Untitled

The Routledge Handbook
of Translation, Feminism
and Gender
The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender provides a comprehensive, state-of-
the-art overview of feminism and gender awareness in translation and translation studies today.
Bringing together work from more than 20 different countries – from Russia to Chile,
Yemen, Turkey, China, India, Egypt, and the Maghreb as well as the UK, Canada, the USA,
and Europe – this handbook represents a transnational approach to this topic, which is in
development in many parts of the world. With 41 chapters, this book presents, discusses, and
critically examines many different aspects of gender in translation and its effects, both local and
transnational.
Providing overviews of key questions and case studies of work currently in progress, this
handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation,
feminism, and gender.
Luise von Flotow has taught translation studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada since
1996, publishing widely in the field of feminism, gender, and translation. She most recently
co-edited Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons with Farzaneh Farhazad
(Routledge 2016) and co-translated Tout le monde parle de la pluie et du beau temps. Pas nous, a
book about Ulrike Meinhof (2018) with Isabelle Totikaev.
Hala Kamal is Professor of English and Gender Studies in the Department of English, Faculty
of Arts, Cairo University. Her research interests and publications in both Arabic and English
are in the areas of feminist literary criticism, translation studies, and the history of the Egyptian
feminist movement. She has translated several books on feminism and gender into Arabic.
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive

overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks
are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and
carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource
for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PRAGMATICS

Edited by Rebecca Tipton and Louisa Desilla
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY

Edited by Minako O’Hagan
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND EDUCATION

Edited by Sara Laviosa and Maria González-Davies
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND ACTIVISM

Edited by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, FEMINISM

AND GENDER
Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND COGNITION

Edited by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Hand

books-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.
The Routledge Handbook
of Translation, Feminism
and Gender
Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: von Flotow, Luise, 1951– editor. | Kamāl, Hālah, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of translation, feminism and gender / edited by Luise
von Flotow and Hala Kamal.
Description: 1. | New York : Taylor and Francis, 2020. | Series: Routledge handbooks in
translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020000889 | ISBN 9781138066946 (hardback) | ISBN
9781315158938 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Literature—Women authors—
History and criticism. | Women and literature—History—20th century. | Women
translators—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC P306.2 .R684 2020 | DDC 809/.89287—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000889
ISBN: 978-1-138-06694-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-15893-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To our collaborators, peer reviewers, readers, students, and our children
Contents
List of illustrations xii

List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgementsxx
Introduction 1
Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal
1 Women (re)writing authority: a roundtable discussion

on feminist translation 5
Emek Ergun, Denise Kripper, Siobhan Meï, Sandra Joy Russell,
Sara Rutkowski, Carolyn Shread, and Ida Hove Solberg
PART I
Translating and publishing women 15
2 Volga as an international agent of feminist translation 17

Rajkumar Eligedi
3 Translation of women-centred literature in Iran: macro and micro analysis 32

Sima Sharifi
4 Pathways of solidarity in transit: Iraqi women writers’ story-making

in English translation 48
Ruth Abou Rached
5 Maghrebi women’s literature in translation 64

Sanaa Benmessaoud
6 Translation and gender in South America: the representation of

South American women writers in an unequal cultural scenario 83
Rosa Basaure, Marcela Contreras, Andrea Campaña, and Mónica Ahumada
vii
Contents
7 Translating metonymies that construct gender: testimonial

narratives by 20th-century Latin American women 93
Gabriela Yañez
8 Polish women translators: a herstory 107

Ewa Rajewska
9 Women translators in early modern Europe 117

Hilary Brown
10 Women writers in translation in the UK: the “Year of Publishing

Women” (2018) as a platform for collective change? 127
Olga Castro and Helen Vassallo
11 Censorship and women writers in translation: focus on Spain

under Francoism 147
Pilar Godayol
12 Gender and interpreting: an overview and case study of a woman

interpreter’s media representation 159
Biyu ( Jade) Du
PART II
Translating feminist writers 171
13 The Wollstonecraft meme: translations, appropriations,

and receptions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism 173
Elisabeth Gibbels
14 An Indian woman’s room of one’s own: a reflection on Hindi

translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own184
Garima Sharma
15 A tale of two translations: (re)interpreting Beauvoir in Japan,

1953–1997196
Julia Bullock
16 Bridging the cultural gap: the translation of Simone de Beauvoir

into Arabic 205
Hala G. Sami
17 Translating French feminist philosophers into English: the case

of Simone de Beauvoir 224
Marlène Bichet
viii
Contents
18 On Borderlands and translation: the Spanish versions of Gloria

Anzaldúa’s seminal work 239
María Laura Spoturno
PART III
Feminism, gender, and queer in translation 253
19 At the confluence of queer and translation: subversions,

fluidities, and performances 255
Pauline Henry-Tierney
20 Feminism in the post-communist world in/as translation 266

Kornelia Slavova
21 The uneasy transfer of feminist ideas and gender theory:

post-Soviet English-Russian translations 276
Tatiana Barchunova
22 Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s

Le Deuxième Sexe, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in Polish:
feminism, translation, and political history 291
Ewa Kraskowska and Weronika Szwebs
23 Translating feminism in China: a historical perspective 308

Zhongli Yu
24 Queer transfeminism and its militant translation: collective,

independent, and self-managed 319
Laura Fontanella
25 Translating queer: reading caste, decolonizing praxis 336

Nishant Upadhyay and Sandeep Bakshi
26 Sinicizing non-normative sexualities: through translation’s

looking glass 345
Wangtaolue Guo
PART IV
Gender in grammar, technologies, and audiovisual
translation361
27 Grammatical gender and translation: a cross-linguistic overview 363

Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri
ix
Contents
28 Le président est une femme: the challenges of translating gender

in UN texts 374
Enora Lessinger
29 Identifying and countering sexist labels in Arabic translation:

the politics of language in cleaning products 390
Sama Dawood
30 Egypt: Arab women’s feminist activism in volunteer subtitled

social media 401
Nihad Mansour
31 The sexist translator and the feminist heroine: politically incorrect

language in films and TV 413
Irene Ranzato
32 Women in audiovisual translation: the Arabic context 429

Nada Qanbar
33 Gender in war video games: the linguacultural representation

and localization of female roles between reality and fictionality 444
Silvia Pettini
34 Gender issues in machine translation: an unsolved problem? 457

Johanna Monti
PART V
Discourses in translation 469
35 Translating the Bible into English: how translations transformed

gendered meanings and relations 471
Mathilde Michaud
36 Negotiation of meaning in translating ‘Islamic feminist’ texts

into Arabic: mapping the terrain 481
Doaa Embabi
37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an 496

Rim Hassen
38 Translation and women’s health in post-reform China: a case study

of the 1998 Chinese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves508
Boya Li
x
Contents
39 Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health 518

Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic
40 Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation, and translation 528

Handegül Demirhan
Epilogue541
41 Recognition, risk, and relationships: feminism and translation

as modes of embodied engagement 543
Beverley Curran
Index555
xi
Illustrations
Figures
5.1 Languages of translation 70
10.1 WIT books by language 133
10.3 MIT books by language 135
32.1 Ratio of women to men in AVT companies surveyed in Jordan 433
33.1 The reality-fictionality spectrum axis 447
34.1 Vauquois triangle (Vauquois 1968) 460
34.2 Example of translation of the single gender-neutral word ‘nurse’
from English into Italian 464
38.1 Original OBOS image in the US version 512
38.2 Modified OBOS image in the 1998 Chinese translation 513
Images
1 0.2 WIT books by country 134
10.4 MIT books by country 137
30.1 Screen capture: ‘She and the Elections’, min 0.46 (.com) 409
41.1 Two covers of Otouto no otto – My Brother’s Husband547
41.2 Bonus images provided by the Japanese publisher 548
41.3 Additional images of the English translation 549
41.4 Cover and title of Sora no ito551
Tables
2.1 Feminist texts by Volga 18
3.1 Library search results of somewhat feminist translations: 1970s 35
3.2 Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s 36
3.3 Number of translations concerned with social justice (1930s–1970s) 38
3.4 Number of translations of feminist books (1980s) 39
3.5 Number of translations of feminist books (1990s and beyond) 39
10.1 Appendix I Women in Translation in our corpus (2018) 143
10.2 Appendix II Men in Translation in our corpus (2018) 145
16.1 Simone de Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic 219
21.1 Definition of gender by Joan W. Scott in Russian translation 283
xii
Contributors
Ruth Abou Rached is a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC research project PalREAD:
Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present, Freie
Universität Berlin. Her research interests include Arab diasporic literatures and women’s writing
and intersectional feminist translation theories. She is editor for New Voices in Translation Studies,
International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies.
Mónica Ahumada is a part-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research focuses on the contribution of translation in
international relations.
Sandeep Bakshi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Queer Literatures and Literary
Translation at the University of Paris Diderot/Paris VII. He researches on transnational queer
and decolonial enunciation of knowledge and is the co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities:
Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford, 2016) with Suhraiya Jivraj and Silvia
Posocco.
Tatiana Barchunova has a PhD in philosophy of science. She is an associate professor at the
Institute of Philosophy and Law of Novosibirsk State University, and teaches gender studies,
political philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. She co-authored a popular book on gender
studies – Gender dlia chainikov [Gender for Beginners], (Moscow, 2006).
Rosa Basaure is an assistant professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research centres on cross-cultural communication and
the contribution of translation to international relations.
Sanaa Benmessaoud is Assistant Professor in Translation and Comparative Studies at the

American University of Ras Al Khaimah. Her research interests include literary translation,
the sociology of translation, gender in translation, contemporary Arabic literature, and critical
discourse analysis. Her articles have appeared in such translation journals as The Translator and
Turjuman: Journal of Translation.
Nesrine Bessaïh, PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, is an anthropologist and a translator
specialized in reproductive justice, an emerging field at the intersection of social justice and
sexual and reproductive health. She coordinates the collective translation and adaptation of Our
Bodies, Ourselves in French for Quebec. The first volume, Corps Accord: Guide de sexualité positive
(2019), is published in Canada, France, and Belgium.
xiii
Contributors
Marlène Bichet teaches English at the Université de Franche-Comté (France). Her

current research explores the translation of feminist philosophy, with particular focus on de
Beauvoir’s work.
Anna Bogic holds a PhD in women’s studies and a master’s degree in translation studies from
the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research has centred on the Serbian translation of the
American feminist health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves and the first English translation of Simone
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She is a Research Associate with the Institute of Feminist and
Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa.
Hilary Brown is Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has
published widely on transnational cultural history in the early modern period, with a particular
focus on women. Her current research on women translators is funded by a fellowship from the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Julia Bullock is an associate professor of Japanese studies at Emory University. She is the author
of two books and numerous other publications on feminism and gender in modern Japan, and
is currently working on a book manuscript titled Beauvoir in Japan: Postwar Japanese Feminism
and The Second Sex.
Andrea Campaña is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research centres on the contribution of literature in the
teaching of English and the multimedia teaching of literature.
Olga Castro lectures in translation studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her main area of
research is feminist translation studies. Her current research focuses on the operation of power
in translation across transnational borders, particularly as it manifests in relation to feminism in
minorized/stateless cultures within multilingual settings. She tweets at @olgacastro80.
Marcela Contreras is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Her research focuses on translator training, translation and
literature, and specialized translation.
Beverley Curran is a lecturer of linguistic, cultural, and media translation at International

Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo and Associate Director of the Center for Teaching
and Learning. Her most recent publications include the essay collection Multiple Translation
Communities in Contemporary Japan (2015), co-edited with Nana Sato-Rossberg and Akiko
Tanabe, and Sky Navigation Homeward: New and Selected Poems (2019), poems by Mikiro Sasaki,
co-translated with Mitsuko Ohno and Nobuaki Tochigi.
Sama Dawood is Associate Professor of Translation and Interpreting in the Department of

English at Misr International University (Egypt). She has publications in the fields of journalistic
translation, simultaneous interpreting, and literary translation. Dawood’s current research
interests include computer-assisted translation and interpreting, and the impact of the digital
age on translation theory and practice.
Handegül Demirhan is a lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Studies department

and a board member of the Gender and Women’s Studies Research Center at İstanbul Gedik
xiv
Contributors
University. Her main areas of research in translation include gender, feminism, feminist pedagogy
and translation of children’s literature, and women’s writing. She is the translator of Pollyanna
(2018).
Bruna Di Sabato is Full Professor of Language Education at the University of Naples Suor
Orsola Benincasa. She holds a PhD in English for specific purposes. Her principal research
interests include educational linguistics, pedagogic translation, and English linguistics. She is the
author of numerous articles and academic volumes pertaining to the aforementioned subjects.
Biyu (Jade) Du is a lecturer in translation and interpreting at Newcastle University, UK. She
is interested in the legal, social, and sociolinguistic approach to translation/interpreting. Her
research areas cover gender-related issues in interpreting, interpreter-mediated communication
in public service settings, migration and multilingualism, and legal translation.
Rajkumar Eligedi is an assistant professor in English at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University,
Saudi Arabia. He has a PhD in English from EFL-University, Hyderabad. He is a recipient of
the DAAD fellowship of Technische Universität, Dresden, for his doctoral studies. His research
interests include translation, gender, literature, and language.
Doaa Embabi is a literature and translation researcher based at Ain Shams University, Egypt. She
has published on different areas of translation studies and developed an interest in translation
of Islamic feminist texts, including an article titled “Production of Knowledge by Translating
‘Islamic Feminist’ Works: The Case of Amina Wadud’s Work.”
Emek Ergun is an activist-translator and assistant professor of women’s and gender studies &
global studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on the
geopolitical role of translation in connecting feminist activists, discourses, and movements
across borders. She recently co-edited, with Olga Castro, Feminist Translation Studies: Local and
Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017).
Laura Fontanella is a postgraduate in European and extra-European languages and literature at

the State University of Milan. Her research interests include translation studies, feminist studies,
and gender studies.
Elisabeth Gibbels was born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and was denied an
academic career due to her activity in the opposition. Her academic work focuses on gender,
translation, and power. Gibbels currently teaches at Humboldt University Berlin. Her latest
publication is a lexicon of German women translators from the beginnings to the mid-19th
century.
Pilar Godayol is a professor of translation at the Central University of Catalonia. Her research
interests include history and theory of translation, gender studies, and censorship. She is the
author of over 100 publications, including Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty
Friedan y Mary McCarthy (2017).
Wangtaolue Guo is a first-year PhD student in transnational and comparative literatures at the
University of Alberta. His research interests include queer translation, translingualism, sexuality
studies, and Sinophone studies.
xv
Contributors
Rim Hassen holds an MA and a PhD in translation and comparative cultural studies from the
University of Warwick. She currently works as a bilingual education officer at Durham City
Council in the UK. Her main interests are women’s translations of the Quran, gender and
translation, feminist translation theory, and translations of classical Arabic poetry into English,
French, and German.
Pauline Henry-Tierney is a lecturer in French and translation studies at Newcastle University,

UK. Her current research focuses on the translation of queer and feminist theoretical texts.
Recent publications explore topics including feminist translation pedagogy, translation, and
sexual alterity in women’s autofiction, matrophobia, and women’s erotic writing in French.
Ewa Kraskowska is Professor at the Institute of Polish Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz
University in Poznań, and Chair of the Department of 20th Century Literature, Literary Theory,
and the Art of Translation. She is the author of books and articles regarding translation and
women’s literature.
Denise Kripper is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Modern Languages Department at Lake
Forest College. She is a literary translator from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and holds a PhD in
literature and cultural studies from Georgetown University. Her research interests include Latin
American literature and translation studies.
Enora Lessinger is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and currently a PhD student
at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. Her research topic, “Translating Silence in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Novels: Testing the Explicitation Hypothesis on Unreliable Narratives,” is at the
intersection between literary studies and translation studies and involves six different languages.
Boya Li is a PhD candidate in translation studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She has
a master’s degree in women’s studies from the same university. Her research interests include
translation and gender, translation of general knowledge, amateur translator communities, and
knowledge transmission between West and East.
Nihad Mansour is a professor of translation studies and Head of the Institute of Applied
Linguistics & Translation, Alexandria University. Professor Mansour has a long experience
in teaching translation and interpreting studies and linguistics modules. She has authored
refereed publications in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, multimodality, and
political discourse analysis, and she supervised several academic dissertations in translation and
interpreting studies.
Siobhan Meï is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts

Amherst. Her research interests include Caribbean and African diaspora literatures, translation
theory, and Caribbean philosophy. Her translations and original poetry have appeared in
carte blanche, The Adirondack Review, Transference, and Asymptote. She is co-editor of “Haiti in
Translation.”
Mathilde Michaud is a doctoral researcher in history at the University of Glasgow. Her current
research focuses on the impact of Catholic discourses in 19th-century Québec in constructing
modern gender roles and identities.
xvi
Contributors
Johanna Monti is Professor in Translation Technology and Computational Linguistics at

the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Her current research focuses on hybrid approaches to
machine translation, the development of linguistic resources for natural language processing
applications, and the evaluation of translation technology.
Antonio Perri is Associate Professor of General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University
of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa. His main research interests include the anthropological and
linguistic features of writing systems and notations (in particular Aztec writing), translation
theory (more specifically, intersemiotic translation), and the problem of gender in translation.
Silvia Pettini is a postdoctoral research fellow in translation studies at Roma Tre University,
Italy. Her main research interests are game localization, audiovisual translation, and bilingual
lexicography. She has published papers in Translation Spaces and The Journal of Internationalization
and Localization and book chapters in Language for Specific Purposes: Research and Translation across
Cultures and Media (2016) and Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation
(Routledge, 2018).
Nada Qanbar is an associate professor in linguistics in the College of Arts and Literature at
Taiz University, Yemen. Her current research focuses on audiovisual translation, gender, and
language in context.
Ewa Rajewska is a Polish translation scholar and a literary translator from English. Among
her books are Stanisław Barańczak – poeta i tłumacz [Stanisław Barańczak – the Poet and the
Translator] (2007), Domysł portretu. O twórczości oryginalnej i przekładowej Ludmiły Marjańskiej [A
Guess at a Portrait. On the Original and Translation Oeuvre by Ludmiła Marjańska] (2016).
Irene Ranzato has a PhD in translation studies, and teaches English language and translation at
Sapienza University of Rome. Her research focuses on the intersections between linguistic and
ideological issues in audiovisual translation. Among her most recent publications are Translating
Culture Specific References: The Case of Dubbing (Routledge, 2016) and Linguistic and Cultural
Representation in Audiovisual Translation (co-editor) (Routledge, 2018).
Sandra Joy Russell is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. Her research interests include Ukrainian post-Soviet and diasporic literature and film,
memory studies, and transnational development(s) of queer and feminist thought. She is also a
translator and editor for the English edition of Krytyka magazine.
Sara Rutkowski is an assistant professor of English at the City University of New York:
Kingsborough Community College. She is the author of The Literary Legacies of the Federal
Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (2017), and has published other
work on Depression-era and post-war American writers and the cultural and political contexts
of 20th-century global literature.
Hala G. Sami is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the English Department,
Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt. She has published on female cultural myths, women
and the poetics of space, the representation of women in literature and popular culture, as well
as women’s role in revolutions and resistance. Her publications include “A Strategic Use of
xvii
Contributors
Culture: Egyptian Women’s Subversion and Resignification of Gender Norms” in Maha El

Said, et al. eds. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (2015).
Sima Sharifi holds a PhD in translation studies, 2017, and bachelor and master’s degrees in
linguistics from Canadian universities. Her interests include the comparative study of Canadian
feminist novels in Persian translations, writing fictionalized non-fiction, and Canada’s North
with the Arctic Inspiration Prize, which she co-founded in 2012.
Garima Sharma is a PhD student of German literature at Leipzig University, Germany. Her
master’s thesis analyzed the three German translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own
from a feminist perspective. Her current research focuses on body poetics in selected works by
German and Indian women writers.
Carolyn Shread is Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA, and
she also teaches translation at Smith College. She has translated ten books, including five by
French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Her research addresses two main areas: the implications
of Malabou’s concept of plasticity for translation studies and the process of translating Haitian
author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces from French into English. She wrote the entry
on “Translating Feminist Philosophers” in the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and
Philosophy (2019).
Kornelia Slavova is a professor of American literature and culture in the Department of English
and American Studies, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her current research
focuses on the translation of gender and feminist theory as well as translation for the theatre.
Ida Hove Solberg holds a PhD in translation studies at the Stockholm University, Sweden. She
is particularly interested in feminist, activist, and other kinds of ideologically framed translation.
She is also co-founder and editor of the Norwegian literary magazine Mellom, Norway’s first
magazine devoted to literary translation, established in 2014.
María Laura Spoturno is Associate Professor of Literary Translation and US Literature at

Universidad Nacional de La Plata and a researcher with Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones
Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina). Her current research focuses on the study of subjectivity and
gender in minority writing and (self )-(re)translation practices.
Weronika Szwebs is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology, Adam
Mickiewicz University. She is working on a thesis that concerns the translation of theoretical
discourses in the Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research
interests revolve around translation studies, 20th-century Polish literature, and literary theory.
Nishant Upadhyay is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado

Boulder and University of Massachusetts. Their research and teaching draws upon decolonial,
intersectional, and transnational feminist, queer, and trans studies, and critical ethnic studies.
Helen Vassallo is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter, UK. She is founder of
the Translating Women project, and her primary research focus is gender parity in translated
literature, particularly within the UK publishing industry. She reviews women in translation
titles at https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen, and tweets at @translatewomen.
xviii
Contributors
Gabriela Yañez, translator and interpreter, works as a professor and researcher in the School
of Humanities and Education Sciences at the University of La Plata, Argentina. Her current
research focuses on the translation of minority writing, specifically of testimonial narratives by
Argentine women writers in the 20th century.
Zhongli Yu is an associate professor in translation studies in the School of Education and

English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, holding a PhD in translation and
intercultural studies (Manchester). Her research interests include gender/women/feminism
in/and translation, museum narratives and translation, war interpreting/interpreter, translation
education, and intercultural communication.
xix
Acknowledgements
The editors of The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender wish to express
their grateful thanks to our students and colleagues, who helped at different stages of our work
on the Handbook. We are grateful to the research assistants, who did invaluable work check-
ing, managing, keeping track, hunting down details, and helping finalize and collate these 41
chapters from around the world. A special thank you goes to Shaily Zolfaghari (PhD student,
University of Ottawa) who accompanied and managed the details of the entire project, and to
Nesrine Bessaïh (PhD candidate, University of Ottawa) and Alexandra Yazeva (PhD student,
University of Ottawa) who helped finish up.
We also wish to thank the peer reviewers from outside the project, whose insightful com-
ments helped in the development of the chapters of the Handbook. Thanks are due to Tahia
Abdel Nasser (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Omaima Abou-Bakr (Cairo University,
Egypt), Mirella Agorni (Ca’Foscari University, Italy), Hebatalah Aref (Cairo University, Egypt),
Amani Badawy (Cairo University, Egypt), Brian Baer (Kent State University, USA), Michaela
Baldo (University of Hull, UK), Jorge Diaz Cintas (University College, London, UK), Nadia
El-Kholy (Cairo University, Egypt), Hoda Elsadda (Cairo University, Egypt), Farzaneh Far-
ahzad (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran), Hiroko Furukawa (Tohoku Gakuin University,
Japan), Ferial Ghazoul (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Magda Heydel ( Jagiellonian
University, Poland), Marion Lerner (University of Iceland), Carmen Mangiron (Universidad
Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain), Susan Pickford (Université de Paris IV, France), Eran Shuali
(Université de Strasbourg, France), Sherry Simon (Concordia University, Canada), Darryl Sterk
(Lingnan University, Hong Kong), Şehnaz Tahir Gurcalar (Bosphorous University, Turkey),
Nancy Tsai (Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, USA), Sergey Tyule-
nev (Durham University, UK).
xx
Introduction
The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender brings together a collection of essays
representing a variety of approaches at the intersection of translation, feminism, and gender. The
conceptualization of this volume started in 2016 as a transnational feminist translation project,
initiated by two editors coming from two different parts of the world, Canada and Egypt, con-
nected by our involvement in feminist translation scholarship and practice, yet marked by our
distinct academic experiences and cultural locations. From our earliest discussions about the
Handbook, it was clear to us that we shared a similar vision: a volume that would bring together
the most prominent and relevant research in translation studies, which is grounded in feminist
theory and gender studies. Our aim was twofold:
1 To provide an overview of the history, theorizing, and current critical contributions at

the intersection of translation, feminism, and gender already established in mostly North
America and Western Europe.
2 To encourage the development of scholarly interest in other parts of the world both among
colleagues already working in the area of translation studies, urging them to adopt femi-
nist approaches and gender tools, and among feminist literary and social critics, whom we
invited to address questions of translation.
We approached known specialists in the area, sent out a Call for Papers for as wide a circula-
tion as possible through all available networks in East, West, North and South, and encouraged
promising scholars to expand their work to include translation studies and/or feminism and
gender. The response was both gratifying and challenging, as we received almost 50 interesting
and compelling abstracts, placing us, as editors, in the difficult position of selection. At this stage,
we did accept almost all the abstracts, and started the long process of seeing them develop into
chapters.
Halfway through the process we were lucky to be able to organize a meeting for the prospec-
tive authors of the Handbook in order to share the work carried out so far, discuss the challenges,
and agree on the structures of the chapters that would allow a degree of harmony with some
variety. The meeting was generously hosted by the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at
the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, owing to the initiative of Ewa Kraskowska,
1
professor and chair of the Institute of Polish Philology, who organised a conference on “Femi-
nism and Gender in Translation” (13–14 April 2018). The agenda included a general overview
of the Handbook, the various approaches adopted by the authors, and the challenges related to
the great diversity in areas of specialization, academic writing conventions, and the position of
the English language as the lingua franca of international academic publishing. As importantly, it
marked an opportunity for participants coming from universities in Canada, Austria, Germany,
France, Italy, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Poland, Bulgaria, Egypt, the Maghreb, and the
United Arab Emirates to communicate, while those authors who could not attend were later
informed of the discussion and decisions taken during the meeting. Apart from the different
approaches, methods, and theoretical frameworks considered during the meeting, we agreed to
structure each of the chapters to include the following sections: an introduction, historical over-
view, critical contributions, current research and/or case study, future directions, and suggested
further readings. Thus, most of the chapters included in this Handbook include these points in
their texts.
As editors, we faced two main challenges. The first was structure, which revolved around
how to structure a book that addresses such deeply seated cultural and sociopolitical questions
as gender and feminism, and adds the complexities of transnational and transcultural translation.
Overarching topics were created to organize what is extremely diverse: history, criticism, analy-
sis, and case studies. Yet, once the chapters took their final shape, it was easier to group them
into the current five parts, preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue. The Prologue
presents a report on a roundtable discussion of “Women (Re)Writing Authority” by a group
of feminist translators and translation scholars. It reflects on how feminist approaches to transla-
tion destabilize authorship and authority. Although originally submitted as a chapter, it is now
the entry point to the whole Handbook, with the authors’ representation of epistemological,
geohistorical, linguistic, and cultural multiplicity and diversity reflecting the Handbook project in
general, and the following chapters. Similarly, the Epilogue chapter entitled “Recognition, Risk,
and Relationships: Feminism and Translation as Modes of Embodied Engagement” presented
an apt closure of the Handbook, offering a general commentary on feminism, translation, and
engagement.
Part I “Translating and Publishing Women” includes 11 chapters which explore translations
of women writers from and into English in India, Iran, Iraq, the Maghreb, South America, Latin
America, Poland, Spain, early Modern Europe, and the UK. The chapters also discuss various
issues such as the practices of feminist translation, cultural representation, interpretation, publish-
ing, and censorship, as well as specific feminist concepts such as solidarity and herstory. In Part
II “Translating Feminist Writers,” we assembled the six chapters dealing with the translations
and receptions of foundational feminist texts (mostly from English and French) into different
languages and within various cultures. These texts include a study of the translation, adaptation,
and reception of Mary Wollstonecraft; the translation of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own
into Hindi; and the problematics of various translations of Simone de Beauvoir into English,
Arabic, and Japanese, as well as the Spanish versions of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands. Part III
“Feminism, Gender, and Queer in Translation” is composed of eight chapters which deal in
more general terms with feminist, gender, and queer intersections with translation in different
parts of the world such as Poland, Russia, and other post-communist countries, as well as in
Italy, China, and India. These chapters, moreover, address issues related to political history, social
structures, and in relation to concepts – largely developed in the “West” – such as transfeminism,
gender, subversion, and decolonization. Another group of eight chapters is included in Part
IV “Gender in Grammar, Technologies, and Audiovisual Translation.” The chapters deal with
2
Introduction
a variety of issues such as grammatical gender, translating gender, sexist translation, political
incorrectness, feminist activism, as well as language issues in audiovisual translation, subtitling,
video game translation, and machine translation. The analyzed texts, from different parts of the
world, include UN documents, social media, video games, and TV programmes and films. The
last part, Part V “Discourses in Translation,” consists of six chapters that focus on the translation
of specific discourses: religion, health, and children’s education. Thus, several chapters discuss
the translation of sacred texts from a feminist perspective while others address the translation of
books on women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and a study of the adaptation and translation
of children’s literature closes this section. All in all, the Handbook, in its five parts, prologue, and
epilogue, expands the study of translation, feminism, and gender geographically, historically, and
epistemologically into the realms of transnational feminist translation praxis.
The second challenge arose from the transnational aspect of this project, in particular the
publishing language, English. Thirty-five of the 41 chapters were written by scholars whose
first language is not English. While the dominance of English academic publishing may be a
fact in many parts of the world, there are as many drawbacks as there are advantages to this fact,
especially in the humanities. The advantages include broader accessibility to academic texts
worldwide for readers who function in English, as a first, second, or additional language. This
Handbook is an example of such accessible international dissemination of academic work. For
monolingual English speakers, the dominance of English publishing also makes work available
from other parts of the world to which they might otherwise have little access: in the case of
this Handbook, this means China, India, South America, and the Middle East. This is valuable, and
we hope that the work collected here will prove useful in this regard. However, the drawback
of such publishing is that local academics and local readers, who are not readers of English, are
excluded. One of the chapters on translating feminist writing from Europe and North America
into Telugu makes this exclusion very clear: the source texts – in English, French, Italian, or
Russian – did not reach the general local public until the translator ‘Volga’ took it upon herself
to make them available, thus fomenting discussion and change. Today, the drive to publish in
English continues to exclude large populations from such development, and translation is a
costly and not always successful enterprise.
A further difficulty that publication in English raises is the issue of editing. There are many
ways of writing an academic text, and different cultures have different traditions. English is one
such culture. Yet publishing in English imposes English structures and writing conventions,
and demands mastery of the language. Further, authors writing about local topics, histories,
cultures – which is inevitable in the study of translation – end up having to explain many details
of the context of their work that would be understood by local readers. References to irony, for
example, require much more detail: irony works with complicity and requires knowledge of the
local situation which is being referenced. Over explaining irony can kill it. Similarly, translation
studies requires references to translated texts, the changes they undergo, the losses and gains and
misinterpretations that can be detailed; when a Spanish, or German, or Arabic-speaking writer
analyzes the Spanish, German, or Arabic translation of a certain text, they will cite examples.
For the purposes of English publication, these examples must then be ‘translated’ into English
for the international readers to understand the effects of translation translated and retranslated.
These are important matters; they have considerable impact on the transnational aspect of
feminist and gender-aware approaches to any academic study. The predominance of English, if
only as a gatekeeper excluding work that doesn’t meet its standard, and the power of ideas and
theories emanating from Anglo-America and Europe, expressed in English and referred to as
‘the West’ in many of the chapters, create an imbalance that affects the dynamics of transnational
3
exchange. This has already been explored in postcolonial terms by authors of the 1990s, but it
continues to be a factor undermining the collaborative and reciprocal creation and exchange of
information sought in transnational feminist and gender studies.
Still, in the face of these challenges, we are proud to have been able to collect such a diverse
array of material on translation, feminism, and gender, and we hope that our international Eng-
lish readers will learn as much from these chapters as we did assembling, editing, and finalizing
them.
Luise von Flotow (Ottawa)
Hala Kamal (Cairo)
25 November 2019
4
1
Women (re)writing authority
A roundtable discussion
on feminist translation
Emek Ergun, Denise Kripper, Siobhan Meï,

