay 1990: 208–9).
Translation, not creation, was the province of a learned woman.
Margaret Tyler is an exceptional figure of this period. She is best known for her translation of a Spanish romance entitled A Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578) by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra. Tyler’s work seems to have introduced this genre into England; its immense influence created the fashion for Spanish romances of chivalry in England, and it was followed by many similar works in English. But it is the vigorous preface which accompanies this translation which especially defines Tyler’s importance for our topic. She defended the right of women to read and translate works which are not restricted to the area of ‘divinitie’, and in particular to take on the daring deeds of chivalry and romance. She also encouraged women to take up the pen. This preface has been compared to a feminist manifesto and called a ‘landmark in feminist literary history’ on account of its being ‘both the boldest criticism of patriarchal ideology by a woman writer up to that time and one of the very few female-authored documents before the eighteenth century to deal with the problems of the literary woman whose imaginative voice is inhibited by patriarchal divisions of genre and gender’ (Krontiris 1992: 45).
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During the Renaissance, then, in England as well as in the rest of Europe, translation had capital importance for women, as it was one of the only modes of intellectual activity which allowed them to escape the interdiction against public expression. While some commentators assume that this work had little impact, lamenting the fact that women were ‘only translators’, others have seen in translation a real contribution to the spiritual life of the times and a site from which dominant norms could be challenged and resisted. A comprehensive understanding of women’s writing activities during this period will only be possible when the work initiated by literary historians like Hannay and Krontiris is pursued in greater depth.
Aphra Behn, Germaine de Staël, Margaret Fuller, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Lady Gregory, Constance Garnett, Jean Starr Untermeyer, Willa Muir, and Helen Lowe-Porter are just a few of the women translators who, beginning particularly in the 18th c., played prominent social and political roles through their activities of literary mediation. The fact that all these women combined their interest in translation with progressive social causes is more than coincidental; they understood that the transmission of significant literary texts was an essential, not an accessory, cultural task. The translation of key texts is an important aspect of any movement of ideas. This is evident for first-wave feminism and for the causes to which it was allied, especially the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th c.
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Aphra Behn (1640–89) is the best known and most prolific of early women writers; she was the first professional woman writer (Spender 1992: 39) and in her own time a celebrated woman of letters [see I.b.3.iii]. That she was an active translator is not entirely surprising, as translation was recognized as a primary creative activity for Restoration writers. Perhaps the most surprising element of Aphra Behn’s translations was that she translated from Latin (though possibly indirectly, from pre-existing cribs) as well as from French. This was highly unusual, for women of Behn’s time were rarely taught the classical languages—if they were taught to read at all. That Aphra Behn translated Ovid’s Epistle of Oenone to Paris is therefore of unusual significance. And that the poem was chosen by Dryden, or the publisher Jacob Tonson, for inclusion in Ovid’s Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680) was a clear indication of the prestige of this work [see II.n.6.ii].
Perhaps the two most important works Behn translated are by the moralist La Rochefoucauld and the philosopher Fontenelle. Her rendering of 400 maxims by La Rochefoucauld, entitled Seneca Unmasqued; or, Moral Reflections was appended to the Miscellany of 1685. Particularly noteworthy as a contribution to reflection on translation in the 18th c. is Behn’s preface to her translation of Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds (1688), in which she explores some of the general structural and rhetorical problems of equivalence between English and French. Some of her comments are inaccurate, but they point to her interest in a scholarly grounding for translation.
Cultural historians have yet to bring to light the full networks of writers and translators who ensured the transmission of feminist and other emancipatory texts across national frontiers during the 18th and 19th c. Various international organizations of anti-slavery associations existed, and translation was considered a task important to them (Kadish and Massardier-Kenney 1994: 37).
Other elements of the traffic in political writings beginning in the late 18th c. centre on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97).
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She herself translated a book by Jacques Necker, On the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788), as well as Madame de Cambon’s Young Grandison (1790).
Wollstonecraft’s own Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was of course widely translated (the 1832 translation into German by Henriette Herz helped pave the way for the women’s movement in Germany).
As influential cultural mediators of the 19th c., Madame de Staël, Margaret Fuller, and Eleanor Marx-Aveling used translation in the service of explicitly political causes. Madame de Staël (1766–1817) did not herself publish translations (although she translated extensively within her own work), but her fiction and theoretical writings initiated a new translational sensibility in European letters. As a militant cosmopolitan, de Staël forced her audience to become aware of the interdependence of national traditions. She articulated the interconnections between literature and society across national boundaries, insisting on exchange as a decisive element of creativity and intellectual vigour.