Sandra Joy Russell, Sara Rutkowski,
Carolyn Shread, and Ida Hove Solberg
This collectively authored reflection on translation began as a roundtable discussion by a group

of feminists considering how translation can subvert, rewrite, or question hegemonic defini-
tions of authorship, as well as how it can disrupt or dismantle intersecting regimes of power.
This text is the product of our conversations since that initial meeting, including both in per-
son and online exchanges. Authorizing ourselves to explore a new form of collective writing
enabled by digital technologies, one that both recognizes individual ideas and weaves them into
the representation of a communal understanding, we explore the theoretical formulations and
practical negotiations of the textual authority of translators within the interdisciplinary con-
texts of feminist studies, literary studies, and translation studies. The dialogic convergence of
those three disciplinary territories allows for an in-depth examination of power and resistance
in relation to women’s transformative roles as authors, translators, and social justice activists
in different geohistorical contexts. Moreover, such criticism is useful in revealing the past and
present silencing of women’s contributions to social change as cultural and political agents.
The goal of this chapter is to consider how translation brings local and transnational feminisms
into dialogue across time and place, and in doing so, challenges legacies of hegemonic cultural
authority that too often reproduce heteropatriarchal, colonial formations. Some questions that
guided our discussions include: How can translation disrupt or dismantle intersecting regimes
of power? What is the role of women translators in histories of resistance (e.g. feminist move-
ments)? How does translation subvert, rewrite, or question hegemonic definitions of author-
ship? What promising areas of collaboration remain between feminist and translation theories
as they continue to evolve? The participants of this roundtable chapter, coming from different
interdisciplinary and transnational backgrounds, approach questions of feminist politics and
philosophies of authorship and translation with their uniquely positioned epistemic voices. In
doing so, they help expand critical understandings of translation in general and feminist transla-
tion in particular, and offer a multifaceted meditation that works from our various perspectives
and experiences to go beyond (mis)perceptions of authorship towards practices of solidarity
in translation.
5
Emek Ergun et al.
Critiquing the modern concept of author,

inventing multiple translatorship
The modern concept of the author as the sole and individual originator of their own work is
comparatively new in the West, as research on the literary cultures of the medieval and early
modern periods in Europe demonstrates. At the roundtable, Siobhan Meï reminded us of dif-
ferent descriptions of the medieval woman author by defining ‘authorship’ in both its modern
and medieval contexts, as well as exploring the various avenues in which cultural and spiritual
authority could be accessed by women of the time. Just as the agency and authority of the
translator is often called into question, early modern and medieval women writers occupied
an equally precarious role within the patriarchal intellectual and spiritual conventions of
their time. Due to women’s historical exclusion from intellectual circles and institutions of
learning, the way towards authorship and spiritual authority for women writers was neither
straightforward nor, in some instances, without social consequences. In a chapter from The
Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (2003) titled “Women and Authorship,”
Jennifer Summit describes the multitude of ways in which we might consider the possibility
of the medieval woman author, a project that involves defining ‘authorship’ in both its modern
and medieval contexts, as well as exploring the various avenues in which cultural and spiritual
authority could be accessed by women of the time. Authorship, according to Summit, is a his-
torically variable term whose meaning shifts according to institutional and historical contexts.
Where the modern author is identified and culturally valued as the sole creator of their work,
medieval and early modern forms of authorship are based in the concept of auctoritas, a term
used as a “marker of doctrinal authority” whose ideological power is derived from its “link to
tradition, defined as a stream of continuous influence by its root tradere, to pass on” (Summit
2003, 92). Living medieval writers thus cultivated their cultural and intellectual authority from
within a recognizable network of sources, including the philosophies and poetics of ancient
theologians, classical writers, scripture, and, even, as visionary writing exemplifies, the direct
and divine will of God. Writing as “a suspension rather than an assertion of selfhood” (Sum-
mit 2003, 96) and as textual demonstration of total submission to God’s will serve as examples
of the ways in which women visionaries were engaged as authorial participants in medieval
literary culture.
An example of one such visionary writer is Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), a 13th-century
French-speaking mystic and author of Le miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (The Mirror of Simple
Souls) (1295). Le miroir is a complex and highly abstract prose piece written in the style of a
Boethian dialogue that evokes the courtly tradition of fine amor celebrated in works such as Guil-
laume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s 13th-century allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose (Ernst
Langlois 1914–1924). In Porete’s text, multiple feminine allegorical voices, including Reason,
Love, and the Soul, address one another. Porete’s work is unique in the context of Chris-
tian visionary writing in that it does not document corporeal revelation, but rather intimately
describes an ongoing spiritual and cerebral negotiation of the self in relation to God’s will. Writ-
ten in the vernacular, Le miroir was deemed heretical and Porete was burned at the stake in 1310.
Porete’s spiritual and literary legacy did not die with her however, as there is strong evidence
pointing to connections between Porete’s Miroir and the writing and translations of Marguerite
de Navarre (1492–1549), sister to King François I and a known evangelist sympathizer during
the tumultuous early years of the Protestant Reformation in France. Meï suggested that while
intellectual submission and textual self-negation would initially seem to contradict or dissolve
authorial possibility, the identification of a divine source for one’s writing, which exists not
only beyond the self, but also supersedes individual consciousness, generates a space of creative
6
agency and flexibility in which transmission and reception – rather than ownership – become
the goals of cultural production and spiritual enlightenment.
Still prevalent today, the idea of the solitary author has been questioned and contested by
literary studies scholars such as Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener (2013), who, building on Jack
Stillinger’s (1991) concept of multiple authorship, coined the term multiple translatorship. Tradition-
ally, the multiplicity of agents behind a translation has been understood in terms of collabora-
tion or cooperation, yet it may also involve discrepancies and disagreements. By disclosing the
multiplicity of agents involved, traces of negotiations challenge common conceptions of author-
ship. On these grounds, Ida Hove Solberg reminded the roundtable that opposing viewpoints
between agents are likely to surface in translations of ideological works, such as feminist texts,
due to the frequent personal ideological involvement of the agents. Keith Harvey finds “bind-
ings” (Harvey 2003) – cover texts, illustrations, promotional material, etc. – to be key sites for
negotiation between competing ideological viewpoints. One example Solberg shared is the first
Norwegian translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe in 1970 by an intellectual
first-wave feminist that was released by a small, predominantly male left-wing publishing house.
Its ‘bindings’ present it simultaneously as a work on questions of sexuality, with a faceless naked
woman on the cover, and as an existentialist discussion of women’s situation. In the translation,
the topic of sexuality is toned down or even omitted, and much of the existentialist vocabulary is
simplified. The paradoxical dissonance between what is on the cover and the book’s content is an
example of multiple translatorship, but to whom should these choices be attributed, the translator
or the editorial team? Negotiations of different conceptions of the book, evident in its bindings
and supported by correspondence between agents, illustrate the possibility for both productive
dialectical opposition as well as mutual influence and interplay between translational agents.
Similarly, re-conceiving translation as a specific form of authorship, at the roundtable Carolyn
Shread drew on her own work as a translator of several works by contemporary French philoso-
pher Catherine Malabou, beginning with Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2009). She recounted
how she self-reflexively began to construe Malabou’s signature concept of ‘plasticity’ – defined
as the giving, receiving, or even explosion of form – as relevant to translation. For instance, con-
ventional conceptions of translation can be characterized as an ‘elastic’ model in that translation
is measured against a discrete and autonomous original to which the translation always refers
back and is inevitably found to be lacking and subservient. The equivalences of the exchanges
fail and the translation is never commensurate with the original. By contrast, a ‘plastic’ paradigm
views translation as a morphing process by which a text develops precisely through transla-
tions. To replace textual elasticity with plasticity is also to adopt a generative framework that
aligns with feminist conceptions of relationality as opposed to a discrete subject/object divide.
Moreover, because plasticity accounts not only for the giving and receiving of form but also its
destruction, this revised conception allows us to understand the ‘accidents’ of translation. Plastic-
ity parses the ways in which translation is involved in reworkings and in the production of the
new. In our discussion, Emek Ergun agreed that if our premise is that translations and originals
are differently assembled and marked texts, then neither is purely original or copied. They are
both creatively produced through different meaning-making mechanisms and they both con-
tinue to make and shed meanings when they encounter readers who bring their own locally
crafted interpretive schemes to the reading process.
Representing others for others

This insight allows us to ask, as Meï put it, on whose behalf are we speaking/translating? As
an activity that is built on processes of mediation and negotiation, in what ways and under
7
Emek Ergun et al.
which conditions does translation allow agents and communities to speak for themselves? When
and how does translation as a representational practice submerge or erase voices, histories, and
knowledge? This last question is particularly relevant in the construction of feminist translation
epistemologies that seek to challenge regimes of power. Genealogical excavations of liberalism
have exposed the racially exclusionary foundations of the Western legal, social, and philo-
sophical frameworks through which bodies become legible as human and the processes through
which various narratives congeal and circulate as History. As a porous and de-centred site of
critical inquiry that is interested in how community forms across borders and sociocultural
differences, feminist translation is also a space in which liberal conceptualizations of freedom,
individuality, autonomy, and agency are explored and interrogated.
Even so, in our conversation, Sandra Joy Russell raised the question: what does it mean for
women translators to be able to engage with the act of translation when the female body has
been, and continues to be, regulated by various spheres, not only sexual and reproductive, but
also within political and activist spheres of power, as in the spaces of protest and revolution? This
interrogation allows us to consider translation’s unique offering of not only the ‘possession’ of
a text but, more subversively, the repossession of a textual body through the reproductive act of
rewriting through translation, and, moreover, the extent to which this repossession is translat-
able between geographic and ideological spaces. In other words, the challenge of textual repos-
session is especially present for feminist translators, whose work requires active recognition of
how feminism(s), transnationally and transculturally, has formed and developed under different
ideological and historical conditions. For women translators who have historically confronted
expectations of invisibility and the assumed absence of authorship, the symbolic representation
or imagining of the human body as a space of ownership takes on a new significance, one that is
specifically feminist: it participates in the act of reclaiming authority over a textual body.
In Russel’s unpublished translations of women’s poetry written during Ukraine’s 2013–2014
Euromaidan Revolution from a collection entitled Materyns’ka moltyva [Maternal Prayer], the
figure of berehynia, an ancient Slavic goddess or ‘hearth mother,’ emerged as a poetic symbol
for women’s roles in the protests. Often fetishized, the image of the berehynia in contemporary
Ukraine has been tied to the maternal body and become a catch-all for describing women’s
participation in the revolution. Rendering this image in English in a Western context prompted
Russel to ask what would it mean to disrupt this figure as a way to reconstruct it as more
subversively feminist, as an opposition to, rather than protector of, patriarchy? This impulse is
problematic, however, within a Ukrainian activist context, since such rewriting re-performs the
revolution in order to meet the criteria of Western feminism. While rewriting through transla-
tion can reclaim the female body as feminist, translating from a post-imperial context (Ukraine)
to an imperial one (US), we have to ask how power and authority are wielded in translation.
More specifically, how does such power, through its representations of the symbolic and corpo-
real body, reinforce hegemonic and imperialistic formations of feminism?
Thinking about these questions as pertinent concerns across the globe, Meï made a connec-
tion to the work of feminist activist Gina Athena Ulysse, who, in Why Haiti Needs New Nar-
ratives: a Post-Quake Chronicle (2015), deploys translation as a complex and intimate process of
representation for Haiti, a nation that has been constrained by the persistence of stereotypes that
alienate and victimize its communities. In this trilingual (English, Haitian Creole, and French)
text, Ulysse deconstructs, revisits, and challenges these narratives. Ulysse, a member of the Hai-
tian diaspora, consistently returns to the issue of representation – to the question of who can
speak on behalf of whom. The auto-ethnographic reflexivity of Ulysse’s written work and her
mobilization of embodied performance challenge how certain narratives are constructed and
circulate. Ulysse’s artistic oeuvre offers key insights into what a feminist translational praxis can
8
look like: one that is always attentive to the ways in which politics and poetics of representation
traverse and conjoin the public and private spheres of meaning-making.
Expanding boundaries of authorship

The pairing of feminism and translation as discourses and practices produces a rich space for
thinking through the politics of speaking and storytelling in transnational contexts, particularly
with regard to these questions of representation. In our discussion, Sara Rutkowski shared her
interest in contemporary instances in which the translator tears down traditional models of
textual authority thereby expanding the boundaries of authorship. A striking example is Ann
Goldstein, who has become a virtual stand-in for the celebrated, though anonymous, Italian
writer Elena Ferrante, author of the widely popular four novels that comprise the Neapolitan
series: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those
Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). Indeed, it is Ferrante’s determination
to remain unknown that has allowed for a more expansive view of translation as collaboration
and co-authorship (although it should be noted that in 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti
concluded that Anita Raja, herself a translator, was the actual author of the Neapolitan novels – a
claim that Ferrante vehemently denied). Goldstein, who translated all four novels into English,
has become the embodiment of the hidden writer, the sole conduit to the source, and by her
own admission, even mistaken for the source. Her public status in the author’s absence has
helped turn on its head the historical and ideological construction of translation, the very prob-
lem that initially drives feminist critique – namely, the notion that translation is subordinate to
the original and as such is parallel to women’s role as submissive, reproductive, the handmaiden
to the master. The famed translator and invisible writer upend that social order and contribute
to the rising cultural cachet of translators. In fact, Solberg confirmed that the same can be said of
Ferrante’s translators in Norway (Kristin Sørsdal), Sweden ( Johanna Hedenberg), and Denmark
(Nina Gross), all three of whom have served as authors-by-proxy, attending public events, giving
extensive interviews, and generally becoming well-known literary figures in Ferrante’s absence.
Moreover, Ferrante’s novels themselves are particularly germane to the topic of feminist
translation because they are in many respects about the power of translation and its vital role in
expanding the boundaries of women’s social and political identities. One example is the narra-
tor’s struggle to reconcile her two languages, the Neapolitan dialect, which intractably represents
the intimacy of home, the working-class, anger, and violence, and standard Italian, which signals
the aspirational world beyond the domestic, itself oppressively constructed. It is only when she
becomes a writer that the narrator is empowered, and not by the language in which she writes,
but by the act of translating. Translation is a central motif for crossing over linguistic, national,
and gendered borders. The story both around and inside Ferrante’s novels highlights translation
as an act of subversion, a claiming of territory that has been habitually denied to both women
and translators.
Fictionalizing translation and translators

Along with the growing public interest in, and awareness of, individual translators, there has
also been a global upsurge in the representation of the act of translation and the task of the
translator in literature itself. This fictional turn is fundamental because it foregrounds translation
by allocating a leading role to translators and interpreters, who have been largely erased, even
though they have always been central to the production and circulation of texts. As a literary
device, translation prompts us to reconsider the way we perceive fiction. At the roundtable,
9
Emek Ergun et al.
Denise Kripper presented her research on how fictional women translators and their practices
are portrayed in contemporary literature in Spanish. In these works, they challenge the original/
copy dynamic celebrating irreverent translation as an act of subversion. They mistranslate and
they do so on purpose, with a political agenda in mind. So what happens when a ‘bad’ translation
becomes a good one? What happens when meanings are subverted deliberately? In the same
way that Chicana feminist writers have reclaimed and reappropriated the figure of La Malinche
(see for example Norma Alarcón 1989), the indigenous interpreter who aided the Spaniards
in the conquest of Mexico and has been historically rendered as a traitor, these works release
the woman translator from a servile, invisible, and inferior position. Feminist translation thus
becomes a creative and empowering approach whereby, through an exercise of mistranslation, a
productive new work is created. Their strategies vary from impeding communication by refus-
ing to translate to overshadowing the original by mistranslating it, attempting to resist regimes
of power such as the hegemony of English, patriarchy and male-dominated spaces, and even the
very reign of the original. For example, the short story “Never Marry a Mexican” by Chicana
writer Sandra Cisneros (1992) is sprinkled with Spanish terms, followed by their explanation,
translation, or (re)elaboration by its code-switching translator protagonist. Thus, a US-based
empowered English-speaking target readership is suddenly dependent on her for understanding;
readers are forced to rely on a character ambiguously depicted as treacherous, while, by contrast,
a Hispanic bilingual audience is invited into a complicit reading. Moreover, the novel Inclúyanme
afuera (2014) by Argentine writer Maria Sonia Cristoff narrates the experiment of its protago-
nist, a woman tired of her machine-like job as a simultaneous interpreter stuck in a booth, who
eventually decides to remain silent for a year. Silence becomes her counteroffensive, her tool
of resistance and the novel dwells on what happens when the world is deprived of translation.
As Kripper proposed, these and other feminist fictional translators tamper with globalization’s
running wheel, hinder its fluidity, slow down readers, forcing them to take a pause and reflect,
or even suspect, mistrust the process. They make translation visible.
Considering pedagogical questions

In our discussions since the roundtable, one of the most pressing questions we asked ourselves
was what can we do as feminist scholars, translators, and educators? Ergun pointed out that it is
not a given that feminist translation is intersectional since it may easily be disrupted or curbed
by global machineries of communication. Indeed, the existing Eurocentric feminist transla-
tion scholarship has largely adhered to a gender-only focus in its theories and practices and
only recently, both with the emergent geopolitical expansion of the field and with the deep
interrogation and transformation of Western feminist praxes by the intersectional critiques of
feminists of color, queer feminists, and third world feminists, feminist translation scholars have
explicitly begun to claim intersectionality as a crucial signpost for their translation praxes. After
all, any translation that only takes into consideration gender injustice can reproduce other forms
of oppression along the axes of race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, geopolitics, etc. Given that
translation always takes place across linguistic, cultural, national, and geopolitical borders that are
ridden with various asymmetrical power relations, intersectionality thus appears as an essential
framework for feminist translation, whose ultimate goal is to intervene into discourses of domi-
nation and help forge connectivities and solidarities across differences and hierarchies.
In a world of violent borderings that are designed to undermine, if not disallow, translations
practiced for socioeconomic justice for all, feminist translators have an ethical imperative to pur-
sue intersectionality so that their work does not end up replicating the very structures of power
that we mean to disrupt. To prevent this from happening, Solberg pointed out the importance
10
of translating feminist literature from minoritized languages in order to counter the dominant
translational flow, as well as including such texts in syllabi. She brought up the example of Nor-
wegian feminist and lesbian activist Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalias Døtre (1977), translated by Louis
Mackay as Egalia’s Daughters (1985), an innovative novel that swaps gender roles. On a related
note, Kripper mentioned the need to refresh the canon with new translation perspectives, such
as Emily Wilson’s recent version of The Odyssey (2017), translated into English by a woman for
the first time. These new translations have the potential to reinvigorate not only the cultural
discourse but also our critical pedagogy.
Ergun put theory to practice by considering feminist classrooms, particularly those that
interrogate the neoliberal, white-supremacist, and hetero/sexist forces of globalization, as spaces
of engagement where we can develop a vision of feminist translation as a vital part of transna-
tional feminist politics. Her undergraduate course “Transnational Feminism” became just such
an experimental space in 2017 by adopting Hilary Klein’s Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories
(2015) as textbook. While translation is not at the centre of the book as a topic of discussion, it
is everywhere in this text. Zapatista women’s stories of creating common grounds of resistance
among various indigenous communities, each with its own language; producing and distrib-
uting their decolonial feminist agendas through pamphlets and women’s laws; implementing
workshops and cooperatives for local sustenance and economic independence; and sharing their
political demands and visions on larger nationwide and worldwide platforms are also stories of
feminist translation. Compañeras not only reveals the possibility of building commonality within
difference but also the strategic use of hegemonic languages, Spanish in this case, in service of
communities of resistance, particularly those marginalized at the intersections of colonial and
patriarchal power relations. Numerous stories in the book revealed to students the power of
translation to disrupt male hegemony over discourse and knowledge and helped them reframe
translation as an enabler of cross-border solidarities and polyphonic assemblages that pursue
liberation and justice.
Translating in the digital revolution

Carolyn Shread built on Emek Ergun’s interest in feminist pedagogy by recalling that practices
of solidarity are undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the digital revolution. In this context,
she discussed her recent translation of Catherine Malabou’s Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Meas-
urements to Artificial Brains (2019) in which the author explores the way that natural intelligence
and brain plasticity, upon which she had formerly based democratic claims (What Should We
Do with Our Brain? 2008), are being transformed by technological advances that move towards
the creation of a synthetic brain. In this human-machine adaptation, we observe corresponding
modes of power that we have yet to fully comprehend. Within this digital transition, translation
offers a practice that helps us grasp intersecting regimes of power that are unlike any hitherto
engaged. Thus, while feminist translation previously sought to alter the paradigms by which
translation was framed, its analysis now helps us anticipate new forms and modes of exchange
that are emerging and that feminists must learn to negotiate.
The question becomes how does artificial intelligence reframe authority in translation?
While there is a generalized belief in the superiority of human translation over machine transla-
tion, the condescending jokes about Google Translate mask both an underlying anxiety and the
fact that we are developing an increasing tolerance for, indeed a habit of, interacting with both
automated and mediated forms of intelligence. Sooner or later, depending on the languages,
machine translation will be very effective. Authority and authorship will be rewritten by agents
that do not resemble those we know now. As the instrumental relation to our tools gives way to
11
Emek Ergun et al.
the adaptation human plasticity is experiencing, we are in uncharted territory. Collective intel-
ligence, amassed and oriented via artificial intelligence, may crowdsource solutions and dissolve
the lines upon which a male heroic narrative of solo authorship established itself.
How do these technology futures affect feminist translation? While in the immediate it calls
for an intersectional critique to identify the sexist, racist, and other biased foundations of algo-
rithms, along with analysis of the effects of building translation from a corpora that draws on a
male and Western canon, reinforcing patriarchy in automated reflexes, it also allows us to imag-
ine machines outside a gendered body and to ask what happens to humans when they accom-
modate themselves to artificial intelligences. As we consider the future of feminist translation, it
is important to ask how do we position ourselves not only in relation to other feminisms, but
also in response to emerging augmented intelligences? When we arrive at artificial authorship
in translation, what is the place of feminism? Moreover, following Michael Cronin’s argument
in Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017), how does feminist
translation respond to the imperative to reduce the energy consumption implicated in transla-
tion technologies when human authority is overridden by the fact of climate change?
Towards solidarity in translation

At this point Meï encouraged us to consider how modern, hegemonic framings of authorship
continue to efface, undermine, and mute the various ways in which we are entangled with
one another – humans, animals, things, and even technologies. These earthly and digital entan-
glements and the diverse relationalities and frictions they produce have been central sites of
exploration for transnational and interdisciplinary feminist work at the intersections of biology,
environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, and literature. In response, Ergun suggested that
we focus on our encounter to discuss the unique significatory potential of translation to con-
nect stories and subjectivities across borders – borders that are usually promoted to polarize and
segregate, rather than to bring closer and connect. Translation, by facilitating cross-border travels
and encounters of differently originated, assembled, and situated stories and discourses, helps
reveal our semiotic gaps, interpretive habits, epistemic illusions, and subjective imperfections.
It is precisely due to this power to defamiliarize our (half )truths by welcoming difference that
translation appears as threatening to the self, when it is imagined and performed in opposition
to the other. However, this supposed threat is the very celebratory aspect of translation. It is how
translation is created and creates: it lures the self into a vulnerable state of hosting the other and
becoming anew with them.
When we welcome translation with sincere hospitality and open our ‘home’ to that beloved
or unknown guest arriving from a long journey and bringing us stories from a distant land (or
perhaps not as distant as we think it is), we have the opportunity not only to become aware of
the partiality and limits of our reflections and imaginations but also to grow with those stories
and appreciate the incompleteness and permeability of our interconnectivity. Translation ena-
bles our subjectivities, individual and collective, to grow beyond – beyond where the language/s
we speak can take us. It is by encountering translated originals that we become original transla-
tions ourselves – unique transnational assemblages of ‘home-made’ stories partially and indefin-
ably borrowed from others, some of whom we do not share a language with. It is in this sense
that we argue that an entrenched fear/hatred of the other can come to an end with the demise
of the entrenched fear/hatred of translation. This is about reimagining relationships to worlds
and words, some we know, some we don’t, but we are of them, they are of us, and it is only
through an ethics of hospitality, vulnerability, plurality, and solidarity – a translational ethics –
that we learn to become with each other and co-exist in our differences. In this sense, we claim
12
feminist translation as utopian. It is the very principle, practice, and promise of transnationality.
When reconceived as such, not in opposition to authorship, but as a transnational form of co-
authorship, translation means hope – not loss or failure – for a future in polyphony.
Further reading
Copeland, Rita. 1995. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Ver-
nacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This text explores the role of translation in the emergence of vernacular literature in medieval Europe.
It is an excellent resource for researchers interested in the historical intersection of translation and liter-
ary culture in the European context.
Doerr, Nicole. 2018. Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Doerr presents her counterintuitive field findings that a multilingual environment – one that depends
on interpreters – is more democratic than a monolingual setting. Her research challenges long-standing
assumptions about effective modes of communication to show that translation has the potential to be
a powerful political tool.
Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives.
New York: Routledge.
This recent collection is composed of 16 essays that explore translation as a form of local and trans-
national feminist activism from different interdisciplinary perspectives, while at the same time seeking
to geopolitically expand the Anglo-Eurocentric boundaries of the field. It also includes a roundtable
discussion on translation with leading scholars on feminist politics.
Herrero Lopez, Isis, Cecilia Alvstad, Johanna Akujärvi, and Synnøve Skarsbø Lindtner, eds. 2018. Gen-
der and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception. Montréal: Vita Traductiva–Éditions
québécoises de l’œuvre.
This anthology presents new research on the roles that gender plays in the complex processes of trans-
lation, transnational transfer, and reception of translated texts. It focuses on Scandinavia in particular.
Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activ-
ism. New York: Routledge.
This anthology engages with emerging interdisciplinary research on queer (including feminist) dimen-
sions of translation and interpretation.
References
Alarcón, Norma. 1989. Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism. Cultural Cri-
tique, 57–87.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1970. Det annet kjønn. Translated by Rønnaug Eliassen and Atle Kittang. Oslo: Pax.
Brantenberg, Gerd. 1977. Egalias døtre: en roman. Oslo: Pax.
Brantenberg, Gerd. 1985. Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes. Translated by Louis Mackay in coopera-
tion with Gerd Brantenberg. Seattle: The Seal Press.
Cisneros, Sandra. 1992. Never Marry a Mexican, in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York:
Vintage Books, 68–83.
Cristoff, Maria Sonia. 2014. Inclúyanme afuera. Buenos Aires: Mardulce.
Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. New York:
Routledge.
Ferrante, Elena. 2012. My Brilliant Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.
Ferrante, Elena. 2013. The Story of a New Name. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.
Ferrante, Elena. 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York:
Europa.
Ferrante, Elena. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.
Harvey, Keith. 2003. “Events” and “Horizons”. Reading Ideology in the “Bindings” of Translation, in
Maria Calzada Pérez, ed., Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology–Ideologies in Translation Stud-
ies. Manchester: St. Jerome, 43–69.
13
Emek Ergun et al.
Homer. 700BC [2017]. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Jansen, Hanne and Anna Wegener. 2013. Multiple Translatorship, in Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener,
eds., Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation. Montréal: Éditions Québécoises de l’œuvre, 1–39.
Klein, Hilary. 2015. Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories. New York and Oakland: Seven Stories Press.
Langlois, Ernest, ed. 1914–1924. Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun. 5 vols. Société
des Anciens Textes Français. Paris: Firmin Didot.
Malabou, Catherine. 2009. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by
Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastien Rand. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2019. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains. Translated by
Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Summit, Jennifer. 2003. Women and Authorship. in Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, eds., The Cam-
bridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2015. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Translated by Nadève
Ménard and Évelyne Trouillot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
14
Part I
Translating and
publishing women
2
Volga as an international agent
of feminist translation
Rajkumar Eligedi
Introduction
The ‘cultural turn’ that took place in translation studies in the 1980s liberating the discipline
from strictly linguistic approaches and moving towards descriptive approaches as discussed by
Gideon Toury (1995) brought the study of the context and the sociocultural aspects of transla-
tion as well as the place and function of the translation within the target culture to prominence.
The emergence of feminist approaches to translation studies in the 1990s, focusing on the ques-
tion of gender as an interdisciplinary area of research and translation practice (e.g. Simon 1996;
Flotow 1997), added a further sociopolitical dimension to the field. However, despite the exten-
sive translation activity that takes place in India, translation studies remain an emerging or a mar-
ginal area of research, and even more so feminist translation. In relation to the Indian context,
Spivak (1993) initiated a discussion of feminist translation in postcolonial contexts, followed by
scholars such as Niranjana Tejaswini (1998), Devika (2008), Kamala (2009), Tharakeshwar and
Usha (2010), who contributed to this discourse. This chapter builds on these scholarly efforts
by exploring the role played by Volga, an Indian feminist translator, in translating feminism into
Telugu. It discusses her work as an agent of translation, working from mainly English to Telugu,
and analyzes Volga’s role in stimulating a debate on feminism in Telugu through her translations.
This chapter also addresses the opposition Volga faced in translating feminist texts and ideas into
Telugu and how she dealt with this in her struggle to establish feminism as a serious discipline
of thought and make it possible and even acceptable to discuss feminism in the public sphere.
Volga is regarded as the first significant feminist translator in the Telugu public sphere (refer
to Table 2.1). She selected and translated texts that focus on issues of marriage, domestic abuse,
sexuality, reproductive rights, motherhood, and freedom. She played a significant role in spread-
ing knowledge on feminist politics in Telugu and emphasized how women need to question and
fight against patriarchal values through her translations. She tried to reduce misconceptions about
feminism through her translations and her writing, and systematically used translation as a tool to
bring feminist ideas into Telugu culture, and support that culture’s own efforts in feminist matters.
Volga faced strong opposition from certain ‘leftist’ male intellectuals and also certain women,
who resisted the translation of feminist work as a foreign idea that might divide the indigenous
social movements in the name of gender and encourage individualism. This was the primary
17
Rajkumar Eligedi
Table 2.1 Feminist texts by Volga
Sl. Name of the book Genre Author/ Year of Publisher

No. translator publication
Feminist translations
1 Agnes Smedley’s Portraits Memoir/biography Volga 1984 Hyderabad Book
of Chinese Women in Trust
Revolution (1976) is
translated as Samanyula
Sahasam
2 Agnes Smedley’s Daughter Semi- Volga 1985 Hyderabad Book
of Earth (1929) is autobiographical Trust
translated as Bhumi novel
Putrika
3 Alexandra Kollontai’s Volga 1988 Feminist Study
Three Generations Circle
(1929) is translated as
Mudu Taralu
4 Oriana Falacci’s Letter to a Volga 1989 Feminist Study
Child Never Born (1975) Circle
is translated as Puttani
Biddaku Talli Uttaram
5 Ariel Darfman’s Widows Volga 1994 Maanavi
(1983) is translated as Prachuranalu
Missing
6 Kamala Basin’s What Is Pamphlet Volga 1996 Vantinti Masi-
Patriarchy, Kali for Women Sthrivaadha
(1993) is translated as Prachuranalu
Pitruswamyam
7 A collection of papers Feminist theory Volga 1996 Vantinti Masi-
on black feminist Sthrivaada
theory translated as Prachuranalu
Kombahi River Collective
Prakatana
8 Naval El Sadavi’s Women Novel Volga 2000 Swechcha
at Point Zero (1983) is Prachuranalu
translated as Urikoyya
Anchuna
9 Sushma Deshpande’s Vhay, Biography Volga 2000 Asmita
Mee Savitribai (Yes, I Am
Savitribai) is translated as
Nenu Savitribaini
10 A collection of research Collection of articles Volga 2009 Asmita
papers are translated
into Telugu as Akshara
Yuddalu (War of Words)
Feminist theoretical texts
11 Tholi Velugulu – Strivaada Feminist theory Volga 2003 Swechcha
Siddhanta Vikasam (First Prachuranalu
Illumination – Feminist
Theory)
18
Volga – agent of feminist translation
Sl. Name of the book Genre Author/ Year of Publisher

No. translator publication
12 Kutumba Vyavastha Feminist and Volga 2004 Swechcha

Marxism – Feminism Marxist theory Prachuranalu
(Family System-Marxism-
Feminism)
13 Maaku Godalu Levu (We Do Introduction to Volga 1989 Feminist Study
Not Have Walls) Feminism Circle
Anthology of feminist
poetry
14 Nelimeghalu (Blue Clouds) Anthology of Volga 1993 Asmita
feminist poetry
Feminist Novels
15 Sahaja Novel Volga 1986 Swechcha
Prachuranalu
16 Swechcha (Liberty) Novel Volga 1987 Swechcha
Prachuranalu
Anthologies of short
stories
17 Rajakeeya Kathalu (Political Feminist stories Volga 1993 Swechcha
Stories) Prachuranalu
18 Prayogam (Experiment – Feminist stories Volga 1995 Maanavi
ajakeeya Kathalu-2) Prachuranalu
Translations of Volga’s
texts into English
19 Selected short stories of Feminist stories Alladi Uma 1997 Authors and
Volga translated as The and M. Writers India
Woman Unbound Sridhar Limited
20 Volga’s Novel Swechcha Feminist novel Ari 2006 National Book
(1987) is translated as A Sitaramayya Trust (NBT)
Quest for Freedom (2006)
21 Volga’s Rajakeeya Kathalu Feminist stories Madhu H. 2007 Swechcha
(1993) is translated as Kaza, Publishers
Political Stories (2007) and Ari
Sitaramayya
reason for the strong opposition that arose against her translations in the 1980s. However, Volga
has argued and shown through her writing and her translations that feminism is not aimed at
dividing social movements but in fact, aimed at defending the rights of women who are part of
these movements and organizations.
The Telugu public sphere1 has been one of the more vibrant spaces in India in terms of
social movements. Leftist activism, the Dalit movement, and women’s movements have emerged
demanding liberation and representation as well as confronting the established hegemonic struc-
tures. Due to the multiplicity of languages used in the different political movements across the
country, various activists involved in these movements connect with and influence one another
through translation across local languages, demonstrating how translation can act as an agent of
social change through its transfer of thought across various social and political contexts. In this
19
Rajkumar Eligedi
sense, translation can be seen to contribute to social and political movements as much as these
movements impact translation. Anthony Pym (2002) notes that one of the main tasks of transla-
tion is to help solve social problems. It may also work as a catalyst for social change (Lin Kenan
2002) or operate as an agent of change (Eva Hung 2005). Within the context of the Indian
Savarna2 and Dalit feminist movements, Telugu feminists have played a significant role trying
to bring social change to the existing patriarchal society by introducing a version of feminism
which combines theory with practice, and was made accessible to the Telugu-speaking reader-
ship through translation. These pioneer feminist efforts included bringing to light the painful
narratives of women’s sufferings, voicing different forms of their suppression and telling subse-
quent stories of their journeys to liberation from dominant patriarchal institutions.
Popuri Lalitha Kumari, popularly known as Volga (pen name), was born on 27 Novem-
ber 1950 in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. Venkata Subba Rao, Volga’s father was a communist, and
well versed in Russian literature. At a very early age Volga had also read the translated versions of
Russian literature and was influenced by Marxist philosophy. She is considered a pioneer of the
Telugu feminist literary movement, immensely contributing to the field of feminism and feminist
writing by introducing feminist thought to the literary and political spheres of Telugu society.
She was an active member of the Student Federation of India (SFI) at Andhra University and
participated in the Naxalbari movement3 in the late 1960s as a member of the Communist Party
of India (Marxist–Leninist), continuing her active involvement with the Marxist Leninist (ML)
movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to her political activism, she worked with
Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) and Janasahiti (People’s Liter-
ary Organization) in the 1970s. At a later stage, Volga took the initiative of forming a feminist
study circle4 in 1988, while maintaining a cordial relationship with the members of Stree Shakti
Sangatana5 (Women Power Organization), a women’s organization established in 1977. Later, she
worked with Anveshi (established in 1985) over a period of time and subsequently joined Asmita.6
Volga and other translators who introduced a feminist perspective into Telugu have been
subjected to serious criticism from progressive writers and thinkers. Despite this strong opposi-
tion, however, feminist translators like Volga, P. Satyavathi,7 and organizations like Stree Shakti
Sanghatana (Women Power Organization), the Feminist Study Circle, Anveshi and Asmita, and
the publishing houses like Hyderabad Book Trust8 and magazines like Bhumika (Role) and
Mahila Margam (Women’s Path) continue to translate feminist ideas and make the discussion on
feminism in Telugu possible and acceptable.
Historical perspectives on feminist thought

In the globalized world, ideas travel in various settings: from one language to another, one cul-
ture to another, and from one society to an altogether different one. “Like people and Schools of
Criticism, ideas and theories travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one
period to another,” Edward Said argues in his path-breaking essay “Travelling Theory” (1983,
226). In her study “Travelling Concepts in Translation” (2018), Hala Kamal discusses ‘feminism’
and ‘gender’ as travelling concepts that move across histories, geographies, cultures, disciplines,
languages, and politics. Feminist ideas, too, have travelled across the world via translations and
in defiance of opposition and criticism from the local cultures and societies that may resist the
challenges to patriarchal orders that such ideas represent. The ‘travel’ from the international
context into the Telugu society was made necessary by the needs of women and the demands
of the women’s movement.
The evolution of the history of feminism in India can be classified into three periods: the
social reform era of the 19th century, the nationalist era of the 20th century, and the new
20
feminist era that began in the 1970s. During the 1960s and 70s, the women’s movement in
Telugu society was influenced by Marxist and Leftist thought. With the entry of feminism after
the 1970s, there was a great change in the women’s movements across India and in the Telugu
region as feminist activists and translators influenced by international feminist thought trans-
lated feminist ideas into Telugu to mobilize women against patriarchal norms. When the UN
declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and then extended this into an international
women’s decade (1975–1985), this gave further impetus to feminist activism in the Telugu pub-
lic sphere as many autonomous women’s organizations emerged out of these contexts. These
organizations led the movements against social practices such as male domination and the dowry
system, as well as crimes against women that manifested in sexual harassment, rape, domestic
violence, and gender violence. This activism was inspired and supported by various national and
international women’s movements as well as the translation of women’s literature and feminist
writing. The worldwide feminist movement and its experiences provided a theoretical base for
feminist organizations to engage with the women’s question in the Telugu society.
The first feminist socialist organization

The POW (Progressive Organization for Women) was established in Hyderabad in 1974 by a
group of women students who were influenced by Marxist-Leninist thought and socialist femi-
nism. It was considered the first feminist socialist organization in Hyderabad. In the Telugu con-
text, ‘feminism’ originated in the Srikakulam Naxalbari movement and the Telangana Armed
Struggle stimulated by questions raised by women about ‘male domination’ and the ‘patriarchal
nature’ of the revolutionary groups. The POW was dissolved in 1975 due to state repression
and ideological differences between the women leaders and the Marxist-Leninist Party (M-LP)
with regard to women’s issues. Most of the leaders from the organization left the M-LP and
established such organizations as the Stree Shakti Sanghatana (SSS), which was formed in 1977.
Members of the group were influenced by Western feminism and their own political experi-
ence. K. Lalitha, Geeta Ramaswamy, Rukmini Menon (of POW), and members of SSS (Stree
Shakti Sanghatana) studied classic feminist texts like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963),
German Greer’s Female Eunuch (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectics of Sex (1970), Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970). They were also influ-
enced by readings of Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao. One of the early discussions in the
SSS was on the women in China, with a focus on the Chinese revolution, women’s roles in that
revolution, and the conditions of women in China after the revolution. Thus, various versions of
feminism emerged in the Telugu context through translation, and it was through SSS publica-
tions that the idea of the ‘personal is political’ was propagated from a feminist perspective in the
Telugu public sphere. Eventually, the SSS stopped functioning (1984), but it gave birth to two
new feminist organizations: Anveshi in 1985 and Asmita in 1991, which built their activism on
their predecessors, POW and SSS, and pursued ideas that have some transnational impact. These
are the beginnings of feminism in the Telugu context. There were international influences on
this feminism, with the most important coming from China, the Soviet Union, and the mostly
Anglo-American feminism of the West.
Critical issues: problems encountered in translating

feminist texts or ideas into Telugu
Volga faced considerable resistance to her questions and feminist thoughts while she was work-
ing in the Marxist-Leninist groups. She left the revolutionary organizations9 as a protest against
21
Rajkumar Eligedi
the male domination she experienced there and began translating feminist texts to educate and
enlighten the progressive groups and others about the basic concepts of feminism such as patri-
archy, oppression, sexuality, motherhood, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom. She faced stiff
opposition to her feminist writing from civil society after she left the revolutionary organiza-
tions, especially with regard to her novels and translations. Her novel Swechcha (Liberty) (1987)
is considered the first feminist novel in Telugu, and was criticized precisely for its feminist
content. Political parties, literary persons, organizations, and common people alike in Telugu
public sphere expressed their opinions, objections, and criticisms of this novel (Volga 1987, v–
xiv). Similarly, many of her translations such as Mudu Taralu (Three Generations), Puttani Biddaku
Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born) were subjected to similar criticism for introducing
new feminist ideas into the Telugu context. Jwalamukhi, a well-known leftist writer, argued
that feminism is an international imperialist conspiracy, implemented through non-government
organizations (NGOs). He asserts that as part of the conspiracy feminism has spread widely only
after the UN declaring 1975–1985 as international women’s decade. He expresses his fear that
feminism might stop the (communist/leftist) revolution in India, and says that the description
of sexual intercourse, or the pain women experience after intercourse constitutes “porn poetry”
(Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 38). His critique is that women writers are “doing business
with their body” (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 9–13, 38–40). In another vein, Raavi
Sastri, a Telugu revolutionary writer argues that feminism is an issue of middle-class women, that
feminists are those who don’t have any work and are ‘gayyalulu’ (quarrelsome) (Satyanarayana
and Suryaprakash 1997, 40–41). Raavi Sastri’s argument is upheld by S.V. Satyanarayana, a leftist
writer, who says the so-called women’s poetry does not represent the woman. It just represents
the desires of elite urban women (Satyanarayana and Suryaprakash 1997, 42).
In this context, Volga and other feminist writers engaged in writing, translating feminist
literature, and countering the arguments of leftist writers. They are criticized for translating
feminist texts into Telugu as these bring Western ideas that have created radical change in the
source culture. While it was not an easy task for Volga to translate feminist texts in the face of
these regular criticisms, she took it as a challenge and continued her work to bring feminist ideas
into the Telugu context.
Current research: Volga

Until the 1980s, there was little writing in Telugu from a feminist perspective, while women
continued to face various issues like dowry, eve teasing,10 and sexual harassment, and started
protesting against these and other forms of oppression. However, they lacked an ideological
framework to articulate a political stance since the concept of ‘feminism’ was deemed unac-
ceptable and the term itself was used as an offensive expression throughout the 1970s and 80s in
the Telugu public sphere. Terms such as ‘feminism’ and ‘male domination’ troubled the revolu-
tionary groups in the Telugu society in this period, as even the progressive thinkers saw it as a
dangerous Western encroachment on the revolutionary movements. It was also viewed as a part
of a conspiracy to divide the people on the basis of gender. Feminists were seen as overfed, self-
indulgent urban upper-class women who smoked cigarettes, cut their hair short, wore sleeveless
blouses, and demanded unmitigated freedom. Hence, there was a strong opposition to the trans-
lation of feminist texts into Telugu in the 1980s. Yet, gradually, a curiosity developed around
this term in the literary and revolutionary circles. In this context, a number of other feminist
writers began to bring feminist theory into Telugu, taking the risk of being attacked, even by
the politically progressive circles, for translating such materials into Telugu.
22
Volga is among the most prominent of these feminist translators. Her translation philosophy
was based on a strategy of close translation, as she believed that the TL text should be faithful
to both the intentions of the original author and the contextual meaning of the SL text. In a
conversation with this researcher, she said, “I translated the original text without sacrificing
the flavour of the original. I have been faithful to the original in all my translations. I feel that
translated text should reach the readers without any injustice to the original text” (Eligedi,
20/11/2013). She is aware of the problematics of ‘faithful’ and literal translation in relation to
feminist translation, where it could fail to make a text accessible to the TL readers. She says:
If we translate a feminist text as it is into Telugu, it won’t reach Telugu readers. The
main reason for this problem is that English feminist writers write theory from their own
experiences, which does not reach the Telugu readers. Therefore, I have taken the theory
developed by feminist writers. I used to write essays and books with feminist theory from
my experiences and the experiences in Telugu Public Sphere.
(Eligedi, 20/11/2013)
Her translation is informed by feminist theory, which she combines with her own political
experience as well as the experiences of people in the Telugu public sphere, thus constructing a
text accessible to her Telugu readers. Volga also compares the importance of writers in relation
to translators, commenting on the role of translators and writers in the following words:
The writer is very important. There is no translator without a writer but the ideas, ideolo-
gies of the writer are translated into another language by the translator. The translator also
brings new readers to the writer in another language. The important task of the translator
is to take the ideas and ideologies of the writer to the new readers in a different language.
(Eligedi, 20/11/2013)
As a writer and translator, Volga considers the role of the writer more significant than that of
translator, as the translator ‘exists’ because of the writer. However, the translator is also important
as he/she is acting as an intermediary between readers and writer. Therefore, both are important
in the process of translating or transferring ideas into a new language.
Despite fierce opposition and criticism from leftist groups, Volga continued her translation
work. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she translated collections of essays and wrote some
significant feminist essays to reduce the negative approach towards feminist thinking in the
Telugu public sphere. Initially, these were published in various Telugu magazines like Edureetha
(Swim Against Tide), Udayam (Morning), and Nalupu (Black). In 2003, these essays were published
as a collection entitled Tholi Velugulu–Sthrivadha Siddhantha Vikasam (First Illumination–Evolution
of Feminist Theory (2003)). The book includes 19 essays on feminist theory, translated mostly
from English, and published by Swechcha Prachuranalu (Liberty Publications)11 in Hyderabad.
Many of these essays can be considered summary translations, as they are translated, rewritten,
and adapted from multiple sources in English. However, it is important to note that this form
of translation was used by Volga, and many other feminists, to bring international feminist
knowledge into Telugu, and offer a historical account of feminist thought across the world. The
volume begins with groundbreaking feminist texts, written by pioneers of the feminist move-
ment and offers a comprehensive discussion of feminist ideas.
One of Volga’s essays, titled “Feminism Ante” (Feminism Means) was published on 26 May
1988 in the Udayam (Morning) magazine. In this essay, Volga discusses the misconceptions around
23
Rajkumar Eligedi
feminism, trying the redress its negative implications in the Telugu culture. She explains the
connotations of ‘feminism,’ saying: “Many people do not like the two words feminism and
women’s liberation. Traditionalists think that feminism and women’s lib are related to the mod-
ern women who cut their hair, wear sleeveless blouse and smoke cigarettes” (Volga 2003, 96). In
this instance, Volga not only confronts the traditionalists but also addresses the male social scien-
tists who assumed that feminism was imported from the West. In this essay, she argues that femi-
nism and the women’s liberation movement have been present in society from the time women
first started resisting oppression in its various forms (2003, 96). In other words, she contends that
feminism is not a Western import but has emerged from the lived experiences of the people and
the political movements. She published another essay in 1988, in the July 21–28 issue of Udayam
(Morning) magazine, entitled “Socialist feminisamlo dorakochchu samaadaanaalu” (Answers May
Be Found in Socialist Feminism) as a response to some of the questions raised in regard to her
essay “What Is Feminism?” These questions were about the difference between Marxist theory
and feminist theory as many people in the Telugu public sphere assumed feminism was com-
munist theory. Volga discussed the differences between Marxist and socialist feminists to address
this issue.
Volga published many essays on oppression, liberation, love, friendship, sexuality, domestic
work, and pregnancy. From 1988 to 1995 she translated and introduced into Telugu the lives
and groundbreaking texts of Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wol-
lstonecraft, Francis Wright, Judith Sargent Murray, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Suzanne Clara La Follette, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
She translated most of these texts from English into Telugu as they were originally written
in English. She also translated Kollontai’s works into Telugu from English translations of the
original Russian. She introduced the ideas in On the Equality of Sexes (1779), A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1792), The Subjugation of Women (1869), Women and Economics (1898) and
Concerning Women (1926) in the translations. All these translations and essays focused on a wide
range of feminist issues like male domination, women’s oppression, and reproductive rights, and
thus triggered a debate on feminism in Telugu. These essays triggered heated discussions among
leftist organizations in regard to women’s issues, as the women engaged in these organizations
had started questioning the male domination in the organizations and in society in general.
These essays also enabled Telugu readers to understand the development of feminist theory
in various parts of the world. Volga’s translations and explanations thus played a crucial role in
enhancing the Telugu readers’ understanding of feminism in the face of criticism from Marxist/
revolutionary groups.
Translated texts
Volga also faced opposition for her translation of feminist writings from Chinese, Russian and
Italian works. Coming from a Marxist background, she was interested in looking at the condi-
tions of women in leftwing movements across the world. Her choice of theoretical texts was
based on their relevance to the Telugu sociocultural context, in terms of their themes and the
issues discussed in them. For example, Oriana Fallaci’s A Letter to a Child Never Born (1976) raised
many questions about reproductive rights and single mothers. Referring to the text, Volga said
the following in a conversation:
These questions are very significant. If it is translated into Telugu, there will be discussion
about it. I thought this book would be useful in our context. So, I have translated it into
Telugu as Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born). I read feminist texts in
24
English. Some of them raise very pertinent questions. When I think it is relevant and these
questions raise discussion in our society, I translate them into Telugu.
(Eligedi, 20/11/2013)
Volga played an important role in not only translating but in selecting the feminist texts
that might raise questions about such topics as reproductive rights and encourage progressive
discussion in the society. In the 1980s, she started translating the works of Agnes Smedley, who
documented the lives of the Chinese women she knew personally, and the events she herself
witnessed in the revolutionary movements. Volga started with Portraits of Chinese Women in Rev-
olution (Samanyula Sahasam 1984), which is useful in understanding the lives of Chinese women
activists in the 1920s and 1930s. Volga also translated Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical novel,
Daughter of Earth12 as Bhumi Putrika (1985), which is a semi-autobiographical novel, describing
Smedley’s role in the Chinese revolution and her struggle for the liberation of women. This
book also gives a detailed account of Smedley’s involvement with social and revolutionary
movements across the world, and her involvement in both revolutionary and feminist activism.
Volga seems to have identified with Agnes Smedley and chosen this text for its relevance to both
the leftist and the women’s movements, emphasizing the interconnectedness between feminist
and revolutionary politics.
Volga also translated Oriana Fallaci’s novel Letter to a Child Never Born (1976) as Puttani
Biddaku Talli Uttaram in 1989. It was first published in Italian in 1975 and was soon translated
into English in 1976. Volga translated the English version into Telugu, and it was published
by the Feminist Study Circle13 in 1989. Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) was an Italian author and
journalist who wrote this novel in the form of a letter from a young woman to the fetus she
carries. It portrays a woman’s struggle as she is caught in a situation that forces her to choose
between continuing in a career she loves and motherhood, due to an unexpected pregnancy –
a struggle that ends with a miscarriage, and opens a discussion about reproductive rights and
politics. By translating the book, Volga introduced and propagated the controversial notion of
“vyakthigatham kuda rajakeeyame” (the personal is political) into the Telugu public sphere. The
translated book triggered a debate on reproductive rights as the translation raised the following
questions, among others: Why is motherhood glorified in literature? Why is there no focus on
the complications of pregnancy and the problems women face after pregnancy? How does the
state control women’s reproductive rights through society itself but also the institutions of sci-
ence, technology, medicine, and law? How are family relations, pregnancy, children, and gender
relations not merely personal but also sociopolitical issues?
Volga translated Alexandra Kollontai’s The Loves of Three Generations (1929) as Mudu Taralu
in 1988, working from the English translation. The Telugu version was published by the Femi-
nist Study Circle. Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was a Russian revolutionary, feminist, and
the first female Soviet diplomat. She advocated for and wrote extensively about radical sexual
politics and free love as she looked at family and marriage as oppressive institutions: “She was
instrumental in the legalization of abortion and homosexuality, the creation of a system of quick
and easy divorce, and the introduction of a crèche system” (Kirstyiane, 27/05/2008). The book
is about an inter-generational conflict between three women: Maria, the grandmother; Olga,
the mother; and Genia, the daughter. It describes the experiences and thoughts of these three
women about love and the sexual relations of the daughter Genia, revealing the contradictory
opinions of the older and younger communist women in the family about life, love, marriage,
sexual pleasure, feelings, desires, and relationships. The main message conveyed through this text
is that women should not be judged based on their relationships, as it is a common practice to
stigmatize women as ‘loose women’ (women of easy virtue) if they have had a relationship with
25
Rajkumar Eligedi
more than one man. The translation of this text into Telugu aimed to introduce yet another
feminist perspective and thus shake up traditional notions of womanhood, even though the act
of translation and publication could stigmatize both translator and publisher.
Volga’s Mudu Taralu became one of the most debated translations in Telugu. It was reviewed
by many Telugu writers in popular Telugu magazines in the 1980s, creating a heated debate and
raising questions about gender relations in general and within revolutionary movements in par-
ticular. A Telugu Marxist woman writer, Muppala Ranganayakamma (1989, 48–49), criticized
the translation for encouraging women and men to have multiple sexual relationships. She also
argued that the three generations of women are portrayed in a negative light: the behaviour of
Maria, of the first generation, was shameless and self-disrespectful, while Olga and Genia (of the
second and third generations) have lost their minds in the name of ‘love’ and ‘liberty.’ Ranganay-
akamma adds that, “this story also showed that as soon as the political activities are developed,
sexual relations also get developed. While showing that Olga, the mother participated in the
political activities more than her grandmother, Maria and her daughter, Genia participate in
political activities even more than her; it demonstrated that their sexual relations also developed
in a similar way” (50). In this comment, Ranganayakamma discusses the connection between
these women’s sexual relations and their political activities over three generations. She was
critical of this translation as she considered that it might encourage sexual promiscuity. On the
other hand, many Telugu feminist activists saw Mudu Taralu as a historical necessity, as it was
translated in a context of public discussions about feminism, relationships, and sexuality in the
Telugu public sphere.
In the introduction to this translation, Volga and the Feminist Study Circle note that a
wide range of discussions about gender relations and sexuality has been addressed and clarified
in Mudu Taralu. They also point out that the idea of translating and publishing the book was
considered very seriously because of the possible stigma that could be attached to them as ‘loose
women.’ They also revealed their awareness of the society’s views on women’s sexuality, and
particularly women’s ‘virginity,’ arguing that this is little more than a myth and a cultural con-
struct that needs dismantling. Finally, they assert their vision of the three women as worthy of
the respect they received from their own society, for their services to the country, as communists,
regardless of their views on love and sex (Volga 1988, iii–v).
Volga used translation as a tool to bring feminist ideas into Telugu in direct opposition to
leftist politics of the time. These translated texts show Volga’s interest in various languages and
cultures but she always translated from English. It was the ideology of feminism in its different
international versions that motivated her to translate and bring international feminist ideas and
thoughts into Telugu for the benefit of the Telugu reading public. Her choice of translations
demonstrates her intention to change the thinking of male-dominated society. All her transla-
tions (summary translations, essays, books) introduced new ideas into Telugu and contributed
to the growth of feminist literature in the Telugu context.
Volga’s response to contemporary Dalit-Bahujan