Resemblances between the career of Madame de Staël and that of Margaret Fuller are not hard to find. Margaret Fuller (1810–50) was known during her lifetime as the ‘Yankee Corinna’ (Durning 1969: 19), in reference to the heroine of de Staël’s novel about Italy, as well as to Fuller’s support for internationalist libertarian causes. She consciously patterned her life after that of Madame de Staël, setting up a ‘Conversation’ group in Boston which was to be a replica of de Staël’s salon. And Fuller’s activities as a promoter of literary cosmopolitism, her support of Italian nationalism, and her devotion to German literature make her an exemplary follower of de Staël.
Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1855–98) is not best known as a literary figure. The daughter of Karl Marx [II.h.8], she is most widely known as a social activist; but she was in fact heavily involved in the world of letters, and did a substantial amount of translation work, from French and from Norwegian—which she learnt in order to read and translate Ibsen (Kapp 1972: 99).
Her most influential translation was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; her somewhat literal translation was for a long time used as the standard version. Marx’s main motivation in translating the work was to challenge conventional standards of morality. Her translations were politically motivated, as were those of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), who was a central figure associated with the Gaelic Revival and Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) in the early 20th c. She was a poet and prolific playwright. Her translations from Irish into Kiltartan Anglo-Irish dialect were aimed at transferring into English the power and energy of Irish folklore (Kohfeldt 1985).
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The one translator’s name that many readers during the first part of the 20th c. would have been likely to know is that of Constance Garnett (1862–1946), translator of some 60 volumes of writing by Russia’s most notable modern writers [see II.p.3–6]. It has become a cliché to observe that the English-speaking world has, in reading Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, been listening principally to the voice of Constance Garnett. The breadth and impact of Garnett’s translation work, and her personal celebrity as a translator, makes her an extraordinary figure in 20th-c. literature. Part of her success lay in the extraordinary appeal of the newly discovered Russian writers for the English-speaking public, but the sheer number of her translations was also a crucial factor.
Few translators have left chronicles of their experiences as translators. The account which Jean Starr Untermeyer provides of her translating relationship with Hermann Broch is, for this reason in particular, of exceptional interest. Her memoirs, Private Collection (1965), provide a remarkable perspective on the dynamics of her work with the exiled author Hermann Broch, a relationship whose tensions were exacerbated by the historical moment (the years of the Second World War), by the immensity of the task (a huge modernist tome, The Death of Virgil, constantly rewritten and revised), and by the personalities of the protagonists. Untermeyer began working on the translation in 1940, before the German work was published. The moments of intimacy and frustration which developed between author and translator were not extraneous to the translation process but seemed rather to be a necessary component of it. Untermeyer received the highest praise for her translation.
Willa Muir was an early feminist, first by temperament and then by political conviction. Women: An Inquiry was published by the Hogarth Press in 1925. As translators, Willa and her husband, the poet Edwin Muir, are best known for their English versions of six books by Franz Kafka [II.h.11.iv]. The Muirs translated The Sleepwalkers, by Hermann Broch, and Willa herself another novel of Broch’s, The Unknown Quantity.
The long literary relationship between Thomas Mann [II.h.11.v] and his translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, is chronicled in John Thirlwall’s In Another Language (1966).
Cut off totally from his German reading public during the war, Mann was dependent upon his American readers not only for critical esteem but also for his revenue. The pressure he put on his translator was evident: she could make or break the reception of Mann’s writing. Despite this tension, relations between Mann and Lowe-Porter remained largely courteous and friendly, and took the form of a voluminous correspondence.
A more contemporary account of a translating relationship is that of Suzanne Jill Levine’s ‘closelaborations’ with Guillermo Cabrera Infante over his novel Tres tristes tigres (1967, Three Trapped Tigers).
The wealth of Levine’s examples of her work of ‘transcreation’, the extent of the literary knowledge and imagination which inform her practice, the strong sense of the cultural inequalities which feed translation, these define a superbly self-conscious (and self-confident) practice of translation.
Beyond their anecdotal interest, and their value as chronicles of the translation process, these accounts show in what ways gender difference acts—in sometimes productive, sometimes negative ways—on the activity of language transfer. They also show that the activities of translators, women or men, can never be understood in isolation, but must always be examined in relation to a social, political, intellectual, or aesthetic framework. Like other acts of writing and communication, translation belongs to a world of roles, values, and ideas; it is in itself an intensely relational act, one which establishes new connections between text and culture, author and reader.