feminist translations
Eventually, Volga also faced criticism from Dalit woman writers for not seriously engaging with
Dalit women’s writing. The Dalit14 movement15 gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s
in Andhra Pradesh, under the influence of Dalit intellectuals such as Kancha Ilaiah and Katti
Padma Rao, who raised the caste question with regard to Dalit women and other lower caste
women. In the post-Ambedkar period,16 Dalit women used literature as a weapon to counter
26
mainstream feminist writing. When asked about Anveshi’s perspective in dealing with Dalit and
Muslim questions in Andhra Pradesh, Susie Tharu, a well-known Indian writer and intellectual
responded saying:
Anveshi has been much more open and concerned about issues of difference. [. . .] Consist-
ently, for almost twenty years, we have been invested in it and taken it forward. We have
been very interested in seeing the connection between feminist thinking and other kinds
of thinking and why it is that the old form of feminism is not hospitable and does not easily
invite Dalit women or Muslim women. They do not feel that this is their place. That criti-
cism and that thinking are very central to Anveshi.
(Eligedi, 25/7/2013)
This was a time when feminist organizations and savarna feminists began to think about
Dalit and Muslim women’s issues, as Dalit women writers like Gogu Shyamala, Joopaka Subadra,
Challapalli Swarupa Rani, and M.M. Vinodhini started questioning the positions of dominant
caste feminist writers for ignoring Dalit women’s problems. Volga welcomes the questions
and criticisms brought forth by Dalit feminist writers and in an interview with The Hindu, she
responds,“That is a good thing. Let their anger flow. . . . We have to wash ourselves in their anger
and grow more sensitive to their questions.” However, she does warn that it is “important for
them to question patriarchy within the Dalit world and with the same sharpness” (Bageshree,
20/01/2013). The Indian feminist movement was initiated by upper caste/class women, but the
questions that they asked are relevant to women from all Indian communities. In India, feminism
continues to be a largely urban middle-class movement. Many of the dominant caste feminists
realized that there is caste violence and different identity politics facing women from Dalit com-
munities. In a conversation with Volga about caste/class and gender, she says:
I think there is nothing wrong in upper caste/class women raising feminist questions or
raising the problems of their own. However, Dalit women have been thinking whether
these questions are relevant to them or if not, how to make them relevant to their back-
grounds. Since feminist ideology is accepted, people also felt that feminist questions have
some sense of justice, these questions; struggles bring some change in the society. This dis-
cussion created a space where Dalit women are asserting as Dalit feminists, BC (Backward
Caste) women as BC feminists and Muslim women as Muslim feminists.
(Eligedi, 20/11/2013)
Subsequently, with the criticism from the Dalit movement and Dalit feminist thinkers, Volga
and other feminist writers also turned to Dalit women’s issues. Volga, Vasantha Kannabiran, and
Vindya translated The Combahee River Collective, the Combahee River Collective Statement: Black
Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties, published as Kombahi River Collective Prakatana–
Nallajathi Strivaadhula Swaram in 1996. Introduced by the African American feminist, Barbara
Smith, one of the pioneers of ‘black feminism,’ the book includes a collection of essays on black
feminist theory, black feminist politics, identity politics, the challenges facing black feminist
organizing. Obviously, the purpose of this translation was to make black feminist theory available
in Telugu so that it contributes to the development of Dalit feminism. In a conversation about
this book, Volga said, “I have translated it with the intention that this Black Feminist theory
would be useful for the growth of the Dalit Feminist theory in Telugu” (Eligedi, 20/11/2013).
27
Rajkumar Eligedi
Volga also translated Sushma Deshpande’s play Nenu Savitribaini or “Yes, I Am Savitribai” in
2000 from Marathi into Telugu. It was titled Vhay, Mee Savitri Bai or “Yes, I Am Savitribai” in
Marathi, and first published in Telugu by Asmita in 2000, then reprinted in 2005. The Dalit
feminist leader, Savitribai Phule, was a woman teacher and a crusader for women’s education in
India, and together with Jyotirao Phule fought the exploitation of Dalits at the hands of Brah-
mins and other upper caste people. Jyotirao encouraged Savitri to teach in a school, and as soon
as she started teaching, voices were heard critical of a lower caste woman becoming a teacher,
considering it shameful to the country. Later on, both Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule
established schools for the lower caste girls in the state of Maharashtra. In her interviews, Volga
pointed out that she was inspired by Savitribai Phule:
I thought that the ideologies of Ambedkar and Phule needed to be discussed. I was inspired
by Savitribai Phule when I read the original text. I did not know much about her before
reading this text. As I was inspired, I also thought that many people would be inspired if
they read this text. This will bring a change also. I also felt that many people would come
to know about Phule, Savitribai and their thoughts. I am the first one to translate Savitribai
Phule into Telugu.
(Eligedi, 20/11/2013)
Volga’s translation of Savitribai Phule resulted in many other translations of her work into
Telugu, drawing Telugu scholars’ and activists’ attention to the writings of Jyotirao Phule and
Savitribai Phule on post-Dalit and Bahujan movements. Today, several Indian social, political,
and caste movements are inspired by the work of Savitri and Jyotirao Phule, and many feminists
as well as Dalit and Bahujan activists were inspired by their visions, owing to the translation of
Nenu Savitri Baini (Yes, I Am Savitribai).
Conclusion
Volga acted throughout as an intermediary and an agent of change, having dedicated her life to
feminist ideology. She has played a very significant role in translating and introducing ‘feminism’
to Telugu, using her translated feminist texts as tools to aid in the empowerment of women
through feminism. Without her translations, feminist thought was accessible only to English-
educated women capable of identifying and reading these texts. It was only in the 1980s that
Volga began translating them into Telugu, thus immensely contributing to the development
of feminist writing and activism in Telugu. Owing to her, Telugu women have been empow-
ered by the feminist notion of “the personal is also political,” and her translations remain a
source of inspiration to generations of women and relevant to the present social context. Her
work has introduced feminism, raising awareness about gender discrimination, and generating
political and intellectual debates within leftist, progressive circles and beyond. Today, feminism is
accepted as a serious ideology in the Telugu leftist, progressive, and literary circles, as a result of
the relentless efforts of Volga through her translations, her original writings, and her activism. In
this sense, Volga’s work is a model of feminist activism through translation.
Future directions
This study has mainly looked at the ‘travel’ of feminist knowledge from English into Telugu.
There is, however, scope for further studies looking at Volga’s translations from Telugu into
English. As there are many translations from Telugu into English, it would be interesting to
28
study how feminist knowledge from Telugu has travelled into English and what impact it has
had on International feminism. The following research questions may be worth considering:
How does the translation of feminist texts shape sociopolitical/identity movements? What is the
role of sociopolitical/identity movements in pushing or promoting the translations of feminist
texts in Telugu? How do translation and political movements shape each other?
Further reading
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1991. Women’s Writing in India: Volume 1, 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth
Century. New York: The Feminist Press.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1993. Women’s Writing in India: Volume II, the Twentieth Century. New York:
The Feminist Press.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalitha, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present in two volumes.
Women’s Writing in India has been used as an authentic text on Indian women’s writing across the
world. These two volumes offer around 140 texts (poetry, fiction, drama, biographical notes) written by
women in 13 Indian languages in India. These volumes include the translations of the work of many
Telugu women writers into English.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures. Cultural Dynam-
ics, SAGE Publications, 10(2), 133–146.
This is one of the significant texts in the field of feminism and translation in the Indian context. It
offers an analysis of feminism in India through postcolonial inquiry into translation. It shows that the
discourse of feminism and feminist politics might open up new conceptual–political formulations/
strategies through translation.
Spivak, Gayatri C. 2000. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader.
London and New York: Routledge, 397–416.
This is one of the seminal essays in the field of feminist translation in postcolonial contexts. It argues
that the translator must surrender to the text as translation is the most intimate act of reading. It offers
insights into feminist and postcolonial approaches to translation.
Devika, J. 2008. Being “In-translation” in a Post-colony. Translation Studies, 1(2), 182–196.
In her study of the context of Kerala the author reflects on the translation of feminism into Malayalam.
She looks at the efforts of translating feminism into Malayalam within two distinct modes of translation:
the ‘faithful’ mode and the ‘grounded’ mode. This study looks at the work of many feminists in Kerala
who have been translating feminist concepts produced in first-world contexts into the local language.
Kamala, N., ed. 2009. Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan.
This is a collection of essays on translation and women in the Indian context. These essays explore
various questions on women’s writing, women’s language, politics of language, women translators, and
the agency of translators.
Sravanthi, Kollu. 2009. Mapping the Feminist Subject: A Reading of the Women’s Movement(s) in Andhra Pradesh
(M. Phil dissertation). Available at: http://www.efluniversity.ac.in/these_cultural_studies.php
In this study on women’s movement(s) in Andhra Pradesh, the author attempts to map the debates that
emerged around feminism in the last few decades through a focus on the feminist subject. This study is
based on interviews with eight feminist scholars from various women’s organizations.
Tharakeshwar, V.B. and M. Usha. 2010. Survey and Analysis of Social Science Higher Education Material Pro-
duction Initiative in Kannada; Translation Strategies, Stories of Success/Failures. Mumbai: Ratan Tata Trust.
This project looks at earlier initiatives to produce higher education material in Indian languages. It
examines the reasons for their success or failure in the context of Kannada. It has a chapter on gender
studies/women’s studies material in Kannada. It offers a brief history of the discussion on women in
Kannada, the emergence of feminism in Kannada, the department/centres of women’s studies in Kar-
nataka. It also includes a report on the workshop on the translation of gender studies into Kannada.
29
Rajkumar Eligedi
Related topics
Translating feminism; gender and translation; activism and translation; translation and resistance;
ideology and translation; translation and agency
Notes
1 Telugu is an Indian language belonging to the Dravidian family of languages. It is the official language
of the Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. It is the second largest language spoken in India
after Hindi and has around 75 million speakers across the world. The Dravidian language family consists
of around 80 language varieties. They are spoken mostly in southern and central India. Telugu, Tamil,
Kannada, and Malayalam are the largest languages in this language family.
2 Savarna feminism refers to upper caste feminism that addresses the concerns of upper caste women
without any (or with less) regard for Dalit and other lower caste women.
3 This was an armed peasant struggle that began in 1967 in Naxalberi, a village in the state of West Ben-
gal with the objective to occupy the lands of Zamindars (big landowners) and redistribute them among
the landless labourers. The slogan of the movement was “The land belongs to those who till it.” It was
a violent movement aiming to overthrow landowners and the state.
4 The feminist study circle was started by Volga and other Telugu feminist writers in 1988 with the
objective to familiarize people with feminism as an ideology. It played a crucial role in introducing and
disseminating knowledge on feminism through its publications and discussions in public forums.
5 Stree Shakti Sangatana (Women Power Organization SSS) was an autonomous woman’s group estab-
lished in 1977 by a group of women activists. K. Lalitha, Veena Shatrugna, Vasantha Kannabiran, Susie
Tharu, Ratnamala, Ambika, Swarna, and Vasantha were among the founders. They worked on the
issues like dowry deaths, rapes, single women’s rights, and price rise. They used to read, discuss, research,
and document local women’s histories. The demise of SSS gave birth to the two feminist organizations:
Anveshi in 1985 and Asmita in 1991. Volga worked with Anveshi for some time. Later, Volga and
Vasantha Kannabiran established Asmita. While Volga worked as the first president of the organization,
Kalpana Kannabiran was the secretary of the organization.
6 Anveshi and Asmita have been very active in shaping the discussions on feminism and gender in the
Telugu public sphere.
7 Satyavathi is a writer and translator who has worked as an English lecturer.
8 Hyderabad Book Trust is a non-profit publishing collective formed in 1980. It supports feminism by
publishing translated/feminist texts.
9 Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) and Janasahiti (People’s Literary
Organization).
10 Sexual harassment or molestation of a woman by a man in a public place. It also refers to unwanted
sexual remarks/advances, groping, etc.
11 Swechcha Prachuranalu (Liberty Publications) is specialized in publishing feminist texts.
12 Daughter of Earth was published in 1929 in English. It was republished in 1987 by the feminist press with
a foreword by Alice Walker and an afterword by Nancy Hoffman. It was published in Telugu in 1985
by Hyderabad Book Trust.
13 The Feminist Study Circle started with the objective to familiarize people with feminism as an ideol-
ogy. The study circle held many discussions on feminist literature. These discussions resulted in many
publications: Puttanibiddaku talli uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born), Maku Godalu Levu (We Do
Not Have Walls), and Mudu Tharalu (Three Generations).
14 The word ‘Dalit’ means broken, downtrodden, or oppressed. It refers to the people who are discrimi-
nated and oppressed based on the caste.
15 Dalits have been leading the movement or struggle against untouchability and caste-based discrimina-
tion. The aim of this movement is the annihilation of the caste system.
16 Dr. B.R. Ambedkar proposed the idea of getting rid of the caste system and introduced many protec-
tions for the Dalit community in the constitution of India. He also fought for women’s empowerment
and education as he believed that education is the most powerful weapon to change the lives of women.
The term ‘post-Ambedkar period’ refers to the period after him when Dalit women started asserting
their position inspired by his philosophy and writings.
30
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Fallaci, Oriana. 1976. Letter to a Child Never Born. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Fallaci, Oriana. 1989. Puttani Biddaku Talli Uttaram. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Feminist Study Circle.
Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. The Dialectics of Sex. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘era of feminism’ Manchester: St. Jerome
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Friedan, Betty. 1963. Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Greer, German and Inglis, Andrew. 1971. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 301.
Hung, Eva. 2005. Translation and Cultural Change. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub.
Kamal, Hala. 2018. ‘Travelling Concepts’ in Translation: Feminism and Gender in the Egyptian Context.
Synergy, 14(1), 131–145.
Kenan, Lin. 2002. Translation as a Catalyst for Social Change in China, in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin
Gentzler, eds., Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 160–183.
Kirstyiane. 2008. Red Love, By Alexandra Kollontai. Vulpes libris. Available at: https://vulpeslibris.word
press.com/2008/05/27/red-love-by-alexandra-kollontai/ [Accessed 27 May 2008].
Kollontai, Alexandra. 1929. The Loves of Three Generations. Translated by Lily Lore. A Great Love. New York:
The Vanguard Press. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1929/great/ch03.htm
Kollontai, Alexandra. 1988. Mudu Taralu. Translated by Volga from English Translation by Lily Lore.
Hyderabad: Feminist Study Circle.
Kombahi River Collective Prakatana–NallajathiSthrivadhulaSwaram. 1996. Translated by Volga, Vasantha Kan-
nabiran and Vindya. Hyderabad: StrivaadhaPrachuranalu–Vantinti Masi.
Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday & co.
Pym, Anthony. 2002. Translation Studies as a Social-Problem Solving Activity. Paper presented in a conference
on Translating in the 21st Century: Trends and Prospects, Thessaloniki, Greece, 27–29 Sept.
Ranganayakamma. 1989. Asmantvamlonchi Asamantvamloki. Vijayawada: Sweet Home Publications.
Said, Edward. 1983. Traveling Theory, in The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 226–247.
Satyanarayana, Suryaprakash. 1997. Strivaada Vivaadhaalu. Hyderabad: Andhrapradesh Abyudaya Rachay-
athila Sangham.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New
York: Routledge.
Smedley, Agnes. 1984. Samanyula Sahasam. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Hyderabad Book Trust.
Smedley, Agnes. 1985. Bhumi Putrika. Translated by Volga. Hyderabad: Hyderabad Book Trust.
Spivak, G. C. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge, 179–200.
Tharakeshwar, V. B. and M. Usha. 2010. Survey and Analysis of Social Science Higher Education Material Pro-
duction Initiative in Kannada; Translation Strategies, Stories of Success/Failures. Mumbai: Ratan Tata Trust.
Available at: http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/survey-and-analysis-of-social-science-higher.pdf
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benja-
mins Publishing.
Volga. 1987. Swechcha. Hyderabad: Swechcha Prachuranalu.
Volga. 2003. TholiVelugulu-Sthrivaada–SiddhanthaVikaasam. Hyderabad: Swechcha Prachuranalu.
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3
Translation of women-centred
literature in Iran
Macro and micro analysis
Sima Sharifi
Introduction/definitions
The objective of this chapter is to provide insight into the translation of feminist writings before
and after Iran’s 1979 revolution, and examine how the Islamic Republic of Iran (henceforth, IRI)
has influenced this process. To take into account the transformation of women-centred texts
in translation across two different eras – in a monarchy1 and under an Islamist g overnment –
I attempt to answer four questions: First, which books on women-centred texts (i.e., feminist
literary fiction or non-fiction) were published in Persian translation, before and during the
1970s and the reign of the Shah? Second, which women-centred texts were translated into
Persian in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, i.e. after the Islamic Revolution, what kinds of changes
can be traced in the translated texts over these decades, and why were these made? Third, how
has the androcentric agenda of Ayatollah Khomeini (henceforth, Khomeini) and its Islamiza-
tion of Iranian society, from his arrival on 1 February 1979, influenced Iranian women’s lives,
societal culture and as a result the translation of feminist or women-centred texts? Finally, what
happens to a source text (ST) which is committed to ending the subordination of women and
is meant to have political impact when it is transferred into an overtly and stiflingly patriarchal
target system?
The definition of women-centred or feminist texts I adhere to here is the sort of writing
that Eva Lennox Birch defines as “enabling an expression of the world as it is perceived by the
female” (1994, 241). Such women-oriented texts may be authored by women and/or involve
thematically pertinent female characters with an eye to the question of equal legal, political,
social, and economic rights for women.
To locate Persian translations of women-centred literature of foreign origin prior to and after
1979, I tapped into three resources: the data base of ‫ سازمان اسناد و کتابخانه ملی جمهوری اسالمی‬the
online catalogue of the National Library & Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (hence-
forth, library), Iranian expatriate scholars, and an Iran-based translation studies journal. Parallel
to my library-based research, and in the hope of adding to my inventory of women-oriented
texts in Persian translation, I reached out, via email and/or telephone, to Iranian scholars resid-
ing in North America, Australia, and the UK, all of whom are known for their feminist work.
I provided these professors with a short list of book titles by well-known authors usually referred
32
Women-centred literature in Iran
to as feminist such as George Eliot (Middle March 1871), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique
1963), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own 1929), Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe
1949), and Kate Millet (Sexual Politics 1970). I added that any writings by these or other authors
interested in the status of women were welcome. As they were unable to provide any useful
information in regard to the existence of Persian translation of feminist texts before 1979, they
introduced me to colleagues and PhD students who they thought might be able to help and
whom I immediately contacted. Most of my contacts were certain that no translations of such
materials had been produced in the decades prior to and including the 1970s. As for Simone
de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, however, some replied in the affirmative. One PhD graduate,
Golbarg Bashi said, “I know The Second Sex was translated because my mother used to read it
in the 1970s” (email).2 But when I asked her for further information, she admitted that she was
unable to locate the book.
A PhD candidate offered, via email, an explanation about the reasons for the lack of a coher-
ent women-friendly translation policy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. According to him, in
those decades, there were three potential groups who had the tools, power and funds to engage
in the act of translating women-centred literature but for a variety of reasons failed to do so:
(1) the dominant institutions of the monarchy which had no political interest in the conscious-
ness-raising effects of such literature; (2) the religious class of clergy that was unwilling to invest
in secularism, in spite of its close connection to the masses and independent flow of income;
(3) leftist groups who were among the most educated and linguistically competent, but who con-
sidered feminist literature a capitalist product with a divisive effect on the working class (email).3
Since my research focuses on the translation of women-centred literature, I did not pursue
the question of whether or not the said institutions devoted their resources to translating other
literary genres, such as poetry or autobiography, for example. That being said, I agree with my
contact’s argument about the scarcity of feminist translations in Persian in the decades leading
up to, and including, the 1970s possibly due to potential translators’ ideologies, and their disin-
terest in feminism.4 Further, the sparse translations of feminism may also be explained by the low
rate of literacy in Iran in the decades before the 1970s. In her article, “Educational Attainment in
Iran,” Mila Elmi5 (2009) writes that in 1966 only 17% of the Iranian female population, and 39%
of males, were literate. Even if there were feminist translators, the low literacy in Iranian society
made feminist translation in that period highly unfeasible. In 1976, however, the literacy rate
had more than doubled to 35% for women and 47% for men; this stems from the Shah’s decree,
strictly implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, dictating the need for girls and boys to be literate.
After 1979 the literacy rate climbed to 52%, 74%, and 80% for females, in 1986, 1996, and 2006
respectively,6 a phenomenon that may explain not only the increase in the rate of translations
in those decades but also the reason for the change in the kind of books translated. This will be
discussed in the following sections.
The other source I reached out to is an Iran-based Translation Studies Quarterly, originating
in Tabatabai University in Tehran; it has published an article titled “The historiography of the
translation of women in contemporary Iran” (Farahzad et al. 2015, 57–74) with the stated objec-
tive to examine the kind of material Iranian women have chosen to translate in different histori-
cal periods over 100 years, since the early 20th century. The research paper claims that between
1901 and 2011, Iranian women have translated over 1700 books of a variety of genres and topics
from English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Although the article includes the number of trans-
lations, no book titles, names of writers or translators, or the countries of the source texts are
mentioned. Neither does the study reveal if any feminist books are considered in the research, or
to what extent Anglo-American literature may have been prevalent in Persian translation during
the Shah’s reign (1941–1979), which might be expected as the USA had a strong influence on
33
Sima Sharifi
Iranian politics and culture at the time. In short, my approach to the Iran-based journal, similar
to my outreach to expat scholars, failed to pinpoint any feminist translations beyond what I had
already accessed through the library.
Further, there seem to be no studies of Persian translations of English work with feminist
perspectives. A number of studies exist that focus on cross-cultural communication and linguis-
tically specific translation issues of certain English novels. These tend to appear in article form,
in online journals, written by Iranian scholars or students based in Iran, with a focus on a lin-
guistic theoretical framework, such as Katharina Reiss’ text types.7 While this chapter examines
and compares the translations of two eras with an eye to the sociocultural contexts of the target
society, the linguistically based studies are not concerned with contextual questions. This brings
me to the point that there may well be no previous study dedicated to a comparison of Persian
translations spanning several decades; nor is there any study of women-centred texts translated
into Persian. On both counts, this chapter intends to fill the gap.
Next, I will examine the search results for the translations published before the 1979 revolution.
Translations of women-centred texts before

the revolution: 1930s–1970s
Through library searches, I accessed Persian translations from 1936 to 1978, a year before the
1979 Iranian revolution (Table 3.3). Some of these translated authors are known for their work on
social justice and women’s issues; for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852,
trans. Keyhani 1936), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, 1868, trans. Doostdar 1949), Pearl S. Buck
(The Good Earth, 1931, trans. Lorestani 1957), Christiane Rochefort (Les petits enfants, 1961, trans.
Najafi 1965), Simone de Beauvoir (Djmilah Boupacha, 1962, trans. Taraji & Pooyan 1965), and
Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 1962, trans. Hariri 1977), among others. Common
thematic threads connect these books expressing sentiments opposing colonialism, slavery, autoc-
racy, and poverty. One may argue that the translators sympathize with the themes of the source
texts, and deploy language to challenge the dominant despotic culture in Iran, for as Olga Castro
puts it: “Language and translation inevitably are tools for legitimizing the status quo or for sub-
verting it” (2013, 6). While 13 books were translated between the 1930s and the 1960s, five trans-
lations were published in the 1970s, and all of these 18 translations raised awareness of the poverty
and social injustices plaguing Iranian society. In fact, such translations seem to underline the mood
of protest that ruled the sociocultural discourse in the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution
which overthrew the Shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty (1924–1979). Table 3.1 shows the texts
containing feminist/social justice themes found in Persian translations in the 1970s.
In Table 3.1, the heading of the last column,‘Location,’ points to the labelled shelf in the library
where these books are held. The importance of this location and its effect on readers will be
explained later. Sparse as they are, the translated texts produced in the 1970s are inquisitive, com-
bative, and subversive; but with the exception of Woolf ’s The Waves, they are not strictly feminist.
Persian translations of women-centred texts since the

establishment of Islamist rule after the 1979 revolution
1980s
As demonstrated in Table 3.2, there is an increase in translations of feminist work in the 1980s.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the anti-feminist climate of the 1980s, and probably because
of the already increased rate of literacy, Iranian translators seem to have enlarged the scope of
34
Table 3.1 Library search results of somewhat feminist translations: 1970s
Authors Source Text, date Theme Translator, date Publisher Location
Buck, Pearl The Child Who Never Rights of children, especially the physically and mentally Ahi, Homa, 1970 Khorrami CS
Grew, 1950 challenged
De Beauvoir, Reflections on a Very Existential questions: mortality, loss of loved ones and Amin Moayed, Roz CS
Simone Easy Death, 1964 independence Majid, 1970
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar, 1963 Social and self-estrangement, strict limitation of Emami, Goli, 1973 Neel CS & DS
patriarchy, renewal through suffering
Albee, Edward Who’s Afraid of Virginia Rejection of a number of myths: marriage institution, Hariri, Alireza, 1977 Beena CS
Woolf, 1962 American dreams of happiness, success, manhood;
illusion as an escape from reality
Woolf, Virginia The Waves, 1931 Existential questions: meaning of life; self-definition; Daryoosh, Parviz, Amir Kabir CS
alienation of the feminine from self and other or 1977
permeating into and defining one another; male
dominance
35
Sima Sharifi
Table 3.2 Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s
Authors Source Text, date Translator, date Publisher Location
De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 San’vi, Ghasem, 1981 Toos CS

Simone
Mémoires d’une jeune fille San’vi, Ghasem, 1982 Toos CS
rangée, 1958
La femme rompue, 1967 Iran-doost, Naser, 1985 Ordibehesht CS
Vieillesse, 1972 Toosi, Mohammad Ali, Shabaviz DS
1986
La femme rompue, 1967 Forooghan, Nahid, 1989 Nashr-e Markaz CS, DS
Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 Daryoosh, Parviz, 1983 Ravaagh CS
Austen, Jane Emma, 1815 Aghaa-Khaani, Ayoob, Ordibehesht CS
1983
Sense and Sensibility, 1811 Khosravi, Hossein, 1984 Golshaaii: CS
Mazhar
Sense and Sensibility, 1811 Karami Far, Abbas, 1984 Kooshesh CS
Villette, 1853 Teymoori, Farideh, 1986 Ekbatan CS
Mansfield Park, 1814 Haghighi, Maryam, 1986 Kooshesh CS
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 1847 Afshar, Mehdi, 1987 Mahtab: Erfan CS
Voynich, Ethel Gadfly, 1897 Shaheen, Daryoosh & Negaretstan CS
Lilian Soosan Ardekaani, Ketab
1987
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss, 1860 Yoonesi, Ebrahim, 1989 Negaah CS
Buck, Pearl S. Imperial Woman, 1956 Badre’i, Fereidoon, 1989 Chekavak NE
translated books by selecting women-centred texts for translation. While in the 1970s only
one out of five translated books were clearly women-centred (e.g., Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves
1931/1977), the 1980s saw the production of 15 translations of 13 women-centred books (see
Table 3.2). A possible additional explanation for the increased number of such translations in
the 1980s, a turbulent decade when a long list of revolutionary changes, detrimentally affect-
ing women’s lives, were put in place as laws (section 3) is that at least some of these translations
had already been produced in the preceding decade(s), but revised and reprinted in the post-
1979 years. Some others may have been purged from the national library of the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran. For example, according to my contact in the USA, the Persian translation of de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, existed in the 1970s, but does not show in the library’s search results.
As indicated in Table 3.2, in the 1980s several of Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction and non-
fiction books were translated. Similarly, while Jane Austen’s work is absent in translation in the
1970s, four of her novels were imported into Persian in the 1980s.
Persian translations of feminist texts: 1990s and 2000s

There is a plethora of translations of feminist articles on unofficial websites in Iran that self-
declare as feminist, one of which is the web page The Feminist School, founded in 2009 and
managed by Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani,8 who is also an author and translator of books focused
on women’s issues. The web page was initiated by a group of Iranian women activists involved
in women’s rights campaigns. In ‘About Us,’ the managing director and editor in chief, Ahmadi
Khorasani, describes the web page as a “platform for voicing women’s issues” and “demand for
36
equality” (original in English). The home page features a variety of women-centred articles
written in Persian, or translated, by both women and men, that explore topics such as peace and
women, advocate the transformation of the male-dominated face of the Iranian parliament, and
run reviews of feminist magazines and books.
Translated articles on the Feminist School web page include Cassandra Balchin’s “Fundamen-
talism and Violence Against Women” (2010; trans. Faranak Farid, 2011), an essay about Pierre
Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination (1998; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2013), Michael Kaufman’s “The
Guy’s Guide to Feminism” (2011; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2012), Mary F. Rogers’s Ecofemi-
nism (1974; trans. Parastoo Ansar, 2014), and Judy Whipps’s “Pragmatist Feminism” (2004; trans.
Djelveh Djavaheri, 2010), among many others. None of these articles turn up in the search
results at the national library. It seems that the relatively free transnational exchange of feminist
concepts and thoughts, albeit in the form of short articles, takes place only through unofficial
Iranian channels such as the aforementioned Feminist School, which has become a leading plat-
form showcasing women’s experiences of everyday life under the Islamist theocracy of Iran.9
Unofficial feminist web pages tend to focus on strictly feminist material for translation, but
the same cannot be said about books translated since the 1990s, which do turn up in the offi-
cial channel of the library. Here are a few examples: Pearl Buck’s Imperial Woman (1956, trans.
Shahshahani, 1992) or Ethel Lilian Voynich’s Gadfly (1897, trans. Nahid Dade-Bakhsh, 1996);
and in the 2000s, Phyllis Chesler’s Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2001, trans, Farideh Hem-
mati, 2008). However, the library also offers other translations for the 1990s and beyond that
can be considered feminist work, such as Maya Angelou’s poem I Shall Not Be Moved (1990s,
trans. Farzin Hooman Far, 1996), Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894, trans. Rooh Anguiz
Poor Naseh et al., 2006), Marilyn French’s The War Against Women (1992; trans. Toorandokht
Tammadon, 1994), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963; trans. Fatemeh Sadeghi,
2013), among others.
Between 2000 and 2017, the source books selected for translations become increasingly
bold and more provocative in their approach to feminist consciousness-raising. A case in point
is the translation of the Canadian author Rupi Kaur’s debut poetry collection Milk and Honey
(2015) and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened (2017). Kaur’s poetry is described by
some critics as “explor[ing] female experiences with evocative and accessible language”10 and
engaging in “raising awareness of taboos on menstruation and sexual abuse.”11 This book of
poetry is translated in two consecutive years, 2017 and 2018, by three different translators. Two
translators, Samaneh Parhiz-kari (Tehran, Mikhak Publishing) and Niloofar Ebrahimi, worked
independently and produced one translation each in 2017. A third translation was created by
Fahimeh Godaz Chian in 2018.
In the 2000s, books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, trans. Soheil
Sommy, 2003), Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1992, trans. Amir Hossein Mehdi Zadeh,
2009), and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of Her Own (1929, trans. Masoomeh Mehr Shadi, 2012),
among many others, appeared in Persian.
The search results for Persian translations of English feminist fiction and non-fiction in
three periods, prior to and including the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond, available through the
national library, display a remarkably consistent pattern: fewer translations turn up before or
during the 1970s while the number of translations steadily increases after the 1979 revolution.
For the sake of space, I do not present the numerous translations produced during those periods.
However, I will show the number of translations from the 1930s to 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and
beyond in Tables 3.3 through 3.5 respectively.
Table 3.3 shows that in the years prior to and including the 1970s, before the revolution, the
number of women-centred translations are 18 in total, and only five out of the 18 volumes are
37
Sima Sharifi
Table 3.3 Number of translations concerned

with social justice (1930s–1970s)
Decade Translations
1930s 1
1940s 2
1950s 3
1960s 7
1970s 5
Total 18
produced in the1970s. In the 1980s, the first decade after the revolution, a total of 15 transla-
tions were produced (Table 3.4 based on the details of Table 3.2). In the 1990s, the number
of translations of women-centred literature were slightly higher than those of the 1980s. The
greatest increase in women-centred books in Persian translation takes place in the 2000s with
a total of 148 translations (Table 3.5). It is conceivable that the proliferation of women-centred
publications in Iran has created a clash of ideologies between these and the anti-feminist leaning
of theocrats in power. The following discussion is one possible example of how the IRI deals
with such an ideological collision.
In the library search results of 2018, I observed a situation, pertinent to the translation of
feminist literature, which did not exist in previous searches (2012 and 2014), and that is the
marking of some feminist book titles (Table 3.1 and 3.2). In the column ‘Location,’ certain
books are marked as either Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), Donation Shelves (DS),
or the “source text may not be loaned.” To illustrate, here are some examples of marked book
titles: Alice Munro’s Runaway Stories (2004; trans. Mostafa Shayan, 2016) is located in Closed
Shelves, while Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928; trans. Mohammad Naderi, 1991) is marked
Non-Existing. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is placed in the Closed Shelves for one translation
(Soheil Sommy, 2003) while it is Non-Existing for another (Seyyed Habib Gohari Rad, 2018).
Mary Wollstonecraft’s text of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an interesting case
which clearly reveals the patriarchal zeal of the IRI. The Vindication is a book written in protest
against Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in which he opines that women’s education must
be inferior to that of men, because if a woman is fully educated, she “would no longer be bound
by her marital and domestic responsibilities” (qtd. in Jane Afary 1996, 197). The library search
turns up no translation for the Vindication, which I therefore assume is not available in Persian,
and the English source text is marked “may not be loaned.” However, Rousseau’s Emile has been
translated by at least four translators. All of these translations, as well as the source texts, both in
French and English, seem to be accessible to the public.
To disambiguate the meaning of the terms Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), and
Donation Shelves (DS), I asked my contact, residing in Iran, to find out from his local librar-
ies the correct meaning of these terminologies. The librarians’ reactions and answers varied
depending on whom he asked:
• “These words mean what they say: CS means not accessible to the public, NE means the
library does not possess the volume, and the DS means the books were donated.”
When my contact pointed to a case marked with both CS and DS, the librarian simply said,
“no clue.”
38
Table 3.4 Number of translations of feminist

books (1980s)
Decade Translations
1980s 15
Total 15
Table 3.5 Number of translations of feminist

books (1990s and beyond)
Decade Translations
1990s 18
2000–2010 50
2011–2018 80
Total 148
• “Never seen such a thing in our local library.”

• “These are special classification systems of the national library.”
• “I really don’t know.”
Yet, one librarian tested my contact’s claim by searching Jane Austen herself. She was genuinely
shocked at the sight of such results as Closed Shelves appearing on her own computer. Finally,
she could only say “I really don’t know.” Since my contact was eventually questioned by the
security personnel of some of the local libraries about his ‘suspicious’ interest in such a matter, he
quit his line of inquiry, out of fear. As a result, I cannot offer a conclusive explanation for these
terminologies. Yet, the terms seem to indicate a simple purging of books from the library shelves.
The library marking of certain books suggests that women-centred literature, even in post-
translation and publication, may be at risk of being obliterated by obstructing public access to
them. It may be argued that some of these books do exist in the black market. However, not
everybody, students and researchers in particular, can afford to purchase costly books; nor can
it be expected that every reader navigates the underworld of unauthorized market. The Closed
and Non-Existing shelves deprive that section of the population who are most in need of books
in public libraries.
How do the sociopolitical changes influence women

and translation?
To unpack my third research question, I will look at the impact of the social-legal-political dis-
courses on women and what they might mean for translations and book publishing in the IRI.
The integration of sociopolitical contexts into the analysis of translation has a long history in
translation studies, hence the coined term “cultural turn” by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere
(1998, xxi). In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, “the government of the Islamic Republic
of Iran repealed many of the legislative and social changes of the Pahlavi era that were seen to conflict
with the laws of Islam” (Lewis and Yazadanfar 1996, xii). Within two months after his arrival,
Khomeini undid decades of women’s achievements in the area of legal reform. He abrogated
the family protection law which had allowed women to initiate divorce and have custody of
their children, and subjected women’s travel and employment to their husband’s permission;
39
Sima Sharifi
these are only several of the many changes that directly impacted women’s lives (Afary 2009,
271–272). As a result of these changes, the revolutionary constitution abounds in legal codes
whose main goal seems to be to relegate women to an inferior secondary status.
For example, Article 630 of Iran’s Constitution allows a husband to kill his wife (i.e. honour
killing) and her lover, if he catches them in flagrante (Nayyeri 2013, 12);12 Article 162 makes
judgeship the exclusive right of men (56); Article 907 states that “when a father dies his son(s)
are entitled to twice as much as his daughter(s)” (49); Article 198 provides that “[t]he standard of
testimony in all crimes is the testimony of two men, except in cases of illicit sexual intercourse,
and homosexuality which shall be proven by the testimony of four men, or two men and four
women [. . .]” (15); Article 1041 prohibits marriage before the age of puberty (i.e. nine lunar
years or eight years and nine months) for girls, but with the permission of the paternal guardian
it is allowed (20). According to Amnesty International,13 across the country, girls even younger
than ten were being married off to older men, especially in rural areas. This practice continued
until 2002 when the age of marriage for girls was raised to 13, or less with paternal permission.
Nayyeri, the Iranian-British lawyer and human rights activist, observes that the minimum age of
marriage for girls also determines their age of maturity or criminal responsibility as approved in
2012 and stipulated in Article 147. According to Nayyeri:
The IRI legal system recognizes women as dependent upon men and incomplete human
beings who need to be supervised and controlled by men and the State [. . .]. As discussed
above, under the Islamic Penal Code, the value of a woman’s worth is only half that of a
man’s; or a woman’s testimony in court is given half the weight of a man’s testimony.
(61)
Feminist literature challenges such a degrading sexist view of women, hence the censorship
imposed on such literature. The immediate question at this point is, given the institutionalized
sexism sanctioned by the patriarchal/theocratic governing systems of the IRI, what censorial
apparati are used to safeguard against women-centred translations.
Censorship in the IRI is a complex and non-transparent system in which the publisher must
first submit the book to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (henceforth, MCIG) to
ensure it conforms to a myriad of written and unwritten rules and the censor’s own interpre-
tation of those rules. Weeks, months, and sometimes years later, the MCIG may issue a pre-
publication permission. Hejazi (2009) details the process as follows:
When the publishers decide to publish a book, they have to commission the translation (if
necessary), copy-editing, typesetting, layout, cover design and proof-reading and then sub-
mit it in the final press-quality PDF format to the Book Department of the MCIG [. . .].
The publishers are responsible for paying all these origination costs even before they know
whether they will receive a PPP [Pre Publication Permission] for the book.
(41)14
As for the censored elements, in addition to the obvious word ‘feminism’ being considered
taboo and unwritable, many other references to women seem to be offensive to the censor.
Censorship is not limited to translations. Non-translations such as local literary creations that
allude to a woman’s body are also subject to extensive censorial scrutiny. In his non-fiction
Persian book, Ketab-e Momayyezie [Scrutinized Book] (2010), the Iranian writer Ahmad Rajab
Zadeh found words, phrases, and sentences ordered deleted. For example, the line “That night
my daughter had her first period” was crossed out of one manuscript by the censor. Another
40
censor found the phrase “wedding night” to be offensive to society. The sentence “She in her
dress of red velvet and a white scarf was more beautiful than a red rose” was crossed out (qtd. in
Mahloujian 2010).15
One may ask if there is any neat list declaring what must be censored. An Iranian translator,
Abbas Ezati describes the arbitrary nature of censorship in Iran:
After 20 years of translating experience and contact with the censorship system, I thought
I could, in my work, reliably avoid all the words or phrases that would provoke the censor’s
sensibility. But I was wrong because it is impossible to find any pattern in the kind of text
the censor censors.
(Ezati 2013; my translation from Persian)
As a result of the non-transparency in what needs to be censored, translators, editors, and

publishers experience the constant, omnipresent scrutiny and surveillance of the censor which
creates “scissors in the head” (qtd. in Stark 2009, xxi) of both the writer and the translator.
A case study: micro-details of the translation

In this section, I present two excerpts of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) as a case study
that illustrates what can happen to a text that is ‘translated’ across cultural boundaries into a
theocratic receiving society such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the search results for post-1979, Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale
appears on the list of books translated into Persian in 2003. In Canada and the target society
Iran, the book is widely known as a women-centred novel because the source text is concerned
with the sociocultural status of women, and the myriad ways that women’s voices, thoughts, and
experiences can be, and are, drowned out, either by socioculturally entrenched gender norms
or by theocratic legal systems. Yet, this same book was translated into Persian by Soheil Sommy
(2003) and circulated among Iranian readers in a clearly theocratic regime, at least until 2014
when it was marked Closed Shelves.
The book tells the story of a 33-year-old woman named Offred who tapes her life story
while living as a handmaid under the oppressive theocracy of Gilead, or more likely after her
escape from that captivity. The narrative begins when Offred is in Gilead, a newly established
Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and ends with her escape that enables her to tell her story.
We learn from Offred’s story that Gilead’s ideologues are bent on purifying society from the
liberalism of the pre-Gileadean era through the establishment of a hierarchical binary in which
women are silenced and their basic human rights are purged. The Handmaids, a group of (still)
fertile women, are assigned to the homes of the ruling classes for the purpose of procreation.
The handmaids are not allowed to have their own names, an education or knowledge of any
kind, own anything, choose their clothing, or have sex for pleasure. In short, handmaids in
Gilead are not allowed to have power or self-awareness; yet the protagonist, Offred, strives for
all that: to gain control if not directly, but vicariously through the memory of her friend, Moira.
While in Gilead, and perhaps because of such oppressive treatment, Offred, who in her past
never identified as a feminist but criticized her mother’s feminism, longs for the two most radical
feminists in her life: her mother and her lesbian friend and radical feminist, Moira.
It must be noted that the purpose of the following contrastive analysis is not to “establish
what has been ‘lost’ or ‘betrayed’ in the translation process” (Bassnett 2005, 8), merely for the sake
of adhering to the source text. The micro-level text analysis here is meant to expose the way
patriarchy is perpetuated through language use.
41
Sima Sharifi
The following excerpt is a commentary on Offred’s mother who was a radical feminist in her
day. In the source text (ST), Offred talks about the day when she returns from her daily grocery
shopping in Gilead, enters the kitchen in the Commander’s house, where she smells the yeast
in the freshly baked bread. This catapults her imagination back to former times. An imagery of
food arouses memories of a better time when she was a mother and had a kitchen at her disposal.
She also recalls her own childhood when her mother did not bake.
ST (The Handmaid’s Tale):

It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers; although my
own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. (45)
TT:
‫ بوی‬،‫ مادر من‬،‫ بوی مادرها را می دهد‬.‫ آشپزخانه هایی که مال من بودند‬،‫مرا به یاد آشپزخانه های دیگر می اندازد‬
.‫ در گذشته ها وقتی خودم مادر بودم‬،‫مرا می دهد‬
[It reminds me of other kitchens, the kitchens that belonged to me. It smells of mothers, my
mother, it smells of me, in the past, when I was a mother myself.] (71)
In the source text, we learn that unlike Offred, her mother, as a radical feminist activist, did
not make bread. The TT reader is deprived of this clue and must reach a different conclusion.
The matricial translation norms omit most of an important part of the sentence: “although my
own mother did not make bread,” leaving only “my mother.” As a result, the segments, “It smells
of mothers,” “my mother,” and “It smells of me” are seamlessly connected to one another and to
the kitchen. The cumulative effect of the TT implies that Offred and her mother, like all other
mothers, are nostalgic about the smell of a kitchen. Thus, Offred’s commentary on her mother,
that clearly says she defied the stereotypical association of baking bread with mothers, is silenced.
The new formulation creates a text in which an imbalance in the “ratio of semantic load vs. lin-
guistic carriers” (Toury 1995, 107) creates a vacuum in meaning. The omitted lingual material is
compensated for by the translation strategy of “informational intensification” (ibid.) in the transla-
tion, that is, the strategy of placing a lone phrase ‫“ مادر من‬my mother” in association with the
kitchen serves an important patriarchal function: situating Offred’s mother squarely in the kitchen.
Here is another example from The Handmaid’s Tale in Persian translation that demonstrates
how patriarchy is maintained through language use, resulting in undermining the feminist intent
of the novel. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6. On the way to their daily shopping, the
two Handmaids, Offred and Ofglen, stop to gaze at The Wall patrolled by Guardians, Gilead’s
Police. As she looks on, Offred narrates her observation of the six abortionists who have been
hanged on The Wall, their heads covered by white bags, and their hands tied in front of them.
Offred knows the executed victims are doctors from their lab coats. Offred says they must have
been doctors who performed, now illegal, abortions in the past. Then she reflects on the possible
informants who could be two ex-nurses because, in the new regime of Gilead, the testimony
of one woman is no longer admissible, implying that unlike the regime before it, Gilead has
downgraded women’s testimony due to their sex – requiring two testimonies.
Employing translation strategies of omission and addition, as explained next, the TT makes
the Persian texts sound like the testimony of one woman was unacceptable in both the pre-
Gilead and the Gilead regimes. In glaring opposition to the ST, the Persian translation becomes
aligned with the IRI’s current Islamic laws, which give a woman’s testimony in court half the
weight of a man’s testimony.
42
ST (HMT):
ex-nurses perhaps, or a pair of them, since evidence from a single woman is no longer admis-
sible (31–32).
TT:
۵۳. ‫ چون شهادت یک زن قابل قبول نیست‬،‫ الاقل دونفر از آن ها‬،‫احتماال از طریق پرستارهای سابق‬
[Probably via former nurses, at least two of them, because testimony of one woman is not
accepted.] (53)
Through strategies of omission and addition, the Persian translation makes two modifica-
tions, with the effect of creating a reading in which unequal gender relations are normalized in
the Gilead, and by extension for the target system. The lingual changes relate to the omission
of the adverb “no longer” in the English version and the addition of the quantifier “at least”
in the Persian text. The omission of the adverbial phrase “no longer” has the effect of blurring
the distinction between the liberal pre-Gilead and the dictatorial Gilead eras. The problematic
difference appears only when the Persian text is compared to the original English text and its
evocation of the pre-Gilead liberal sociopolitical institutions, where unlike the present, a single
woman’s testimony was admissible. It implies that the situation is “no longer” as it was before. In
fact, during the Gilead regime, the condition of women has deteriorated sharply.
From the point of view of women’s rights, the two eras – before and during Gilead – represent
dramatic opposites. This point is anchored in the English adverbial expression “no longer”
which is deleted in the Persian text. Further, when the Persian quantifier “at least” is added to
the text, it suggests a minimum number or amount, which in this case means that the evidence
for the guilty partner must come from two women or more in order to be admissible by the
Gileadean legal code. This sense is absent in the English original. The Persian creates a matter-
of-fact statement suggesting that it has always been the case that evidence from two or more
women is needed, in both pre- and current Gilead times. The two modifications, the omission
and the addition together, create a gendered configuration in which the sub-standard status
assigned to women as a group is normalized. The textual-linguistic change in the preceding two
examples from The Handmaid’s Tale creates a semantic shift with disparaging effect on the female
character, an attempt to synchronize the Persian text with the realities of the target system. It
is evident that even if a translation of a feminist/women-centred text exists in Persian, it may
(because of censorship) completely undermine the feminist intent of the source text.
Conclusion
In general, the library search results as well as the outreach for further sources showed that
feminist ideas hardly travel freely between the English source and the Iranian target society. In
fact, the importation of feminist texts was probably of little import to the early Islamists in Iran.
While there is a visible increase in the translation of feminist texts in the 1980s, the first decade
of the revolution, the 1990s, turns up a similar number of importations. The 2000s showcase a
thriving growth of translations concerned with women’s issues and well-being. As was demon-
strated in the preceding comparative text analysis, such translations are, however, bound to pay a
heavy price for their existence by being censored and seriously altered.
Since translation is not exclusively the concern of linguists but is also influenced by the
broader social context in which it is produced, I presented a brief introduction to the status of
43
Sima Sharifi
women under the patriarchal realities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as a glance at the
censorship apparatus of the IRI. At this point, I pose the final question about the incongruent
link between an authoritarian, theocratic, and patriarchal regime, such as the IRI, and the trans-
lation of feminist texts. In other words, why did the feminist texts available in translation increase
in quantity after the 1979 revolution, and particularly in the 2000s, and include provocative and
often radical feminist authors? A combination of two reasons may help account for such a state
of affairs.
First, allowing translations of feminist work to be produced under the watchful eyes of the
vigilant censor may be a sign of the IRI yielding to pressure from women. Since the 1980s, if
not earlier, Iranian women as readers and activists have demanded that feminist texts be made
available for their enlightenment and to continue the struggle against sexism.16 Since the revolu-
tion, women, both religious and secular, have been increasingly and negatively affected by the
enforcement of the legal and political discriminatory laws against gender equity. Therefore, the
pressure has gained momentum, and, at the same time, translations of feminist materials have
increased to a historically high number. However, this does not mean that the IRI is moving
away from its patriarchal policies.
On the contrary, in light of the increase in the translation of feminist literature, the IRI has
found ways to contravene such a trend. For example, as a countermeasure to the proliferation
of women-centred translations, the IRI seems to make such books unavailable to the public
by placing them in Closed Shelves, or Non-Existing sectors of the libraries, among other
strategies.
The other equally plausible reason might be simply self-serving; translations appear, women
readers (and the outside world) are satisfied, but the censorship system purges the text, and
removes or undermines the feminist features, imposing texts that prop up the hegemonic doc-
trine. The comparative text analysis of excerpts from The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates how the
women-centric passages are trimmed and tamed to the taste of the male-centric censor. The
excerpts used in this chapter are only a miniscule sample of a large body of text analysis of two
books, by two authors translated in two different times by two translators, meticulously analyzed
in my doctoral dissertation where I found women-centred texts are consistently manipulated.17
Contextually speaking, translations of women-centred literature are impacted by the gender-
based discriminatory laws of the target society and this inevitably results in the erasure of the
content of the source text, in order to synchronize it with and conform to what is allowed to
exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Future research directions