2. The Metaphorics of Translation: The Career of ‘Les Belles Infidèles’
Because they are necessarily ‘defective’, all translations are ‘reputed females’. With this analogy, John Florio, in the 1603 preface to his translation of Montaigne [II.g.5.ii], summarizes the tradition of double inferiority which has relegated both translators and women to the lower rungs in their respective hierarchies. Translators are handmaidens to authors, women inferior to men. This historical association finds contemporary resonance in the recognition that the translator still occupies a ‘(culturally speaking) female position’ (Jouve 1991: 47), but one which today is being reinterpreted and radically challenged.
Whether affirmed or denounced, the femininity of translation is a historical trope which runs through centuries of Western culture. The authority of the original over the reproduction is linked with imagery of masculine and feminine; the original is considered the strong generative male, the translation the weaker and derivative female. We are not surprised to learn that the language used to describe translating draws liberally from the vocabulary of sexism, drawing on images of dominance and inferiority, fidelity and libertinage.
John Florio’s reference to translations as ‘female’ has spawned a rich progeny. In numerous prefaces and critical texts, including work as recent as George Steiner’s After Babel (1975), the relation between author and translator, original and translation, is frequently sexualized. Lori Chamberlain suggests that the use of hierarchical terms in metaphor aims to smooth over the conflictual relationship between original and translation and resolve anxiety over ownership of meaning disturbed by the bastardized products of interlinguistic transfer (Chamberlain 1992: 66).
The extraordinarily long career of the term ‘les belles infidèles’ is a particularly pertinent example. Introduced by the French critic Gilles Ménage (1613–92), the adage declares that, like women, translations must be either beautiful or faithful. Its success is due in some measure to the way it positions fidelity as the opposite of beauty, ethics as the opposite of elegance, the drudgery of moral obligation as incompatible with stylistic (or marital) felicity. It is certainly not fortuitous that the expression was coined at a time when translations were considered as the principal means by which French was to be legitimated as a national language. The strategy used by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt and his school of translators in their ‘belles infidèles’ was in fact a blatant policy of infidelity. He and his fellow-translators, many of them members of the Académie Française, sought to enhance the prestige of French literature by providing translations of the Ancients, yet they wished at the same time to consolidate the norms of elegance of a nascent prose style (Zuber 1995).
The conflict between beauty and fidelity, between letter and spirit, reaches far back into the memory of western culture. The terms which we use to divide production from reproduction include some of the most fundamental concepts of our philosophical vocabulary. Derrida has shown how these recurrent oppositions stem from a complicity between gender conceptions and writing, mimesis and fidelity (Graham 1985).
The conventional view of translation supposes an active original and a passive translation, creation followed by a passive act of transmission. But what if writing and translation are understood as interdependent, each bound to the other in the recognition that representation is always an active process, that the original is also at a distance from its originating intention, that there is never a total presence of the speaking subject in discourse? This reconceptualization of translation makes the familiar gendered and hierarchical language inappropriate and unproductive for understanding translation.
Feminist translation thus reopens the dilemma of fidelity, asking in new ways a question which runs throughout the history of translation in the western world. To whom and to what is the translation to declare its fidelity? Participating in a sensibility which is suspicious of any foundational truths, which sees both the ‘meaning’ of the original and the ‘message’ intended for the reader as uncertain, as being constantly subject to interpretation and distortion, feminist translation understands fidelity as a movement synchronous with the writing project—a project in which both writer and translator participate.
3. Challenging Grammatical Gender
Feminist critique of language began with a campaign against sexist terms. Over the years, however, the critique of sexism in language has moved from a largely corrective and action-orientated attention to vocabulary (seen in the work of Louky Bersianik or Mary Daly) to a broader examination of the symbolic power of the feminine in language. Attention has shifted from critical analysis of a single linguistic code to the conceptual terms regulating the intervention of individual and collective subjects within speech and writing.
The term ‘gender’ is derived from a term meaning ‘class’ or ‘kind’, which referred to the division of Greek nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter. grammatical gender means that nouns are placed in classes not according to their meaning but according to their form. This form determines the way the word will behave grammatically when it comes to the agreement of adjectives, articles, and pronouns. These are formal properties and have nothing to do with meaning. Latin and Greek had three genders (as does modern German); there are also languages with two (French) and languages which have a much larger set (Bantu languages).
English has ‘natural’ gender rather than grammatical gender. This means that gender is attributed not by form but by meaning.