The fact that feminist books are translated in societies antagonistic to the very goal of f eminism –
gender equality in social, political, legal, and economic matters – provides any translation scholar
with numerous options for research topics that could enrich the discipline of translation studies.
It would be enlightening to compare the translation of feminist texts in a secular society with
that in a theocratic one to highlight the linguistic features that offend the sensibility of the cen-
sor. It would be equally interesting to focus on the selection and translation of texts as a function
of a societal political ideological mood. Given the fact that the Iranian-based translator, Soheil
Sommy, has translated four of Atwood’s eight translated novels, it would be worth investigating
whether the other three novels were treated like The Handmaid’s Tale. A research project aimed
at uncovering the role that publishers and editors play vis-à-vis the translators could also reveal
the kinds of forces involved in translation in theocracies or in other strongly ideological govern-
ing systems possessing effective censorship apparati.
44
Further reading
There are a large number of collections that tackle the translation of feminist texts, the repro-
duction of patriarchy through language use, and the censorship of women-oriented texts. North
America is particularly well served with Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow
(2014), an anthology that explores the intersection of culture and translation; Flotow (2011)
covers a range of topics, from women authors to women translators and characters in translation.
Sara Mills and Louise Mullany (2011) and Mary Talbot (2010) explore the question of language
study and its significance for feminists. To understand the role of translators and publishers in a
non-Western culture, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam (2015) provides a fascinating sociologi-
cal study of literary translation in Iran. On the censorship front, Michaela Wolf (2002), Denise
Merkle (2002), Maria Tymoczko (2008), and Michelle Woods (2012) explore the complexity
of censorship, the role of the translator, the subtle censoring of texts, and how language can be
used as a totalitarian and patriarchal weapon. Sima Sharifi (2018) explores, from the perspective
of two sisters, one based in Canada, the other in Iran, how a censored feminist translation is
understood by Persian female readers and the memories this invokes.
Related topics
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women-centred texts, Islamic Republic of Iran, theocratic patri-
archy, translation studies, legal equality
Notes
1 The monarchy in Iran is often described as culturally paternalistic in nature as it subscribed to inequity
based on sex. While the government supported women in their pursuit of education, their struggle
against child marriage and men’s unilateral rights to divorce and child custody was promptly suppressed;
the Shah regime also shut down feminist organizations, and the “family laws of Iran in the late 1970s
still considered the man as the head of the household,” (Paidar 1995, 157).
2 Email correspondence, in English, with Golbarg Bashi, PhD, Colombia University, 27 November 2017.
3 Email correspondence, in English paraphrased, with Babak Mazloumi, translator and PhD candidate,
University of California, Irvine, 16 October 2017.
4 My agreement with Mazloumi’s argument is based on personal experience: almost every novel I read
in my youth was a translation of some male Russian author (e.g. Maxim Gorki’s The Mother). This
implies that some translators of the pre-1979 era may have been members, or sympathizers, of Iran’s
communist party, known as the Toudeh Party or the party of the masses – an ideologically close ally
of the Soviet Union. These translators knew Russian and other European languages and had political
interests in disseminating leftist or liberal material. Yasamin Khalighi et al. (Scholars of Ferdowsi Uni-
versity of Mashhad, Iran) studied the Persian translation of literature in the 1940s and 1950s and found
that members of Toudeh Party translated 67 works by Russian authors such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dos-
toyevsky, Turgenev, as well as Balzac, and Dickens, among other European authors ( Journal of Language
and Translation Studies, 48(3), 19 December 2015, 1–7.
5 Zahra Mila Elmi is an assistant professor in Mazandaran University, Iran. Available at: www.mei.edu/
content/educational-attainment-iran [Accessed 6 March 2018].
6 The increased rate of literacy is partly due to the development of education for both males and females,
but also to the fact that girls in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s found education the only way to gain
some freedom in the face of the many restrictions imposed on their lives by the leaders of the Islamist
government. In other words, the IRI could not stop, or reverse, the trend for literacy that had already
spread across Iran before the 1979 revolution. In his study of “Islam, Education and Civil Society in
Contemporary Iran,” Zep Kalb, Graduate of Oxford University, completed his MA at the University of
Tehran, and PhD at UCLA, states that while the number of university students in the 1950s Iran was
fewer than 9000, this number grew to 30,000 in the 1960s and over 100,000 between 1976 and 1977
(2017, 582).
45
Sima Sharifi
7 For example, Shokooh Khosravi and Mohammad Khatib (September 2012) wrote an article titled
“Strategies Used in the Translation of English Idioms into Persian in Novels” in Theory and Practice in
Language Studies. Vol. 2, No. 9, 1854–1859.
8 Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani is also a publisher, an essayist, journalist, author of several books on the
women’s movement in Iran, and a founding member of the Women’s Cultural Center (markaz-e
Farhangi-ye Zanan) in Tehran, “an NGO that focuses on women’s health as well as legal issues.” In
2007 she was sentenced to three years in prison for threatening the national security, and the NGO
was shut down. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noushin_Ahmadi_Khorasani. In order to
secure permission to operate, the NGO’s founders “were required to be married, university graduates
without any previous convictions for criminal (or political) activities.” Available at: https://tavaana.
org/en/content/noushin-ahmadi-khorasani-two-decades-struggle-womens-rights. Ahmadi Khorsani
was also “a prominent member of the One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws
campaign, which used public petition to challenge the inequality of Iranian men and women before the
law.” The IRI banned the Feminist School web page in 2016. Available at: www.feministschool.com/
english/spip.php?article52. As of February 2019, it is still accessible.
9 Although the IRI officially shut down the web page in 2016, for some unknown reason people can still
publish articles in it.
10 Simran Singh. Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Critical-Analysis-of-Rupi-Kaurs-Milk-
and-Honey.
11 Abigail Eardley. Available at: www.oxfordstudent.com/2017/08/21/poetry-review-milk-honey-
rupi-kaur/.
12 My legal source is the British-Iranian human rights lawyer, Mohammad Hossein Nayyeri, whose report
on gender inequality and discrimination in Iran’s post-1979 Constitution (http://anyflip.com/jzeo/
ghyt) is documented in Human Rights Documentation Centre, an independent non-profit organiza-
tion that was founded in 2004 by international human rights scholars and lawyers: https://iranhrdc.
org/gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women/ [Accessed 20 July 2014]. But
this site http://anyflip.com/jzeo/ghyt was consulted in 20 January 2019.
13 Amnesty International. 2012. “Iran: Joint Statement on the Status of Violence Against Women
in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” 29 November. Available at: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/
MDE13/074/2012/en/ [Accessed 20 July 2014].
14 Arash Hejazi, in his MA at Oxford Brookes University, studied the multi-level procedure of censorship.
According to Hejazi’s personal website (http://english.arashhejazi.com) he was the founder, publisher,
and senior editor of Caravan Books Publishing in Tehran. He is the current editor of John Wiley and
Sons Inc., a global publishing company that specializes in academic publications.
15 An Iranian journalist, Azar Mahloujian, fled to Sweden in 1982; she is the spokeswoman for the Writers
in Prison Committee and a Member of the Board of Directors of Swedish PEN. She is the author of
two books: Back to Iran (2004) and The Torn Pictures (2005).
16 Personal email, in Persian, with an Iranian-based established translator who spoke to me on anonymity,
9 July 2014.
17 Doctoral dissertation defended October 2016. Text Analysis, pp. 177–218. Available at: https://ruor.
uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/35677/1/sharifi_sima_2016_thesis.pdf.
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47
4
Pathways of solidarity in transit
Iraqi women writers’ story-making
in English translation
Ruth Abou Rached
Introduction
Edward Said (1990) was told “Arabic is a controversial language” by a New York publishing house
when he suggested works to be translated from Arabic into English. However, since the mid-
1990s, a ‘market’ for Arab women’s literature in English translation has emerged. This market
has been at times described as ‘constructing’ Arab women writers according to English readers’
expectations (Amireh 2000), ‘creating’ the voices of ‘Arab women’ (Hartman 2012) and even
of women translators (Booth 2016) in ways that reiterate rather than dispel stereotypes about
the Arabic-speaking world. With a history of refusing co-option into any hegemonic ideology
(Ghazoul 2008) Iraqi women writers – along with their translators, editors, and publishers –
have a tradition of negotiating the English translation of their Arabic literary works on their
own terms and in various ways alongside Iraq’s fluctuating contexts of censorship, international
sanctions, and political instability. This chapter has two specific objectives in the overview it
provides of Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation. The first objective is to
complement and contribute to the increasing critical attention paid to Iraqi women’s writing in
both Iraqi (Ahmad 2017; Kadhim 2017; Hatto 2013; Khodeir 2013) and international English-
language academic settings (Mehta and Zangana 2018; Abdel Nasser 2018; Abdullah 2018; Al-
Urfali 2015; Hamdar 2014; Ghazoul 2008; cooke 2007). The second objective relates to raising
more awareness and critical appreciation of how Arab women writers – and their stories first
written in Arabic – have navigated the multiple and charged gendered, geopolitical discourses
to reach different audiences in English translation, with Iraqi women’s stories as the focus of
discussion and analysis.
The focus of this chapter then is to give an overview and open questions on the different
pathways by which Iraqi women writers have taken their stories – and their politics of counter-
hegemonic solidarity – into English. These pathways of mediation into English are nuanced and
varied, as are the politics of literary expression interweaving them. To do justice to these nuances
of mediation and reception, this overview therefore does not present any comparative analyses of
the English translations in relation to an ‘authoritative’ Arabic ‘original.’ Neither are the analyses
of their pathways of mediation restricted to ‘the stories’ or ‘the texts’ themselves, particularly in
view of the extensive paratextual materials – striking visuals, forewords, and afterwords – that
48
mediate Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation. As this overview will show,
these paratextual materials often evoke a politics of solidarity between the people/s of Iraq and
the stories being told and their respective agents of mediation: editors, publishers, reviewers, cover
artists, and translators. In this respect, the pathways by which expressions of solidarity are medi-
ated reconfigure – or at least open up thinking about – definitive notions of borders between
text and ‘paratext,’ translation and ‘paratranslation,’ as well as writer, translator, and ‘paratranslator’
in ways yet to be explored in depth within contexts of translation studies. To help engage with
the potential complexities of such mediations of cross-border solidarity, this chapter thus draws
on (intersectional) perspectives of feminist translation which frame acts of translation as gendered
and geopolitically situated modes of re/writing – not as reiterative versions of an ‘original’ text
(Castro and Ergun 2017; Flotow and Shread 2014), and notably ‘feminist paratranslation’ (Abou
Rached 2017, 2018), an analytical framework that focuses on paratexts as key components of
the meaning-making at play in any (para)translated work. From such critical perspectives, this
overview thus aims to highlight the pathways of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation as
negotiations of complex discourses that mediate ‘Iraq’ and ‘Iraqi people’ within often shifting
spheres of solidarity and as a distinct aesthetics of ‘rewriting’ localized, gendered perspectives of
such stories – thus making this a field of study that calls for further research.
Earlier Iraqi women’s stories in Arabic publication

While Iraqi women have always played a crucial role in maintaining traditions of oral literature
as a bedrock of Iraqi cultural memory, the first actual writings by Iraqi women were probably
anonymous and unsigned (Al-Dulaimi 1999, 11, cf. Ghazoul 2008, 181) or kept in private col-
lections by their authors and shared with people they knew personally (ibid.). The first publica-
tions by Iraqi women were in literary journals such as Layla (Efrati 2004, 158) during the 1920s,
with the first short story collection by Dalal Al-Safadi titled ‫[ حوادث وعبر‬Incidents and Lessons]
(self )-published in Basra in 1937. The first novella was ‫[ عقلي دليلي‬My Mind Is My Guide] by
Maliha Ishaq in 1948 followed by ‫[ من الجاني‬Who Is the Culprit] by Harbiya Muhammad in 1954.
Eminent Iraqi woman poet Nazik Al-Mala’ika put free-verse Arabic poetry on the wider Arab
world literary map in the 1950s. In terms of story-writing, Daizy Al-Amir’s first short story
collection ‫[ البلد البعيد الذي تحب‬The Distant Land That You Love] (Al-Amir 1964) was published
in 1964 in Beirut, an important cultural centre of the Arab world. Samira Al-Mana’s novella
‫[ السابقون والالحقون‬The Forerunners and the Followers] (Al-Mana 1972) was published there in 1972.
Iraqi women writers also publishing short stories inside Iraq included Ibtisam Abdullah, Lutfiya
Al-Dulaimi, Bouthayna Al-Nasiri, Maysalun Hadi, Mai Muzaffar, and Salima Salih. Themes of
these early examples of Iraqi women’s story-making (many yet to be translated) are also found in
other works later published in English translation: generational and gendered family dynamics,
love, patriarchal injustices, and everyday dreams of a different future.
An important theme running through all stories is how experiences of power injustices
pertinent to women and other vulnerable groups in Iraqi society are potentially relevant to
everyone in Iraq, whatever their sociopolitical constituency. Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi’s short story
collection ‫[ البشارى‬Glad Tidings] (1974), for example, shows a dystopian world dominated by
psychic uncertainty. In one story, women find themselves acting in a play they thought they
were going to watch. In another story, a woman feels happy to hear “‫[ ”البشارى‬the glad tidings]
or ‘good news’ that she has run a red traffic light (1974, 43). Whether she is happy to be seen
crossing a red line, or to have identified what the red line/light is in the first place, is left open
to interpretation. Bouthayna Al-Nasiri’s short story “‫[ ”القارب‬The Boat] (1974, 2001) about
traditions of honour, revenge, and sacrifice in local river communities is underpinned by the
49
Ruth Abou Rached
silent threat of violence pervading the world of each protagonist be they woman or man. While
these stories are clearly a commentary on patriarchal injustices, such allegorical representations
of the vulnerable also reflect a wider trend in Iraqi literature connected to censorship directives
of the 1968–2003 Iraqi Ba’athist government1 (Khoury 2013; Hanoosh 2012; Rohde 2010;
Ali 2008; Davis 2005) and the fear of imprisonment or exile (Wali 2007; Mushatat 1986) if the
directives were not respected. In this sense, dystopic representations of localized gendered expe-
riences of hardship in Iraqi women’s writing can be read as ‘c/overt’ political commentary on
wider dynamics of power towards all constituencies in Iraq as well as ‘overt’ condemnation of
localized patriarchal practices towards women, specifically. Such a reading, however, depends on
the discernment of readers as well as their potential expectations, a crucial point when stories
published before 2003 have been labelled (in English) as state propaganda (Zeidel 2011; Starkey
2006, 149). In relation to this point, Iraqi academic Shakir Mustafa (2008), for example, warns
that overt critique of the Iraqi government cannot be easily discerned in the anthology of Iraqi
writers’ stories he edited and translated into English (2008, xvi), many of which were published
in Arabic before 2003. His commentary implies that these stories may disappoint (US) readers
expecting overt condemnation of a pre-2003 totalitarian government in Iraq.
This particular point helps frame why the first examples of Iraqi women’s stories in Arabic-
English translation should be read in their own right and with reference to their local contexts
of publication. Most of these stories first appeared in ‘state-sponsored’ literary anthologies and
journals such as Ur, Iraq, Iraq Today, and Gilgamesh (Altoma 2010) funded by a then prosperous
Iraqi government promoting Iraq as a cultural centre in the Pan-Arab world. Due to the gener-
ous government sponsorship of literary events and publications, any literary work not conform-
ing to Iraqi state directives would often be blocked from circulation in other Arab countries
as well as Iraq, which resulted in such works being less likely to become known, reviewed, or
translated in wider Arab and international scholarly settings (cooke 2007, 241). During the
1980–1988 war between Iraq and Iran, Iraqi women’s story-making faced further barriers and
challenges. As pointed out by Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Masmoudi 2015, 33),
novels by Iraqi men writers proliferated in number during this war, partly because men were
writing about their experiences on the battlefront as soldiers or reporters, partly because all Iraqi
literary production was being framed by the Iraqi government as part of the military war effort.
This meant that in Iraq, literary works by Iraqi women writers were less likely to receive critical
attention or acclaim and were even less likely to become known or circulate outside of Iraq.
Even though women writers did not receive the same critical attention in Iraq as men (Rohde
2010, 144), Iraqi women writers continued to publish in Iraq between 1970 and 1990. These
writers included Ibtisam Abdullah (1980, 1988), Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi (1986a, 1986b, 1988), Bou-
thayna Al-Nasiri (1990), Maysalun Hadi (1985, 1986), Alia Mamdouh (1980), May Muzaffar
(1979), and Aliya Talib (1989) – with others outside Iraq such as Daizy Al-Amir (1988), Samira
Al-Mana (1985), Salima Salih (1974), and Haifa Zangana. Although many of these works have
not yet been translated, noting their presence – and their publishers – is an important testimony
to Iraqi women’s writing prevailing alongside (and despite) state discourses of ‘war,’ hypermas-
culinity, and censorship, which diminished these writers along with the literary value of their
work.2 Any reading of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation needs to be informed by the
knowledge that much of this innovative body of work has yet to be translated.
Early examples of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation

Opportunities for Iraqi women writers to connect with publishers outside Iraq during the
1980–1988 war were few and far between due to travel restrictions imposed on Iraqis during the
50
1980s (cooke 1996, 2007). In the wake of the 1990–1991 war in Iraq, a crumbling publishing
infrastructure and ensuing international sanctions were also reasons for the relative scarcity of
Iraqi women’s literature published in English translation during and beyond the 1990s, especially
in comparison to translations of Arab women writers from other regions. This last point empha-
sizes the need to pay close attention to how and where earlier works by Iraqi women writers
were actually published in English translation, that is, examine the ‘paratexts,’ that is the contexts
surrounding the mediation of their works, amongst them self-translation, co-collaborative cor-
respondence, and self-publication.
The first instance of a novel (and memoir) published in English (self )-translation was Through
the Vast Halls of Memory (1990) by Haifa Zangana. This novel began as individual chapters or
short stories published in two Arabic diasporic journals: in ‫[ االغتراب االدبي‬Literature in Exile]
between 1986 and 1989, then ‫[ الكاتبة‬The Woman Writer] (Zangana 1995, 136). These chap-
ter were then brought together, translated, and edited by Haifa Zangana herself with the support
of surrealist artist and publisher Peter Wood alongside whom she had exhibited her artwork in
the 1970s and 1980s. The publication of Daizy Al-Amir’s On the Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s
Tales of Alienation (1994) came about via a collaboration between the author, publishers, and
academic scholars of Arab literature (1994, vii, xiii) who had arranged for her to come to the
US in 1989 on an academic visit (McCann-Baker 1994, vii). In this respect, the cross-border
solidarities of (women) academics with Daizy Al-Amir are an integral aspect or ‘paratext’ of
how this particular publication came to be. Alia Mamdouh’s novel Mothballs (1995) was first
published in English as part of the Garnet Arab Women Writers’ Series due to a combination of
the personal, political and aesthetic politics of the book coming together for the series editor, lit-
erary writer and academic Fadia Faqir. In her introduction to Mothballs, Faqir cites her personal
engagement with the political situation of Iraq during the 1990–1991 US/Iraq war (Faqir 1995,
v) as one factor inspiring her decision to include Mamdouh’s story in the series along with her
appreciation for the aesthetic (and political) qualities of the work. Similarly, Bouthayna Nasiri’s
long-term residence in Cairo led to eminent English translator Denys Johnson-Davies taking
a selection of her short stories published between 1970 and 2000 and repackaging them into
one publication titled Final Night (2001) in English translation. Already blacklisted by the Iraqi
government in 1979 for her story-writing, Samira Al-Mana’s ‫[ القامعون‬The Oppressors] (1997)
was translated into English (2002/2008) by Paul Starkey through the grass-roots literary group
Exiled Writers Ink! in London, which organises events and literary writing projects for exiled
writers. In this respect, relations of trust in agents who mediated their works emerge as a key
factor for Iraqi women writers who, for the most part, were also personally involved in seeing
their work published in English translation. Alongside these pathways of trust, interweaving the
publications are pathways of solidarity, all of which add to the fabric of each work’s meaning-
making. Solidarities with Iraqi women writers were often inspired by an appreciation for the
aesthetics of a particular example of Iraqi literature less known outside Iraq as well as a wider
commitment to providing a platform for Iraqi women’s writing, long overshadowed by ongoing
contexts of war and sanctions.
Another way of critically approaching the pathways taken by Iraqi women’s texts into Eng-
lish is to consider the reasons why Iraqi writers first began publishing their stories in the dias-
pora, taking the UK as one case study. One reason was to keep their writing in circulation – in
any language – even if Iraqi state directives banned some writers’ (Arabic) works. The role
played by local literary diaspora journals was crucial in this regard. As many Iraqi writers feared
Iraqi surveillance operating outside of Iraq, the journals in which they published were selective
and specific, operating in a spirit of literary activist collaboration and based on a sense of mutual
trust between writer, translator, and publisher (Al-Mana and Abou Rached 2017). The first Iraqi
51
Ruth Abou Rached
diaspora literary journal in London ‫[ االغتراب األدبي‬Literature in Exile] (1985–2002) was founded
by Samira Al-Mana and Iraqi poet Salah Niazi, with the aim of fostering literary spaces which
did not reiterate “‫[ ”إ ّمعي أو ضدّي‬either with me or against me] mentalities (Al-Mana and Niazi
2002, 3) previously experienced by many Iraqi writers. Although based in London, the reach
of this journal extended well outside of the UK and Europe.3 The journal ‫[ الكاتبة‬The Woman
Writer] (1993–1995) was the one of the first to foreground Iraqi and Arab women’s writing
within leftist literary frames. Although this journal had a limited publication run, it was deemed
to be very important, which explains why back copies still circulate in some Iraqi literary dias-
pora circles in London4 and one example is available online. In order to get Arab literature more
deeply connected with English language readerships, Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon founded Ban-
ipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature with Margaret Obank in 1998. The aim of this journal,
according to Shimon was “to encourage a wider readership of Arab writers and poets for their
own sake, and for the particularity and the universality of their voices,” that is, provide a space in
which to read Arab literature beyond hegemonic political oppression whatever its provenance.
In Banipal, we find short stories by Iraqi women writers Lutifya Al-Dulaimi, Samira Al-Mana,
Hadiya Hussein, Bouthayna Al-Nasiri, Inaam Kachachi, and Salima Salih with literary translators
of their works – among them, Denys Johnson-Davies, Marilyn Booth, and Shakir Mustafa – as
allies of Iraqi/Arab writers’ political integrity in English translation.
Another important pathway of translation for Iraqi women writers’ stories into English is
that of academic publications in the UK and the US by scholars of Arab literature, often with
carefully worded introductions informed by a sense of solidarity towards the writers concerned,
most of whom were living in particularly charged contexts of censorship. The presentation by
miriam cooke as translator-editor of two short stories by Aliya Talib in the anthology Blood
into Ink (1994) is a prime example of what could be termed a reticent approach informed by
solidarity. She explains that Talib’s stories formed part of the ‘War and Culture Series,’ which
was funded by the Iraqi government during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war and that these sto-
ries were sent to her by the Iraqi Embassy in Washington DC. After stating that Talib might
still be living in Iraq, cooke advises readers that both of Talib’s stories require “careful reading”
(1994a, 80) but gives no further explanation. cooke’s reticence seems to imply a c/overt recog-
nition of different geopolitical locations at play in this work – one being that any attempt by
the (US-based) translator to interpret the stories’ political impact could endanger the life of a
writer living elsewhere. Other examples of scholarly ‘reticence’ informed by solidarity can also
be noted, for example in Daizy Al-Amir’s The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman’s Tale of Aliena-
tion (1994). Despite the meticulous references to the multiple agents involved in bringing out
this book between two wars taking place in Iraq, no reference is made to Iraqi state politics of
war in any part of the work. Similarly, in his introduction to Bouthayna Al-Nasiri’s short story
collection Final Night (2001), translator Denys Johnson-Davies (2001, 1) notes that the style of
Al-Nasiri’s earlier short stories is “more direct and relaxed” but does not offer further expla-
nations. Nor does he speculate on why her writing style has changed. Academic editor Fadia
Faqir very clearly articulates why she herself included Alia Mamdouh’s iconic novel ‫حبات النفتالين‬
[Mothballs] (1986) in the ‘Arab Women Writer’s Series’ (1995–1998), a transnational literary
project which published Arab women writers’ novels in English translation; her own personal
anguish at seeing “the bombs falling on Baghdad” (Faqir 1995, v). She also frames the publica-
tion of this work as preserving some historical memories of Iraq, thus interpreting the words
of Alia Mamdouh from her critical perspective as academic editor. The translators, editors, and
publishers seem to be enacting a politics of solidarity with Iraqi woman writers by being reticent
about political intention, all of them in various ways. They do not articulate any political inten-
tion on the part of the writer. Reticence in these cited examples of story publications enacts a
52
politics of solidarity rewritten – in English – as part of the works themselves. This enacting of
solidarity opens up interesting questions on how to read the politics of ‘c/overt’ solidarities in
(para) translation in Iraqi women’s literature, and in other literary traditions operating in similar
situations of alterity, if the intentions of the author – or (para) translator, that is editor as well as
translator – can never or cannot be ‘overtly’ declared.
The politics of cross-constituency solidarity

in Iraqi women’s literature
In current activist postcolonial scholarship, contemporary Iraqi literature has rightly been rec-
ognized as an important marker of cross-constituencies of solidarity and mourning within and
despite hegemonic dynamics of power which accord more value to some lives than to others
(Atia 2019; Abdel Nasser 2018; Mehta and Zangana 2018; Al-Ali and Al-Najjar 2013). Scholars
writing on the work of Iraqi women writers have been inspired by such themes, focusing on
the ways in which these writers work to celebrate (as well as mourn) lived gendered experi-
ence in Iraq. Critical engagements with Iraqi women’s writing often focus on what the telling
of the stories works to do, that is enact a politics of cross-constituency solidarity from diverse,
distinctly gendered perspectives and also address how these stories are told. In this respect, writ-
ing is framed as gendered forbearance in the face of injustice (Ahmad 2017; Kadhim 2017;
Al-Urfali 2015; Hatto 2013; Hamdar 2014; Grace 2007; Mehta 2006; Kashou 2013); an act of
resistance to oppression (Abdullah 2018; Abou Rached 2017; Masmoudi 2015, 2010); transcrib-
ing localized voices on paper as an act of documentation working to preserve Iraq’s diverse
cultures (Abou Rached 2017, 2018). Aesthetic expressions of cross-constituency solidarity are
however not unique to women writers in Iraq and such representations of cultural-political
heterogeneity and cross-constituency solidarity have marked Iraq’s literary scenes for decades
(Al-Musawi 2006). Such thematic motifs have, however, run the risk of being overlooked due
to the predominance of (post-)2003 war in Iraq (Al-Ali and Al-Najjar 2013, xvii). In view of
the overwhelming prevalence of discourses of the 2003 war in wider contexts of Iraq, there is
a danger that Iraqi women’s literature written before, during, and after 2003 will be read solely
through the post-2003 lenses of war and conflict, rather than in appreciation of stylistic and
thematic aspects that make this writing distinctive in Arabic and across other languages.
As explained by Ferial Ghazoul (2008, 198), one critical leitmotif in Iraqi women writers’
novels has been cross-boundary “solidarity of the subaltern.” By this, Ghazoul means that Iraqi
women writers see themselves as subalterns when they write about the different constituen-
cies of women as subalterns. They face the gendered dynamics of various interlocking systems
of oppressions that are common to other women, and they also face the oppressions particular
to women writers. As noted by Hadil Ahmad (2017) and Majeda Hatto (2013), such oppres-
sions include hegemonic discourses of nationalism and patriarchal mores as well as political
censorship, not always limited to Iraqi state apparati. Another theme common in many novels
published both before and after 2003 is that of marginalized women of Iraq telling their own
local stories about life at earlier moments in Iraq’s modern (and patriarchal) history. Alia Mam-
douh’s novel ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (1986, 2000, 1995, 2005) represents the shifting politics of
independence and revolution in urban Iraq during the 1940s. Haifa Zangana’s novel ‫مفاتيح مدينة‬
[Keys of a City] (2000) depicts the intersecting patriarchies of Arab and Kurdish Iraqi cultures
in the 1950s (Al-Mozani 2000). The recourse to (pre-Ba’athist) moments in Iraq’s history was,
in this case, undoubtedly a conscious choice on the part of the writer. A novel about rural or
urban women in localized historical contexts might escape (Iraqi state) censors as a critique
of sociopolitical injustices in contemporary Iraq. A novel about women and men of specific
53
Ruth Abou Rached
constituencies in specific times and locations however would be read as overt critique towards
state apparati and their military arms, Iraqi or otherwise. This is clearly the case in Hadiya Hus-
sein’s novel ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] (2004, 2012), which tells of the Iraqi experience of US and
Iraqi state military violence in Basra during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq.
Another prevalent pathway of meaning-making by which a politics of cross-constituency
solidarity in Iraqi women writers’ novels is mediated is that of the gendered bildungsroman, a
girl-to-woman story in which a protagonist relates what she ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ through her child’s
eye/I. Along with Mamdouh’s ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs], Betool Khedairi’s two novels ‫كم بدت السماء‬
!‫[ قريبة‬A Sky So Close] (1999, 2001) and ‫[ غائب‬Absent] (2004, 2005) are two cases in point. The
first novel is set in rural Iraq in the 1970s, and Baghdad and London during the 1980–1988 and
1991 Iraq wars. Her second novel ‫[ غائب‬Absent] (2004, 2005) is told by a girl living in Baghdad
during the time of international sanctions. Both novels include a detailed acknowledgement
by the author Khedairi in which she thanks everyone – friends, family, translators, editors, and
proofreaders – involved in the production of the Arabic and English versions. The fact that her
thanks are addressed towards all those involved in both language versions suggests that each
version exists in tandem, rather than in derivative or authoritative relation to the other. This
acknowledgement suggests that what is important to explore here is not whether the English
version of each novel is an ‘authentic’ version of the Arabic text in terms of ‘literal’ translation
but rather to whom each version is addressed, or for whom they are ‘rewritten.’ In this respect,
the notion of ‘reader’ as part of each novel’s meaning-making and solidarity-building in (para)
translation is open to further exploration.
The mediation of these marginalities in Arabic writing and English translation as vectors
rather than derivatives raises the issue of Iraqi women writers’ engagement with Arabic as a
written and spoken language by which cross-constituency solidarities are enacted, built, and
imagined through story-making. In many Iraqi women writers’ novels, Iraqi dialect is used to
phonetically ‘rewrite’ (or overwrite) formal written Arabic, the language used in the public
sphere which has, in the past, traditionally overwritten the presence of women and other mar-
ginalized groups in Arabic-speaking regions (Saddiqi 2006; Safouan 2007). This is why Ghazoul
has described the use of dialect as one of the “distinguishing feature/s of the Iraqi novel, whether
the author is man or woman” (Ghazoul 2008, 195) in that Iraqi writers consciously write Iraqi
dialect as a performance and a speech-act of lived Iraqi experience which re/writes – and
resists – the parameters of authority buttressing the status of formal written Arabic. This use of
dialect in Arabic poses questions for those reading the English translations: how can non-readers
of Arabic ‘hear’ or discern traces of the gendered resistance at play in Arabic via English transla-
tion? In Inaam Kachachi’s novel ‫[ الحفيدة األميركية‬The American Granddaughter] (2009), for example,
we read the voice of the US-American translator’s Iraqi grandmother in Mosuli Iraqi dialect. In
the English version (2011), translator Nariman Youssef transliterates some Mosuli Iraqi words
in Latin letters to render at least something of her voice in English translation, albeit somewhat
differently. In contrast, the Iraqi dialect words of Alia Mamdouh’s ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (1986,
2000) are rendered for the most part in standard English, with a brief explanatory glossary
of cultural terms in both the UK 1995 and the US 2005 versions of the novel. The striking
cover jacket visuals and detailed para/textual explanations are noteworthy for both versions.
The introduction by Fadia Faqir in the 1995 UK version, the foreword by Hélène Cixous, and
Farida Abu-Haidar’s afterword in the 2005 US version explain and inform the reader about the
discursive importance of Iraqi women’s voices – despite the ‘sound’ of these voice being – at least
mimetically – ‘unhearable’ outside of Arabic.
On the one hand, each of the novels’ (para)translation strategies – transliteration (Kachachi
2011) and copious repackaging (Mamdouh 1995, 2005) – could be read as an attempt to
54
compensate for a ‘lack,’ namely the impossibility of rendering Iraqi dialect voices and the local-
ized politics of each writer’s consciously gendered novel in English translation. Re/reading such
strategies as part of the meaning-making of the work in new contexts (rather than as a testimony
to the ‘failure’ of translation) offers another perspective which can enrich our understanding of
the novels and how their pathways of translation could be read as cross-constituency solidarity
‘re/written’ differently. In her comments on feminist translation praxis, Barbara Godard (1989),
for example, conceptualizes engagement with the unhearable in translation as traces of life and
discourse heard and shaped by (yet resistant to) masculinist or hegemonic language – as “an echo
of the self and the other, a movement into alterity” (1989, 44). By this echo, she implies that any
‘alterity’ in languages – however represented or transcribed – can only be heard as an uncanny
echo since the thought processes inspiring such articulations are inevitably shaped and config-
ured by language in the first place. Working with the echo of alterity in/of language is, accord-
ing to Godard, an act of “transformance” (1989, 46) – a performance of the transformation of
an inaudible echo through creative activist translation praxis. From this perspective, strategies
of transliteration and para/translational repackaging used for these two novels can be read as a
‘trans-performance,’ testifying precisely to English being unable to convey Arabic voices of the
novel in ‘audible’ ways – yet presenting the importance of these voices even if they can only be
‘read’ differently, if at all. Such examples of paratextual interventions reiterate the importance of
appreciating – while critically exploring – the translation or ‘paratranslation’ of women’s voices
in Iraqi women’s literature as a distinctive aesthetics as well as a c/overt politics of transnational
mediation of solidarity.
Iraqi women’s stories in post-2003 English translation

In the period following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent US allied occupation, pub-
lication contexts for Iraqi women’s literature in English translation shifted from academic or
localized diasporic community settings to academic-commercial publishers with a more ‘global’
reach, based in or partially funded by agencies or funders from the US. Alongside the thousands
of publications about post-2003 Iraq available on the US book market (Lynx-Qualey 2014), the
translation of Iraqi women’s novels continues to be underpinned and inspired by the committed
activist collaboration between Iraqi women writers and their allies, often academics who feel
some connection or affinity to Iraq. All four novels by Iraqi women writers published by the
New York Feminist Press, for example, have critical introductions and afterwords by academic
experts – Hélène Cixous and Farida Abu-Haidar in two novels by Alia Mamdouh (2005, 2007),
Hamid Dabishi and Ferial Ghazoul for Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), and Nadje
Al-Ali for Iqbal Al-Qazwini’s novel Zubaida’s Window (2006, 2008). A common theme in the
paratexts of these books is how each agent or ‘mediator’ involved sets out to contextualize the
writer and her respective novel alongside local and global discourses on gender and politics in
pre- and post-2003 Iraq. In Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), the writer of the fore-
word, Hamid Dabashi (2009, viii), refers to Zangana as his “Iraqi sister” who “speaks for both
Iraqis and Iranians of her generation” (ix). In Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones (2008), translator
Marilyn Booth takes particular care to explain how the novel’s ‘multilingual’ and ‘transnational’
themes are reflected in its linguistic and cultural references (2008, 277). Booth also credits Mam-
douh for assisting with the translation of this “polyphonic” work (ibid.). Similarly, the English
version of Hadiya Hussein’s ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] (2004, 2012) published by Syracuse Press,
has two introductory chapters by miriam cooke (2012) and translator Ikram Masmoudi (2012)
both of which map out Hussein’s politics of writing in Arabic about the 1991 uprising in Iraq
as well as the politics of publishing the English translation in 2012. Iraqi women writers along
55
Ruth Abou Rached
with their (US-based) translators and editors thus seem to pre-empt the risks of a neo-colonial
discourse on Iraq and so work against it, while they also counteract (various) censorships in
Iraq’s fluctuating international political contexts.
Literary awards for Arabic literature, notably the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, estab-
lished and hosted by the American University Cairo (AUC), have provided other pathways by
which Iraqi women writers’ novels get published in English translation. Another prestigious
award is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) – often known as the Arab Booker –
managed in London and supported by the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi. These prizes
accord prestigious critical recognition to writers and their literary works in Arabic, and provide
the winners (and for IPAF, also the short-listed candidates) with the possibility of having their
work translated, published, and distributed throughout the English-speaking world. Alia Mam-
douh’s novel ‫[ المحبوبات‬The Loved Ones] won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in 2004, and the prestige
Mamdouh garnered as a result helped ‘market’ Marilyn Booth’s translation (Mamdouh 2008) and
also her novel ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] as the 2005 US English version published by New York
Feminist Press. In contrast to Mamdouh’s work, the two novels by Iraqi women writers making
the short list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) do not have critical introduc-
tions in their English versions. Short-listed in 2009, Inaam Kachachi’s ‫[ الحفيدة األميركية‬The Ameri-
can Granddaughter] (2009) clearly and overtly politicises the gendered and geopolitical status of
translation in post-2003 Iraq and America by its very subject matter: it is about an Iraqi-Amer-
ican woman working as an interpreter for the US army during the 2003 Iraq war. Nevertheless,
despite the novel’s charged subject matter, the only additional information made available in the
English version, The American Granddaughter (2011) is a note about the novel being shortlisted for
the 2009 IPAF and a brief bio of translator Nariman Youssef. Similarly, the blurb of The Baghdad
Clock (2018), the English version of ‫( ساعة بغداد‬2016) by Shahad Al Rawi, highlights its IPAF
status and states briefly that the author (not the translator) “takes readers beyond the familiar
images in the news.” Readers are thus left to negotiate their own terms of engagement.
Future research: rereading Iraqi women’s stories in translation

For the diverse peoples of Iraq, what is understood as Iraq and Iraqi society has undoubtedly
changed and shifted in location since the country’s independence in 1932. Many Iraqis have
lived in Iraq for generations. Others have had to move to other locations inside Iraq or leave
the country altogether. Literary representations of Iraq thus often carry crucial emotional and
political resonance for readers, Iraqi or otherwise, who feel some alliance or connection with
Iraq’s diverse peoples, cultures, histories, and politics. In this respect, the study of Iraqi women’s
literature in translation touches on many scholarly (and activist) disciplines and fields of research;
these include Arab literature, diaspora literatures, women’s literatures, postcolonial studies, gen-
der studies along with translation and intercultural studies, with feminist translation studies
which are intersectional and transnational in focus being particular salient. Scholarship on Arab
women’s literature in English translation is a vital starting point for the study of Iraqi women’s
literature as a body of work in English translation (Booth 2016; Hartman 2012; Hassen 2009;
Valassopoulos 2008; Kahf 2006; Hassan-Gholley 2007 Amireh 1996, 2000 Al-Majaj et al. 2002).
While Iraqi women’s literature is a rich field of research, many scholarly themes, approaches, and
questions have yet to be explored in depth, including which stories and works by Iraqi women
writers have featured in (English) translation over time and which have not. Iraqi women’s
literature has been translated into languages other than English – French, German, Italian, Ser-
bian, Spanish, and Portuguese to name a few. The phenomena of ‘transit’ languages, such as
English and French functioning as vectors into other languages – and the asymmetries of power
56
between them (Loucif 2012) – are worthy of further exploration in this context. Exploring the
many languages other than Arabic intertwining the literary histories of Iraqi women’s literature
is also a field of inquiry inviting much more critical engagement. The self-reflexive choice of
Riverbend (2005) the most well-known Iraqi blogger, at least to US readerships, during the
2003 war in Iraq to write her blog in English also questions boundaries between self-writing
and self-translation in ways that certainly invite future research into local and broader contexts
of Iraqi and Arab women’s literature. Other literary traditions of Iraq such as memoir (Al-Radi
2003), poetry, theatre, and literary critique invite further study, an invitation implicitly issued by
Salih Altoma in his decision to publish his detailed catalogue of these genres already available in
English translation (Altoma 2010).
This point raises the question of why it is useful to (re)read Iraqi women’s literature in English
translation alongside an analytical framework of feminist translation. This is a pertinent question in
view of the charged discourses of ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’ at play in post-2003 Iraq. According to
Haifa Zangana (2013, 2005), for example, the presence of US state-funded ‘feminist’ NGOs in Iraq
worked to serve US state interests rather than the post 2003 needs of Iraqi women, and damaged
the legacy of Iraqi women’s local gender-focused political activism as well as the term ‘feminist’ in
Iraqi contexts. In these charged political contexts, the ‘feminist’ power relations at play clearly go
beyond categorical definitions of what ‘feminist’ agency is or isn’t. As the local and global reach of
(feminist) terminologies is pertinent to many other contexts of translation besides Iraq, it is impor-
tant to situate any research project within a clearly defined understanding of what ‘feminist transla-
tion theory’ means. One point of departure is to consider why feminist translation scholars view all
writing, including translation, as ‘rewriting.’ In earlier instances of feminist translation praxis, such
premises were based on exposing and questioning the very patriarchal premises on which all lan-
guages are based, translation being the vector by which different (gendered) discourses travel across
languages (Massardier-Kenney 1997; Simon 1996; Flotow 1991; De Lotbinière-Harwood 1991;
Godard 1989). In more recent scholarly contexts, feminist translation praxes have taken a more
‘intersectional’ turn (Castro and Ergun 2018; Flotow and Farahzad 2017; Flotow 2012; Shread
2011), where gender is not the only field of inquiry when analyzing – and interrogating – the
power dynamics influencing how different works, discourses, and literary traditions move across
languages or are ‘rewritten’ through the vector of translation. Remediations of different constitu-
encies of race, gender and class alongside those of languages, location, and epistemes of knowledge,
to name a few, are being interrogated and called into question as they move across languages. In
this way, engaging analytical frameworks of feminist translation to reread (para)translated literary
works does not mean that all texts or writers should be identified as having a defined feminist ide-
ology. In fact, feminist translation analysis sets out to challenge categorical definitions of ‘feminist’
as well as the many gendered, geopolitical, and other interlocking power relations in contexts of
translation (Castro and Ergun 2017; de Lima Costa 2014; Álvarez 2014).
This last point is particularly relevant when we consider – and interrogate – the many (co-
collaborative) agents presented as (para)translating, mediating, or ‘explaining’ an Iraqi woman
writer’s story to new (perceived) target readerships as different expressions or pathways of
solidarity. The importance accorded to academic expert introductions, for example, suggests
that various power relations involving readers’ relations to an Iraqi woman writer are assumed
to be at play when her short stories or novels are published in English translation. Similarly,
the absence of introductions in earlier translations of Iraqi women writers configure ‘absence’
as well as presence as an important component of meaning-making in this literature in its
earlier contexts of censorship. Questions of how to read the politics of Iraqi women writers’
story-making in English translation thus arise: Why are the politics of some agents, such as
academic experts and editors, made more apparent in some Iraqi women’s novels than others?
57
Ruth Abou Rached
Why do some stories by Iraqi women writers have such extensive introductions, forewords,
afterwords, and blurb reviews mediating their works, while others do not? How are Arabic-
language representations of diverse gendered identities in Iraqi women’s literature mediated in
(English) translation? Such questions are important to ask in contexts of the study of Iraqi and
Arab women’s literature per se as well as in feminist translation analyses. Françoise Massardier-
Kenney (1997, 63) states, for example, that the (feminist) translator must show or perform her
political agency explicitly somewhere in the translated work, and that this often occurs in an
introduction or in footnotes. If we use the tools by which hegemonic discourses invisibly shape
our realities without question, we run the risk of being co-opted into reiterating them (ibid.).
The more c/overt ways in which instances of solidarity are visible through the ways by which
Iraqi women writers’ literature has been mediated in English suggest however that categorical
notions of ‘overt’ agency in para/translated works are well worth revisiting, particularly in con-
texts of censorship and other (gendered) contexts of oppression. As noted by Ferial Ghazoul,
much Iraqi story-writing must be read, after all, as “an aesthetic expression of a complex and
disturbing reality” (Ghazoul 2004, 1). This reality includes the languages and ways in which
Iraqi women writers have published. This chapter overview has worked to show how we can
read the pathways that Iraqi women’s story-making have taken into English as an aesthetics
of solidarity rewritten across different intersecting pathways and realities. Further research on
Iraqi women’s literature will reveal how their stories continue to shed light on and work to
transform such realities.
Further reading
Al-Ali Nadje, S. and Deborah Al-Najjar, eds. 2013. We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War.
New York: Syracuse University Press.
This collection of essays focuses on the politics of Iraqi aesthetic production since 2003 from Iraqi
perspectives. Essential reading for those wishing to gain a background on contemporary Iraqi cultural
production, including the politics of its patronage, circulation, and reception.
Ashour, Radwa, Ferial Ghazoul, and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi, eds. 2008. Arab Women Writers: A Critical
Reference Guide, 1873–1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Essential reference for scholars of 20th-century Arab women’s literature published in Arabic. Each sec-
tion gives a detailed overview of literature from each country.
Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature 61: A Journey in Iraqi Fiction, ed. Samuel Shimon. Available at:
www.banipal.co.uk.
A recent scholarly overview of Iraqi literature from perspectives of long-established and more recent
Iraqi literary figures. There are also excerpts of Iraqi fiction in English translation.
Faqir, Fadia, ed. 1998. In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers. Reading: Garnet
Publishing.
A collection of autobiographical essays written by Arab women writers on the gendered politics of
their own writing. A rich source of scholarship which brings together a wide and diverse range of liter-
ary perspectives from Arab (including Iraqi) women writers.
Mehta, Brinda and Haifa Zangana, eds. 2018. War and Occupation in Iraq: Women’s Voices. Gendered
Realities (Special Issue). International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 12(1), 53–71. doi: 10.1386/
jcis.12.1.53_1.
This special issue on Iraqi women under war and occupation is gives an up-to-date overview of the
politics of Iraqi women’s representation from a range of different literary and critical perspectives. Use-
ful reading for scholars working on contemporary Iraq women’s writing.
Related topics
Iraqi women’s literature, Arab women’s literature, censorship, feminist translation approaches
58
Notes
1 The 1968–2003 Ba’aathist Iraqi government came to an abrupt end after the invasion of Iraq by US, UK,
and other allied military forces in 2003, with subsequent military occupation of Iraq by the US lasting
until 2011.
2 This list of Arabic language publications only includes writers whose works were translated into English
and cited in this chapter. Many more stories by these and other Iraqi women writers have been pub-
lished. This list is the beginning of a widening index of Iraqi women writers, inspired by Salih Altoma’s
(2010) catalogue.
3 A full catalogue of this journal is, for example, available in the literary journals section of Bir Zeit
University.
4 I thank Dr Azhar Hammadi for kindly inviting me to attend an Iraqi literature event in London during
July 2015, where back copies of the literary journal ‫[ الكاتبة‬al-kātiba] were still available to purchase.
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Ruth Abou Rached
Iraqi women’s literature cited in this article (primary sources)

Abdullah, Ibtisam. 1980. ‫[ فجر نهار وحشي‬Dawn of A Monstrous Day: Short Stories]. Baghdad: Manshūrāt Shari-
kat Mat b‘at Al-Adīb Al-Baghdādīya Al-Mahdūda.
Abdullah, ˙Ibtisam. 1988. ‫[ ممر الى الليل‬Passage to˙ the Night–A Novel]. Baghdad: Wizārat Al-Thaqāfa Wa
Al-I‘lām, Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma.
Al-Amir, Daizy. 1964. ‫[ البلد البعيد الذي تحب‬The Distant Country That You Love: Short Stories]. Beirut: Dār
Al-‘Awda.
Al-Amir, Daizy. 1988. ‫[ على الئحة االنتظار‬On the Waiting List]. Beirut: Dār Al-Adāb.
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duction by Mona Mikhail. Austin: Texas University Press in Austin.
Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 1974. ‫ قصص‬- ‫)البشارة‬. [The Glad Tidings–Short Stories]. Baghdad: Wizārat Al-Thaqāfa
Wa Al-I‘lām.
Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. 1986a (2013). ‫ رواية وقصص‬- ‫[ عالم النساء الوحيدات‬The World of Lone Women – A Novel
and Short Stories]. Baghdad∫†Dār al-Madā Li al-Tibā‘a Wa al-Nashr Wa al-Tawzī‘.
Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya 1986b (2015). ‫ قصص‬:‫إذا كنت تحب‬. ˙ [If You Ever Loved Short Stories] Baghdad: Dār
al-Madā Li Al-Tibā‘a Wa al-Nashr Wa al-Tawzī‘.
Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya. ˙ 1988. ‫)بذور النار (رواية‬. [Seeds of Fire–A Novel]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn Al-Thaqāfīya
Al-‘Āmma.
Al-Mana, Samira. 1997. ‫[ القامعون‬The Oppressors]. Damascus: Dār Al-Mada.
Al-Mana, Samira. 1972. ‫[ السابقون والالحقون‬The Forerunners and the Followers] Beirut: Dār Al-‘Awda.
Al-Mana, Samira. 1985. ‫النصف فقط‬/[Only a Half: A Play in Two Acts]. Translated by Farida Abu Haidar.
London: Panorama Print.
Al-Mana, Samira. 2002/2008. The Oppressors. Translated by Paul Starkey: London: Exiled Writers’ Ink!
Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 1974. ‫[ حدوة حصان‬Horseshoe](Short Stories). Baghdad: Dār Al-Hurrīya.
Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 1990. ‫[ فتى السردينة المعلب‬Boy in a Can of Sardines] (Short Stories) Baghdad: Dār Al-Kharīf.
Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna. 2001. Final Night (Short Stories). Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Introduction
by Denys Johnson-Davies. Cairo: American University of Cairo.
Al-Qazwini, Iqbal. 2006. ‫[ ممرات‬Corridors of Silence]. Amman. Dār Al-Azmina Li Al-Nashr Wa Al-Tawzī‘.
Al-Qazwini, Iqbal. 2008. Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile. Translated by Azza El Kholy and Amira
Nowaira. Preface by Nadje Al-Ali. New York: Feminist Press.
Al Rawi, Shahad. 2016. ‫[ ساعة بغداد‬The Baghdad Clock]. London: Dār Al-Hikma.
Al Rawi, Shahad. 2018. The Baghdad Clock. Translated by Luke Leafgren. London: Oneworld Publications.
Hadi, Maysalun. 1985. ‫ مجموعة قصصية‬،‫الشخص الثالث‬: [The Third Person–Short Stories]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn
Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma.
Hadi, Maysalun. 1986. ‫ مجموعة قصصية‬:‫[ الفراشة‬The Butterfly – Short Stories]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn
Al-Thaqāfīya Al-‘Āmma.
Hussein, Hadiya. 2004. ‫[ ما بعد الحب‬Beyond Love] Beirut: Al-Muʾassasat Al-‘Arabīya Li Al-Dirāsāt Wa Al-Nashr.
Hussein, Hadiya. 2012. Beyond Love. Translated by Ikram Masmoudi. Preface by mariam cooke. Introduc-
tion by Ikram Masmoudi. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Kachachi, Inaam. 2009. ‫[ الحفيدة االمريكية‬The American Granddaughter]. Beirut: Al-Jadīd.
Kachachi, Inaam. 2011. The American Granddaughter. Translated by Nariman Youssef. Doha: Bloomsbury
Qatar Foundation.
Khedairi, Betool. 1999. ‫[ !كم بدت السماء قريبة‬A Sky So Close!]. Amman and Beirut: Al-Muʾassasa Al-‘Arabīya
Li Al Dirāsāt Wa Al-Nashr.
Khedairi, Betool. 2001. A Sky So Close. Translated by Muhayman Jamil. New York: Pantheon Books.
Khedairi, Betool. 2004. ‫[ غائب‬Absent]. Amman and Beirut: Al-Muʾassasat Al-‘Arabīya Li Al-Dirāsāt Wa
Al-Nashr.
Khedairi, Betool. 2005. Absent. Translated by Muhayman Jamil. New York: Pantheon Books.
Mamdouh, Alia. 1980. ‫[ ليلى†والذئب‬Laila and the Wolf]. Baghdad: Dār Al-Hūrriyya.
Mamdouh, Alia. 1986. ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs]. Cairo: Al-Hī’a Al-Masrīyya/Fas˙ ūl.
Mamdouh, Alia. 1995. Mothballs. Translated by Peter Theroux. Preface ˙ by Fadia
˙ Faqir. Arab Women Writ-
ers’ Series, edited by Fadia Faqir. Reading: Garnet Publishing.
Mamdouh, Alia. 2000. ‫[ حبات النفتالين‬Mothballs] (re-print of the 1986 publication). Beirut: Dār Al-Adāb.
Mamdouh, Alia. 2005. Nephtalene: A Novel of Baghdad. Translated by Paul Theroux. Foreward by Hélène
Cixous. Afterword by Farida Abu-Haidar. New York: Feminist Press.
Mamdouh, Alia. 2005. ‫[ المحبوبات‬The Loved Ones]. Beirut and London: Dār Al-Sāqī.
62
Mamdouh, Alia. 2008. The Loved Ones. Translated by Marilyn Booth. New York: Feminist Press.
Muzaffar, May. 1979. ‫[ البجع‬The Swan] (A Story and A Play). Baghdad: Dār Al-Hurrīya.
Salih, Salima. 1974. ‫[ التحوالت‬Metamorphoses] (Short Stories). Damascus: Manshūrāt Ittihād al-Kutāb al-‘Arab.
˙
Talib, Aliya. 1989. ‫[ بعيدا ً داخل الحدود‬Far Away Inside the Borders] (Short Stories). Baghdad: Dār Al-Shu’ūn
Al-Thaqāfīya.
Talib, Aliya. 1994a. A New Wait (Short Story). Translated by Mariam Cooke and Rkia Cornell, in Mariam
Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write
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Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write
War. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 192–195.
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Zangana, Haifa. 1995. ‫[ في اروقة الذاكرة‬In the Corridors of Memory]. London: Dār Al-Hikma.
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Zangana, Haifa. 2009. Dreaming of Baghdad. Translated by Haifa Zangana and Paul Hammond. Foreward by
Hamid Dabishi. Afterward by Ferial Ghazoul. New York: Feminist Press.
63
5
Maghrebi women’s
literature in translation
Sanaa Benmessaoud
Introduction
The Maghreb, formerly known as Afrique du nord française, and referring to Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco, is a space of plurality and difference. Because of a long history of conquests, inva-
sions, and human movements, from the Phoenicians and the Romans through the Arabs and
Ottomans to the French and the Spanish, this region has over the centuries become a mosaic of
cultures, ethnicities, and languages. Because of this genealogy, contemporary Maghrebi literature
is plural, at the intersection not only of multiple languages and cultures but also of different
literary influences. Indeed, while it has integrated Western forms, it remains rooted in an Arabic
literary tradition that goes as far back as the 6th century (see, for instance, Omar Quinna’s (2000)
overview of the classical Maqamah genre1 in 19th- and 20th-century Algeria, and Abdelkader
Jebbar’s (2013) insightful study of the development of the Qasida genre, classical poem, in 20th-
century Morocco).
Maghrebi contemporary literature can be considered ideologically and politically overdeter-
mined given that it first saw the light under French colonialism, and that it reached maturity
in the 1950s, when the Maghreb countries were engaged in the struggle for independence. As
such, this literature raises issues of language, identity, literary realism and its political implica-
tions, relationship with the (former) colonizer and how this relationship shapes and maybe even
canonizes or somehow undermines Maghrebi literary texts. It also raises questions of translation,
both cultural and linguistic, for Europhone writers who move constantly between languages,
mix them, and switch from one to another.
When produced by women, this literature acquires additional layers of complexity. Besides
the issues just referred to, these women’s texts engage significantly with gender issues, as well as
with Islamic culture and scripture, and the place these accord to women. They also raise ques-
tions about their translation and circulation in a transnational context where representations
of Arab-Muslim woman have become ideologically laden. For instance, how does the inter-
national circulation of these writings affect the writers’ authorial decisions as they engage in
(self )-translation? And how are the gender politics that are enacted in these writings translated?
Despite the richness and complexity of Maghrebi women’s contemporary literature, critical
64
Maghrebi women’s literature in translation
interest in it both in the Arab Mashreq and in the West started relatively late. It has only
gained momentum as of the 1990s because of various historical, political, and cultural reasons,
and despite the growing body of research on this literature, there is still need for more critical
engagement with these women’s narratives.
This chapter will first give an insight into the historical conditions that shaped Maghrebi
women’s literature, with a specific focus on Arabic and French texts.2 It will then engage with
the critical issues marking their production, translation, and circulation in the local, regional,
and transnational market. For obvious space limitations, the focus will be on three Maghrebi
women writers, namely Assia Djebar, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, and Leila Abouzeid. While the
first is North Africa’s most prominent francophone woman writer, the second is her ‘Arabo-
phone’ counterpart. Mosteghanemi is the recipient of the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal
for Literature, and is currently one of the most popular and top selling writers in the Arab
world.3 As to Abouzeid, she is Morocco’s most prominent Arabic woman novelist. The trans-
lation of her work into English earned her canonicity in the West and, as a consequence, in
the Arab world, as well.
Historical perspective
Maghrebi literature, including women’s literature, came into currency as a concept in the 1960s.
Referring to contemporary literature produced in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it was concre-
tized by two important critics, Moroccan-French Abdelkebir Khatibi in his Le Roman maghrébin
(1968) and Jean Déjeux in his La Littérature maghrébine de langue française (1973). Like all cat-
egorization, however, this one masks the complexity of the écriture/‫كتابة‬, writing in Arabic,
produced in the Maghreb region. This literature was, indeed, born in a space characterized by
so much cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity that Khatibi (1983) called it Maghreb pluriel,
plural Maghreb. Its authors speak and express themselves in a variety of languages ranging from
the vernacular languages (colloquial Arabic, and Berber or Amazigh dialects) to the vehicular
ones (classical Arabic, French, Spanish, and English). The diversity characterizing this literature
is, in fact, such that Moroccan literary critic R’kia Laroui (2002, 48) talks of ‘literatures’ whose
themes and challenges might coincide sometimes, but which often develop in different ways.
This diversity is especially seen in Maghrebi women’s literature.
Women’s literature in the Maghreb region, whether in French or in Arabic, was late to
emerge compared to its Mashreqi counterpart. Mohammed Berrada (2008) and Mosteghanemi
(1985) attribute this delay, in part, to social conservatism. North African societies, Berrada
(2008) maintains, “did not have a favorable view” of women who expressed themselves through
literature (236). The most determining factor, however, not only in the delay of this literature
but also in its very core remains (French) colonialism and its aftermath. In fact, French critic
Charles Bonn argues that Maghrebi literature is “inseparable” from the history of colonialism
and the decolonization process (2006), while Khatibi (1968, 11) holds that this literature was
born to “exprimer le drame d’une société en crise,” [express the tragedy of a society in crisis]
namely the crisis of colonization and the struggle for independence. In sum, it is a literature that
“writes back” in Bill Ashcroft et al. (1989) words.
Unlike British colonialism, which focused mostly on administrative rule, French coloni-
alism, driven by its “mission civilisatrice,” went to extreme lengths to culturally domesticate
North African societies. It fought this battle of domestication on two main fronts: language and
women. Language was, indeed, a primary “ground on which political battles relating to control
and resistance were fought” in North Africa (Cox 2002, 20). French colonial authorities actively
65
Sanaa Benmessaoud
promoted French at the expense of Arabic and the Berber dialects in all three countries. In
retaliation, the nationalists deployed Arabic, the language of the faith, as the idiom of cultural
resistance both during the fight for independence and after independence. As a consequence,
Arabic, French, and Berber in the Maghreb ended up acquiring “political and social connota-
tions as a reflection of their role in this conflict” (ibid.), connotations that have lingered well
after independence.4
Likewise, policies and practices devised to ‘protect’ women were an integral part of the
French colonial enterprise in North Africa. In fact, Julia Clancy-Smith maintains that from the
beginning of French colonization of this part of the world, “the ‘woman question’ assumed par-
ticularly fraught and contentious dimensions whose repercussions can be detected even today”
(2017, 1). Indeed, the French colonial authorities saw in the control and unveiling of indigenous
women a way to “penetrate” and control societies in the Maghreb (Hélie 1995, 276). They
used several strategies, including traffic in women, prostitution (See Knauss 1987; Lazreg 1994;
Clancy-Smith 2017), and promotion of discourses representing and, indeed, translating North
African women at once as victims in need of liberation, and as simulacra of a feminized and
sexualized Orient (see Alloula 1986).
During the struggle for independence, i.e. in the 1950s, the nationalists responded by pro-
moting women’s rights and equality, and restoring to women the rights that had been denied to
them (Cooke 1996, 122). Ultimately, however, they remained ‘prisoners’ of the French colonial
discourses, and fought back by adopting a reactionary response and returning to traditional, con-
servative social practices. In other words, and as Clancy-Smith (2017) succinctly put it, women
in North Africa were subjected to “a double patriarchy, colonial and indigenous” insofar as they
became reified as symbols for both the power of the colonial empire and the religious and cul-
tural identity of the indigenous societies (12).
This colonial linguistic and sexual violence and its postcolonial aftermath had dramatic con-
sequences for women in the Maghreb, and naturally left their imprint on Maghrebi women’s
literature. Families boycotted French schools, which resulted in high rates of illiteracy among
young girls and women. Consequently, writing by women only started gaining momentum
with independence, i.e. in the 1960s (Déjeux 1992, 1994), and came to prominence in the
1980s. Moreover, the few girls who received education in French schools during the colonial
period were at such an advantage that most literary exploration and production by women,
whether in the form of the novel or short story, was initially in French (Cohen-Mor 2005,
7). Thus, the first women novelists in North Africa, Algerians Taos Amrouche and Djamila
Debèche, were educated in French and penned their novels, Jacinthe noire (1947) and Leila,
jeune fille d’Algérie (1947), respectively, in French. They were first in a long list of francophone
women writers to follow in the Maghreb, including Algerians Assia Djebar, Malika Mokad-
dem, and Leila Sebbar, Moroccan Fatima Mernissi and Baha Trabelsi, and Tunisians Hélé Béji
and Sophie El Gouli. Arabic literary production by Maghrebi women had to wait until the
wave of decolonization in order to trend, thanks to the Arabization policies and the generaliza-
tion of education.
However, perhaps the most important consequence of the context just described, that was so
marked by the imbrication of the colonial and the patriarchal, is that Maghrebi women’s writ-
ings, whether in Arabic or in French, have been ideologically and politically overdetermined
from the very beginning. They were also, and regardless of language, a site of self-empowerment
as women availed themselves of literature and writing to produce counter discourses about
themselves, the colonial trauma and the struggle for liberation, and about their respective socie-
ties and cultures. Thus, in his preface to Algerian woman writer Yamina Mechakra’s novel La
66
Grotte éclatée (1979), Algerian writer Kateb Yacine aptly observes that “Actuellement en Algérie,
une femme qui écrit vaut son pesant de poudre” [In today’s Algeria, a woman that writes, is
worth her weight in gunpowder].
Critical issues and topics
Francophone Maghrebi women’s writings: a literature in translation