Gender is not normally considered a ‘significant’ element of language for translation. Because grammatical categories belong to the structural obligations of a language, they are, like the other elements which constitute the mechanics of a language, meaningless. Roman Jakobson shows, however, that grammatical gender can be invested with meaning in certain cases, as when language is turned away from its instrumental or communicative functions and used in poetry and mythology. Grammatical gender then takes on symbolic meaning, as when the poet wishes to emphasize the mythological origins and gendered identities of the terms for the days of the week, the terms for night and day, or sin and death (Jakobson, in Brower 1959).
That gender differences in language exercise a powerful imaginary role, even in English which has only ‘natural’ and not ‘grammatical’ gender, is clear in the ‘thought experiment’ reported by Deborah Cameron, in which participants, presented with pairs of words like knife/fork, For/Chevrolet, salt/pepper, vanilla/chocolate agreed to identify one element as masculine, the other feminine. There was in fact a wide consensus among participants in giving masculine gender to the first item of any pair, feminine to the second. This phenomenon is called ‘metaphorical gender’ (Cameron 1992: 82).
The experiment shows how pervasive is the gendering of the relationship between strong/weak, active/ passive.
These considerations emphasize that, despite the absence of a strict version of grammatical gender, gender distinctions continue to operate massively through the English language. Indeed, they mark the work of grammarians who present the masculine as a ‘unmarked’ form, the simple form of the word, a form which can be used generically, and with relative neutrality of meaning. And examples from common usage show that even when an English pronoun is theoretically neutral, it can carry an implicit gender charge. Formulations like ‘members of Parliament and their wives’, or ‘the Greenlanders often swap wives’ (Scott 1984: 13) show that the apparent gender neutrality of English is constantly belied by the identification of the species (mankind) with the male.
In these cases, grammatical gender must be taken into consideration for translation. While grammarians have insisted on gender marking in language as purely conventional, feminist theoreticians follow Jakobson in re-investing gender markers with meaning. The meaning which they wish to make manifest is both poetic and, especially, ideological. They wish to show in what ways gender differences serve as the unquestioned foundations of our cultural life.
These considerations form the basis for Howard Scott’s feminist translation of the novel L’Eugélionne (1976) by Louky Bersianik (Scott 1984).
A major part of the book deals with how language, in this case the French language, plays a role in the oppression of women. Two aspects of language are especially emphasized: naming strategies and grammatical gender-marking. Both involve dilemmas for translation, because they use language-specific devices to foreground these grammatical features of French-language usage. Scott explains that his role as a translator of the book was not to provide an erudite explanation of sexism in the French language for the English-speaking reader, but to provide an equivalent political message. How is this to be done? The grammatical consequence of accepting the masculine as the norm is the humiliating fact that the verb which agreed with a phrase such as ‘Three hundred women and one (male) cat’ would have to be in the masculine (‘Trois cents femmes et un chat sont allés….’), according to the rule that any masculine element in a noun phrase (however minimal!) will dictate the grammatical agreement of the predicate. While the French women in Bersianik’s novel picket the Académie Française asking for a change to put an end to the humiliating and illogical superiority of the masculine, Scott’s English-speaking picketers address themselves to the ‘Guardians of Grammar’, and ask why it is logical to say ‘Everyone please take off his boots’, when there are 300 woman and one man in the room. They propose that permission be granted for the use of the indefinite ‘their’, even for use in the singular. This would allow the request to be rephrased as ‘Everyone please take off their boots’. Would this not be a more just and logical formulation? They ask further, ‘Why does a MASTER wield authority, while a MISTRESS waits patiently for her lover and master to come to her?’, ‘Why are CHEFS male, while most of the COOKS on this planet are women?’, and so on. Howard Scott shows, then, that the persistence of ‘natural’ gender in English makes many of Bersianik’s critiques equally pertinent in that language.
Scott’s emphasis on the persistence of gender-marking in English is echoed by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s insistence that ‘We need to resex language’ (de Lotbinière-Harwood 1991: 117).
French texts by Bersianik and Michèle Causse have given de Lotbinière-Harwood the opportunity to develop a translation practice which ‘aims to make the feminine visible in language so that women are seen and heard in the world’ and thus give the lie to the apparent neutrality of English. English, too, is a ‘“he/man” language, that is, it too uses the masculine pronoun “he” and generic “man” as universal signifiers’. When Louky Bersianik asks ‘Quel est le féminin de garçon? C’est garce!’ (‘What is the feminine of boy? It’s slut!’, garce not really being the feminine form of garçon but a derogatory term meaning ‘slut’ or ‘whore’), de Lotbinière-Harwood translates: ‘What’s the feminine of dog? It’s bitch’.
And in her translations of Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve (1987, Mauve Desert), de Lotbinière-Harwood seeks out every expression of gender-marking, spelling ‘author’ as ‘auther’, as a way of rendering the feminized auteure pioneered and widely used by Quebec feminists; and rendering the amante, lesbian lover, by ‘shelove’ (Simon 1995: 123).
4. Feminist Translation?
Where the feminist project of translation finds its most felicitous applications is in regard to texts which themselves constitute innovative writing practices. This is the case particularly of the language-centred texts of French feminist writers like Hélène Cixous, and of Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Madeleine Gagnon, and Louky Bersianik in Quebec [see II.g.16.i].
Luise von Flotow’s useful discussion of feminist translation emphasizes the fact that the cultural and social context of feminism has had much to do with the vigour and boldness of translation by women in Quebec and English Canada. Von Flotow names and describes three practices of feminist translation: supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and ‘hijacking’ (von Flotow 1991).
‘Hijacking’ touches on the more controversial and problematic aspects of feminist translation. Von Flotow refers to the appropriation of a text whose intentions are not necessarily feminist by the feminist translator. Her example is the feminizing translation of Lise Gauvin’s Lettres d’une autre (1987, Letters from Another) by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. The author used the generic masculine in her text; the translator ‘corrects’ the language, avoiding male generic terms where they appear in French and using Québecois-e-s where the original was happy with Québecois in all cases. While it is known that the author has feminist sympathies and worked in collaboration with the translator, Harwood explains in her preface: ‘My translation practice is a political activity aimed at making language speak for women. So my signature on a translation means: this translation has used every translation strategy to make the feminine visible in language’.
What is remarkable about this explanation is that the signature of the translator is given authority equivalent to that of authorship. De Lotbinière-Harwood’s autobiographical style of writing reinstates the authority of the personal register for the translator, giving content and positionality to the translator’s ‘I’. But this example also illustrates the potential conflicts of such renewed authority. Is this ‘I’ to be allowed to become a rival of the author? While we know, in this particular case, that the author seems to have been willing to abdicate her textual authority in favour of the translator’s more radical stance towards language, one could wonder what the consequences of such a gesture might be in other circumstances. What would be the result of a translation which blatantly redirected the intention of the original text, consciously contravening its intentions?
Such a move would not be consistent with the dynamics of feminist translation, where there is deliberate collusion and cooperation between text, author, and translator. Author and translator are operating in a frame of contemporaneity, their work engaging in a dialogue of reciprocal influence. Feminist translation implies extending and developing the intention of the original text. That is why the most successful examples of such practices are to be found in an appropriate match between text and translating project.
One of the most important contemporary feminist writers to investigate these processes of meaning-creation is Nicole Brossard, a Quebec feminist writer who has achieved an international reputation. Her writing is important here because of its powerful avant-garde techniques, which have engaged the theory and practice of feminist translators, notably Barbara Godard. Godard emphasizes the ‘transferential process’ of translation, the reading subject becoming the writing subject. Like the author, the translator uses disjunctive strategies, breaking with a unified language (Godard 1995).
For example, Brossard uses English words in her French text in order to disrupt the code and to enhance the power of certain terms. Godard indicates the passages which Brossard wrote in English in bold face. Elsewhere, she introduces French into her own text, this time without italics or bolding, in order to reproduce Brossard’s strategy.
The interventionism of the translator is by no means gratuitous, but solicited and oriented by the text itself. Godard’s translation follows the mode of meaning generated by Brossard rather than the strictly surface phenomena which result. These strategies include using graphic modes of representation—in These Our Mothers (Brossard 1983), particularly, where this title is represented with a giant ‘S’, the rest of the words agglutinating around it. In the text, a single French word can be translated by two variants, which are put one on top of the other, for example défaite being given as ‘defeat’ and ‘de facto’; mère is occasionally rendered ‘m ther’. ‘Pour écrire, rêver est un accessoire’ becomes ‘Dreaming is an accessory to writ(h)ing’. ‘Chaque fois que l’espace me manque à l’horizon, la bouche s’entrouvre, la langue trouve l’ouverture’ becomes ‘Each time I lack space on the her/i/zon, my mouth opens, the tongue finds an opening, (her eye zone)’ ‘La mère recouvrant la mer comme une parfaite synthèse’, becomes ‘(Mère) She covering (mer) sea like a perfect synthesis’. Only very occasionally does Godard use footnotes, as in an explanation of the French word élan, referring both to a burst of feeling and to a moose, the second meaning being important in Brossard’s reference to hunting. There is no sense here of the translator’s note disturbing the tranquil transparency of the page: Brossard herself uses many kinds of graphic device to complicate the visual aspect of the page.
In this way, the project of the feminist translator accords with the impulse of the text, questioning the most basic relationship of word to object, word to emotion, word to word. Brossard’s writing places transformation at the very centre of its complex attention to the mechanisms of representation. It puts into play a dynamic of multiplicity and mimicry which makes linear and transparent meaning impossible. This conflation of writing with translation and transformation is clearly at odds with a long-dominant theory of translation as equivalence of fixed meanings. Feminist writing and translation practice come together in framing all writing as rewriting, all writing as involving a rhetoricity in which subjectivity is at work.
Feminist translation principles are also involved in other areas of cultural transmission. Two examples can be highlighted here: the first is the transatlantic displacement of the writings of the French feminists, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous into the Anglo-American intellectual world beginning in the early 1970s and continuing to the present [see II.g.13]. This exchange brings to light the network of tensions which are so characteristic of our current intellectual context—the conflicting pulls of internationalist feminist solidarity and the reconfirmation of national affiliations (Freiwald 1991).
The ‘taming’ of French feminist theory in the Anglo-American context involved a merging of philosophical systems, on the one hand the speculative Continental tradition and on the other the more empirical Anglo-American tradition. This process of accommodation was facilitated by various levels and procedures of mediation: commentary, interpretation, and translation.
But the transatlantic passage of French feminist thought also brought about significant effects of distortion and appropriation. These effects inevitably accompany any important movements of ideas; they result from the diversity of interests and desires which command the exchange, and from the reformulation and renewals demanded of the target language. The distorting effects of the exchange are perhaps best witnessed in the reception given to the work of Hélène Cixous, whose work was until recently interpreted on the basis of a very narrow sampling (Penrod 1993).
The second area is contemporary feminist Biblical translation [see II.c.1.xiii]. What is particularly striking about the feminist intervention in this area is that it does not consider itself, and is not often considered to be, an aberration in an otherwise seamless tradition. Rather, it appears as yet another social and ideological stance from which translation can be undertaken—the new face in a long line of such competing figures going back to the Septuagint [see II.c.1.ii]. The debates over feminist and inclusive-language interpretations of the Bible enhance our understanding of translation as a substantial interpretative move, at the same time as they draw attention to the conflictual implications of gendered language (Bird 1988; Simon 1996: 111–33).
While there are strong and powerful voices calling for inclusive-language versions of the Bible (versions which neutralize gendered language), there are equally insistent voices—among feminists—calling for versions which remain attentive to the highly patriarchal language of the originals. On the one hand, there is a drive to express the libertarian potential of the Bible; on the other, an emphasis on the historical and cultural roots of the text. As is often the case with the Bible, the interaction between philology and exegesis, meaning and dogma, becomes particularly intense. The long history of the Bible magnifies the import of translation issues, showing them to be ideologically saturated. In contrast to most other areas of cultural transmission, where translation is so often treated as a mechanical act, Biblical scholarship has always recognized that translation carries with it both the dangers and the promises of interpretation.
In both the transportation of French feminism and new projects of Bible translation there is a particularly revealing imbrication of gender and language issues. Consciously feminist principles are invoked in the choice and manner of the texts translated. These connections allow us to see how translation frames and directs ongoing processes of intellectual transmission. The links of mediation are not automatic; they are not imposed or organized by some dispassionate cultural authority. Rather, translators are involved in the materials through which they work; they are fully engaged in the process of transfer.
What feminist theory highlights is this renewed sense of agency in translation. There is emphasis on the speaking voice of the translator and her active role in the translation process, and a willing recognition that translators are interventionist. This does not mean that the translator is ‘free’ to do whatever she wants, but that her work is shaped and focused by its final aims. This recognition provides an essential critical perspective on translations as products of the ideological tensions of their times. It allows us to make cultural sense of the ‘difference’ between original and translation.
References and appendix：
The Language Instinct(revised), Steven Pinker,William Morrow and Company ,USA, 2000.
Network-Based Language Teaching by Mark Warschauer (Editor), Richard Kern (Editor)
see also Translation Studies and Translation Criticism, Norms of Translation, The Limits of Translation, Linguistic Perspectives on Translation, Varieties of English