Because of the conditions of its birth and development, as described previously, francophone
Maghrebi women’s literature is a site of polyphony and cultural and linguistic hybridity. It is
also a site of identity negotiation, one that is marred with a heavy colonial baggage and much
ambivalence. The very means of self-expression for these women, French, is both their way to
emancipation and self-empowerment, and the legacy of colonial oppression; at once the very
tool by which they recuperate the voices of fellow Maghrebi women and restore their agency,
and the rift that separates them from these women. Assia Djebar, for instance, describes French as
the language of her “libération de femme” (1999, 101), yet still “la langue du sang,” the language
of blood and of the colonial violence (ibid., 149). Grappling with this cultural and linguistic
dissonance requires these women writers to “tanguer, pencher d’un côté à l’autre [. . .] entre
deux mondes. Entre deux cultures [. . .] Écrire donc d’un versant d’une langue vers l’abri noir
de l’autre” (15) [sway, lean from one side to the other . . . between two worlds. Between two
cultures. . . . In other words, to write one’s way from the slopes of one language to the black
harbor of the other].
This swaying between languages and cultures, a decolonizing movement, involves bring-
ing alterity into the colonizer’s language and world, destablizing them both with “les voix
non-francophones – les gutturales, les ensauvagées, les insoumises – jusqu’à un texte fran-
çais qui devient mien” (1999, 29) [the non-francophone voices – the guttural, the wild, the
unruly – until the French text becomes mine]. As a result, this literature, a “literature in trans-
lation” as Khatibi (1983) described it, is often palimpsestic, weaving together texts from dif-
ferent worlds and languages, thus bringing them to interrogate and challenge one another. In
so doing, it constructs “fractured identities” that are “both” and “neither/nor,” that challenge
colonial hierarchies, and “fracture” monolingual and monolithic constructs of identity (Agar-
Mendousse 2009). Accordingly, and like all Europhone postcolonial literature, French-language
literature by Maghrebi women has what Paul Bandia (2014, 12) calls a “symbiotic relationship”
with translation, and raises issues of translation, not only in its metaphorical sense as cultural
representation but also in its orthodox sense as interlingual transposition. (See Zabus 1991;
Tymoczko 1999; Bandia 2001, for an exploration of translation as a paradigm for the study of
postcolonial literature.)
One of the earliest and most important authors to engage with this relationship in regard
to a work by a Maghrebi woman is Samia Mehrez (1992). Approaching the subject from a
postcolonial perspective, Mehrez (1992) explores translational strategies as used in several fran-
cophone Maghrebi novels, including Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia, An Alge-
rian Cavalcade), where the writer superimposes oral testimonies by Algerian women and her
own autobiographical notes on official French colonial archives to rewrite her nation’s history.
According to Mehrez, Djebar, like her male counterparts, is engaged in a process of “perpetual”
translation insofar as “the traces of both classical Arabic and the dialect are always present within
the French” (135). Engaging with a passage of L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), where the narrator,
Djebar’s autobiographical “je” [I] takes hold of the “qalam,” pen in Arabic, and puts it in the
67
Sanaa Benmessaoud
severed hand of an Algerian woman killed by the French army, Mehrez (1992) points out that by
borrowing the word qalam from Arabic and transcribing it in French, Djebar was being doubly
transgressive. The Arabic word being an allusion to the first revelation of the Koran, she trans-
gressed Orthodox Islam by taking hold of this pen, symbolic of patriarchal knowledge, and used
it to restitute voice and agency to the Algerian women silenced both by colonial and local patri-
archal discourses. She also transgressed the (French) monolingual reader’s language and world by
inscribing Arabic language and messages in the French text. Use of such translational strategies,
characteristic both of literal translation and postcolonial literature, thus allows Djebar to create a
text that is “at once a resister and liberator.” In fact, translation in francophone Maghrebi texts,
according to Mehrez, is a discursive strategy that inscribes difference in the Other’s language,
thereby deconstructing pre-existing linguistic and cultural hierarchies, and challenging “colo-
nialist” and “imperialist” readings by the monolingual reader (122). Evoking Homi K. Bhabha’s
in-between space as “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation” (1988/2006), Mehrez
(1992) concludes that these texts “resist and ultimately exclude the monolingual and demand of
their reader to be like themselves: ‘in between,’ at once capable of reading and translating, where
translation becomes an integral part of the reading experience” (122).
In the same vein, but drawing on Henri Meschonnic’s “politique du traduire,” Hervé San-
son’s (2015) more recent study gives insight into the translation ethics in Djebar’s works. Exam-
ining the many ways in which Djebar transposes Arabic, both classical and dialectal, oral and
written, into her French texts, Sanson concludes that Djebar’s is an ethics of translation that
rejects any notion of faithfulness, and destabilizes binary constructions such as author/translator
and original/translation. Hailing from literary criticism, Rachida Yassine (2017) examines the
different textual strategies used by Djebar in L’Amou, la fantasia (1985), mainly heavy borrow-
ing of Arabic words, extensive use of Algerian popular expressions, and reproduction of Arabic
structures and speech patterns in the French text. She concludes that in so doing, the writer
“redefines Francophone history, culture and literature by translating into the colonizer’s lan-
guage a different sensibility, a different vision of the world, in the process creating new paradigms
for intercultural exchange” (132).
Arabic Maghrebi women’s writings: literature on the margin

Arabic Maghrebi women’s literature has been growing in richness ever since independence.5
However, despite its complexity and with some rare exceptions, it is doubly marginalized. Com-
ing from the Maghreb, i.e. west of the Mashreq, the Middle East, it is located at the margin of
the Arabic literary system. As Richard Jacquemond (2017) has pointed out, Arabic literature
produced in the Maghreb is hardly, if ever, designated as ‫أدب مغاربي‬, i.e. Maghrebi literature, in the
Arabic literary field, even when francophone Maghrebi literature is recognized and designated
by critics as ‫األدب المغاربي المكتوب بالفرنسية‬, i.e. “Maghrebi literature in French.” Political problems
between Maghreb countries, particularly Algeria and Morocco, have also resulted in the absence
of a Maghrebi book market. Consequently, Arabic Maghrebi literature has “relatively failed” to
establish itself as a literary subfield. This situation significantly reduces the visibility of Arabic
Maghrebi women writers within the Arabic literary system. Moroccan writer Abouzeid (2003,
159) revealed that when she approached an Arab publisher about her autobiography, Ruju’ Ila
al-Tufulah (1993; Return to Childhood 1998), he rejected the work saying that the autobiography
could have been of interest had it been Brigitte Bardot’s.
But Arabic Maghrebi literary production, whether by women or men, suffers from other
obstacles that hinder its translation and international circulation. Indeed, while the book industry
68
in the Maghreb countries is growing, it is still underdeveloped, and marked by the prevalence
of self-publishing and poor distribution networks. Piracy is yet another significant problem
that faces writers, men and women, in the region, and affects their visibility locally, regionally,
and, therefore, internationally. Besides, while Arabic is one of the largest languages in the world
in terms of speakers, its role remains peripheral in the “cultural world system” as compared to
more central languages (Heilbron 1999). As such, it proves to be an obstacle to the international
promotion of Maghrebi writers, including women, even when they, too, use it as a means of
liberation.
Indeed, given the Maghreb’s colonial history and the fragile status of Arabic post-independence
as outlined earlier, the very act of composing in Arabic, the native language, becomes very
much an act of resistance, a political statement with political and economic implications. Thus,
Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Algeria’s first woman novelist in Arabic, who pursued higher education
in France and defended her PhD with Jacques Berque, insists on writing her fiction in Arabic
and considers this choice an act of resistance against the hegemony of francophonie in Algeria.
Addressing the fact that she was the first Algerian woman writer to write in Arabic, she reveals
that it filled her with “horror, not pride” (1998, 79). In the acceptance speech that she delivered
when she was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal, she thanked the panel of judges for sup-
porting, through her, all those “Algerian writers writing in Arabic who confront unarmed the
onslaughts of Francophonie and its diverse temptations, while they stand patriotically against
the dubious and divisive tendencies to which Algeria is exposed” (1998). Shaden M. Tageldin
(2009) sees in this speech a strong political positioning not only against the francophonie, but
also against the discourse on Arabic as incapable of reflecting Algeria’s diverse reality, and for a
promotion of Arabic as the legitimate language of Algerian literature.
In Morocco, prominent post-independence woman writer Leila Abouzeid insists on writ-
ing fiction in Arabic despite her perfect command of French and English. Comparing her
to many of her contemporaries who composed their works either in English or French,
including her compatriot Fatima Mernissi, Pauline Homsi Vinson (2007, 94) remarks that
Abouzeid’s decision to write in Arabic aligns her with “nationalist writers such as Ngugi
wa Thiongo who view their choice to write in their native languages as a form of national
assertion.” In fact, in her afterword to her novel The Last Chapter (2003), Abouzeid reveals an
“intense aversion” towards French, the language of the people that “put my father in their jails,
where he was tortured,” a language that “was forced on me” and that “threatened to strip me
of my native tongue” (89). More significantly, she finds this position “fortunate, as it kept me
from becoming one of the postcolonial Maghrebi writers producing a national literature in
a foreign language” (89; my emphasis). Echoing Mosteghanemi, Abouzeid clearly sees in the
very act of writing in Arabic a way to resist (neo)colonialist violence and assert her national
and cultural identity.
Because of this positioning through language, however, Maghrebi women writing in Arabic
find it more difficult to pierce through the international book market than their francophone
counterparts. Because the latter’s texts are penned in French and published in France,6 the
Greenwich Meridian of the World Republic of Letters (Casanova 2004), they have “greater
distribution possibilities and therefore potentially larger reading publics” (Mortimer 2001, 4).
They also have more opportunities for translation into other languages, French being a vehicular
language. As a result, Arabic-language literature coming from the Maghreb is less known outside
of North Africa than its French (and English) counterparts (ibid.).
A survey conducted in March 2019, in both Worldcat.org and UNESCO’s Index Transla-
tionum, of the languages into which the bestselling books by Moroccan writers Fatima Mernissi
69
Sanaa Benmessaoud
and Leila Abouzeid, and Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Ahlem Mosteghanemi, were trans-
lated, gives credence to Mortimer as shown in Figure 5.1:
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Fatema Mernissi Assia Djebar Ahlem Leila Abouzeid
Mosteghanemi
Figure 5.1 Languages of translation
Dreams of Trespass (1994), Mernissi’s most translated work of fiction, and L’Amour, la fantasia
(1985), Djebar’s iconic novel, were more successful in translation, albeit to different extents,7
precisely because they were written in vehicular languages and consecrated in the “center of
the World Republic of Letters.” By contrast, ‘Am Al Fil (1983), the Arabic novel that propelled
Abouzeid to international recognition, and Dhakirat al Jassad (1993), Mosteghanemi’s novel
that was consecrated in the Arabic literary system through the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for
Literature, are the least translated, even after their translation into English. This bleak situation
harks back to Edward Said’s (1996) assertion more than 20 years ago that Arabic literature was
an “embargoed literature.” Said attributes this lack of interest to ideological imperatives. Citing
several examples of compellingly subversive Arabic works that remain untranslated, Said argued
that this exclusion finds its explanation in the fact that these works challenge not only dominant
literary values but also monolithic representations of the ‘Arabs’ and the ‘Arab world’ in the
West, and particularly the US.
More than a decade after Said’s diagnosis, Jacquemond (2008) investigated the translation of
Arabic literary texts, including by Maghrebi women writers, in France in the period from 1979–
2000, only to find that while translation of Arabic literature had witnessed a steady increase,
it was still low compared to literature in other languages, and that most of the translations
are either barely visible or “over-politicized” (366). Indeed, 65% of this literature is translated
and published by university presses and publishers specialized in political and Middle Eastern
affairs. This foregrounds the ethnographic dimension that literature coming from Arab coun-
tries acquires when it crosses the linguistic and cultural borders. As a result, the only Arabic titles
that have larger print runs are those that are “faithful to the double paradigm of realism and
political engagement,” and which are thus more easily read and consumed through the ethno-
graphic prism ( Jacquemond 2008, 366–367). After surveying the translation of Arabic literary
works, including those coming from the Maghreb region, in the United Kingdom and Ireland,
Alexandra Büchler and Alice Guthrie (2011) came to a similar conclusion about the main thrust
for translation from Arabic:
there are still not enough translations published from Arabic, and [that,] with some excep-
tions, interest in books coming from the Arab world is determined by socio-political factors
70
rather than by the desire to explore the literary culture of the Middle East and North Africa
for its own merits.
(7)
Interestingly, Jacquemond (2008) maintains that prestigious publishers in France show more
interest in Arabic titles by women writers, including Algerian Ahlem Mosteghanemi, than by
their male counterparts (365–367). This interest comes with advantages. It means visibility in
France and, therefore, better chances for global circulation. At the same time, however, it con-
tributes to a monolithic representation of the ‘Arab woman.’ Indeed, Jacquemond asserts that
this interest is mainly fuelled by “voyeurism” and “politicization” in that the Arab women writ-
ers that enjoy the most visibility and circulation in France are those whose texts “most confirm
representations of Arab women as ‘oppressed’ and/or with deviant or unbridled sexuality” (367).
Along the same lines, Marilyn Booth (2003) doubts that Western readers read literature by Arab
women to have their misconceptions challenged. She believes, instead, that “too often, the oppo-
site seems to be true, as suggested by the popularity of the Not Without My Daughter genre, the
sort that strengthens stereotypes [. . .] about living as a woman in Middle Eastern societies” (49).
Indeed, the transnational context in which Arab (Maghrebi) women’s literature is consumed
is one where the Arab Muslim woman is the object of a literary genre that has been enjoying
strong reception by Western readers and close coverage by Western media, namely autobiog-
raphies of Arab-Muslim women or of Western women as hostages of Islamic religion. Betty
Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) was only the first such narrative. While a 2002
Finnish documentary titled “Without My Daughter” debunked the events in the memoir, the
latter achieved sales of over 12 million copies, and was translated into over 20 languages. It also
earned Mahmoody a celebrity status as she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and was
celebrated by Oakland University in Michigan as Outstanding Woman of the Year.
This “hostage narrative,” in Farzaneh Milani’s (2008) words, witnessed a boom after 9/11,
with the publication of such works as Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi 2003) and Infidel (Hirsi
Ali 2007), both of which enjoyed wide circulation with translation into close to 20 languages
(Worldcat.org 2019). While this genre appears to be trying to uncover and, thus, fight gender
violence in Arab-Islamic countries, some of which does indeed exist, it also translates the Arab-
Muslim woman into a monolithic category that is essentially oppressed, thus subjecting her to
another violence. More importantly, it adds to the century-old archive of Orientalizing images
and ideas about Arab Muslim women, an archive against which texts by these women, including
from the Maghreb, are read, interpreted, and refracted.
Current contributions to research
Research exploring translations as cultural artefacts

In today’s international book market, increasingly controlled by big economic conglomerates,
such ideological imperatives are entangled with economic considerations. As Heilbron and
Gisèle Sapiro (2008) have shown, offer and demand are not mere economic data but social
constructs promoted by dominant cultural and political institutions. This imbrication of the
economic with the ideological results in the texts of Arab women writers, including those from
the Maghreb region, being “commodified, as literary decisions come together with marketing
strategies and assessments of audience appeal (ranging from interest in the ‘exotic’ to feminist
solidarity) to foreground certain texts and repackage or silence others” (Amireh and Suhair
Majaj 2000, 4).
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Sanaa Benmessaoud
This commodification that ‘repackages’ or ‘silences’ is very visible in the translation of

Ahlem Mosteghanemi’s books. Drawing on Petra Broomans and Ester Jiresch’s (2011) model
of cultural transfer, and more specifically the concept of “quarantine” – the time that a book
takes to be published in translation after the first phase of discovery by cultural transmitters,
as well as “the grey area” where some texts fall after translation–Sanaa Benmessaoud (2015)
argues that Mosteghanemi’s major works remained in the “quarantine” phase far longer than
many other less popular works by contemporary Mashreqi women writers. It thus took Dha-
kirat al-Jassad – first published in Algeria in 1985 and republished in Lebanon in 1993 – almost
a decade to be picked up for translation by Egypt-based American University of Cairo Press,
in 2000, and two more years to be translated by a French publisher despite the fact that a
non-fiction book by her had already been published in France by Harmattan. It also took this
novel two full decades to be (re)translated and published by a major Western publisher, namely
Bloomsbury (Benmessaoud 2015, 294–295). The same holds true for Mosteghanemi’s Fawda
al-Hawass (1997), which entered quarantine a second time after its translation into English in
2004 (Chaos of the senses) and French in 2006 (Le chaos des sens) as it elicited little to no interest
from critics and reviewers.8
As to the peritexts of Mosteghanemi’s two bestselling novels, they reposition the works
within the trope of the veil and the exotic. Indeed, the dust jacket of Le chaos des sens (2006), the
French translation of Fawda al-Hawass (1997), features a woman’s veiled face, thus misleading
the French reader insofar as it recasts Mosteghanemi’s narrative, revolving around a female pro-
tagonist who, unapologetically and defiantly, flaunts her femininity and sexuality, in a fetishized
and orientalist mold (Benmessaoud 2015, 294). Similarly, the title of the English retranslation of
Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jassad by Bloomsbury9 repositions the novel in an explicitly exotic
discourse. While Dhakirat al-Jassad means “memory of the body” in Arabic, thus flagging the
narrative as one that inscribes (national and personal) memory in the body (of the protagonist),
the retranslation is entitled The Bridges of Constantine (2013). The English title thus emphasizes
geographical location, Constantine, an Algerian city named after Constantine the Great. This
exoticizing move is further enhanced through the book cover, featuring the face of a kohl-eyed
woman peering seductively from behind a black transparent veil. Benmessaoud thus comments
that such peritextual elements both refract the works through a prism that fetishizes the veiled
Arab woman and uses the veil as a signifier of her difference (296).
In fact, it is noteworthy that the iconography on the cover of The Bridges of Constantine is
highly reminiscent of the sexualized and exoticized representation and, indeed, translation of
Algerian women, specifically in postcards by the French during the French colonization of
Algeria. It taps into the exotic interplay of the visible and invisible, or what Alloula (1986) calls
“obstacle”: the exotic veil, on the one hand, that invites the male’s gaze and elicits the desire to
unveil the feminine other, and “transparency,” on the other hand, which invokes the feminized
Orient’s sexual promise.
Drawing on Casanova, Benmessaoud (2015, 306) argues that this chequered reception of
Mosteghanemi is a striking example of how subversive literature coming from the periphery
is watered down or, indeed, “depoliticized,” and how those writers coming from the periph-
ery and deploying “recognition strategies that would be both subversive and effective” find
themselves “disarmed” (Casanova 2005, 88). Indeed, Mosteghanemi offers an incisive criticism
of post-independence Algeria’s social and political realities in her works, all the while firmly
grounding her narrative in a discourse of a unified, rather than hybrid, Algerian national iden-
tity and a wider Pan-Arab identity, as well as a feminist discourse of female agency. As such, her
works are highly politicized, challenge stereotypes of Arab Muslim women as oppressed and
victimized, and reduce her marketability as a third world writer whose success in translation
72
is predicated on the reproduction of “the structures of the West – hybridity instead of fixed
national identity” (Swaralipi Nandi 2013, 82).
Such modes of consumption are all the more important that they affect the visibility and
circulation of Maghrebi women writers within their own countries. Thus, Abouzeid’s ‘Am Al
Fil (1983, The Year of the Elephant 1989) only gained fame in Morocco and the rest of the Arab
world after it had been translated into English by an American publisher (Abouzeid 2015). In
fact, Abouzeid reveals that the very first discussion of this work she had at Mohamed V Univer-
sity in Morocco was of the English version of the novel, not the Arabic one, and was in English
not in Arabic.
Many of the preceding observations about the exigencies that undergird the circulation and
consumption of Arabic texts by Maghrebi women also apply to francophone Maghrebi women’s
literature. Their work was similarly condemned to an “orientalist ghetto” ( Jacquemond 1992)
from before its emergence. In his fine-grained bibliographical study of francophone Maghrebi
women’s literature, Déjeux (1994) reveals an interest among French readers – especially those
seeking an insight into the “aventures affriolentes des femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement”
[alluring adventures of women of Algiers in their apartment] – for narratives penned by French
women writers about or from Maghrebi societies (7). For a greater sense of authenticity and,
therefore, appeal, many of these writers would take an Arabic pseudonym “pour faire croire
qu’elles étaient bien du milieu et qu’elles pouvaient en parler en connaissance de cause” (8) [to
make their readers believe that they belonged to that world and were therefore better placed
to talk about it]. In 1935, for instance, Berthe Durand-Thiriot chose the pen name of Benta-
Djebel to publish her novel Simple histoire de Zineb la Nailiat: Moeurs berbères [The simple story
of Zainab the Nailiat: Berber mores]. In fact, even after decolonization, as late as 1973, a French
male writer took the female name of Mina Boumedine to publish a novel entitled L’Oiseau
dans la main, purporting to tell the life of an Algerian woman (ibid.). After the decolonization
movements, however, Déjeux (15) observes, these writers were steadily replaced by francophone
Maghrebi women who “seules sont à même de rendre compte de ce qu’elles vivent” [were
alone entitled to report on their life experiences]. In one sentence, the French literary critic thus
reduces the complex literary production by Maghrebi women to an ethnographic and oriental-
ist “compte-rendu,” a report.
This conception of francophone Maghrebi women’s texts significantly shapes the modes of
their circulation and consumption in the international book market. In her compelling inves-
tigation of Maghrebi literature in English translation, Susan Pickford (2016) starts by observing
that the rates of translation of francophone Maghrebi literature, whether by women or men, are
still “relatively low” (86), with periods of increase generally coinciding with political instabil-
ity. She concludes that “Maghrebi French authors thus remained largely positioned within the
same ethnographic frame as their counterparts writing in Arabic” (86). Turning to the specific
case of Maghrebi literature by women writers, Pickford argues that the (late) enfranchisement
of francophone postcolonial studies in the early 2000s, combined with the institutionalization
of world literature, the growth in translation studies, and “the feminization of the post-colonial
canon” have all contributed to a growing number of francophone Maghrebi women writers
gaining access to an Anglo-American readership.
The most accessible of these writers, however, are those writing mainly about women,
and their texts are generally consumed in the metropolis as postcolonial commodities that
conform to, rather than trouble, the French reader’s horizon of expectations (87). Moreover,
a growing pattern of “women translators publishing books by women authors with univer-
sity presses” reveals a “feminist ethnographic frame as a driving force for translation, with a
particular emphasis on the place of women in Islamic society” (89–90). Pickford finds further
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Sanaa Benmessaoud
confirmation of this “feminist ethnographic frame” in the paratext of Malika Mokeddem’s

translated works. The covers of these works consistently reproduce the veil theme and resituate
the books in the realm of the ethnographic (90). Pickford concludes that
while texts by Maghrebi authors such as Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem have explored
post-colonialist themes, the conditions in which their books have tended to be produced
and circulated as material artefacts remain dominated by a neo-colonialist paradigm.
(82)
Pamela A. Pears’ (2015) study of the paratext of Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur apparte-
ment (1980) lends credence to Pickford’s conclusion. Pears maintains that Djebar’s appropriation
of Eugene Delacroix’s famous painting for both the book cover and the title, and her critical
engagement with the painting in her afterword are a strategic move meant to destabilize the
orientalist construct of the Algerian woman and pre-empt any hijacking of her narrative. She
argues, however, that Delacroix’s painting was reproduced in – and has thus framed – all versions
of Djebar’s novel, including its English translation. As such, it has acquired a metonymic value for
the Western reader. Accordingly, this iconography “forever ties [Djebar’s] work to colonialism,
Orientalism, and the formation of the self through the European man’s gaze” (21).
Research exploring translations as texts

To stay with Broomans and Jiresch’s (2011) model, the third phase in the transfer of books is
the translation phase. A close study of the translations of some of the most important works by
Maghrebi women reveals a flattening of their gendered and identity politics consistent with the
reductive editorial practices observed in the packaging and circulation of the translations.
The English translation of Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991, Far from Medina 1994) is a
case in point. Categorized by Cooke (2001) as an example of Islamic feminism that attempts
to construct a “countermemory,” this novel was penned in response to the then-escalating vio-
lence between the state and Islamists in Algeria and the instrumentalization of women as a
symbol of Algerian identity by both sides in the conflict (Zimra 1983, 122–123). Set in 7th-
century Islamic society, it superimposes historical accounts by such Arab (male) chroniclers
as Ibn Hisham and Tabari, with prophet’s sayings transmitted by rawiyat, women transmitters
contemporary of the prophet. To make up for gaps surrounding the lives and actions of these
rawiyat and of other female figures from Islamic history, the author relies on fiction and col-
lective memory. Her objective is to recover these women’s voices that were muted in classical
chronicles, and foreground women’s agency (Lalaoui 2004). When Rim Hassen (2009) looked
closely into the translation strategies adopted by the translator, Dorothy S. Blair, she found a pat-
tern that consistently subverted Djebar’s subversive discourse.
Pointing out the critical role of the rawiyat – and of the rowat, i.e. male transmitters – in
the (re)construction of early Islamic history, Hassen explains that Djebar foregrounds this role
by deploying a wide variety of feminine synonyms and expressions, from “transmettrice,” i.e.
woman transmitter, “diseuse,” i.e. woman teller, and “transmetteuse,” a different feminine form
of the word “transmetteur,” i.e. transmitter, to “chroniqueuse,” i.e. woman chronicler, as well
as by deliberately excluding the role of male transmitters, rowat, through the designation of
the rawiyat as “mémoire des Musulmans” and “mémoire des croyants,” respectively memory
of the Muslims and memory of the believers. The translator, however, fails to reproduce these
feminine words, and even uses masculine generic plural forms, thus breaking the “chain of
female transmitters” and significantly undermining the political significance of these women’s
74
act. According to Hassen, the words where the feminine gender was reproduced are those that
connote obedience, submissiveness, and victimhood. Some of these words, such as “Bedouin
women” and “Yemenite woman,” also invoke exotic images of Muslim women. Such textual
choices, according to Hassen (ibid.), confirm “the Anglo-American readers’ orientalist assump-
tions about Muslim women” as submissive victims.
What is interesting, however, is that significant changes to the original, with similar ideo-
logical effects, occur even when the translator is the author herself. Diya Abdo’s (2009) thor-
ough analysis of Leila Abouzeid’s translation of her own autobiography, Ruju’ ila al-Tufulah,
into English provides an illuminating insight into the double bind under which this author,
like all other Arab (Maghrebi) women authors, finds herself when she has to go west. For this
“migration,” as Abdo puts it, to be successful, the author has to perform the not so easy feat
of frustrating her Western audience’s horizon of expectations while addressing it in familiar
and accessible terms. Further she has to interrogate local structures of patriarchal oppression
while avoiding possible charges of treason against her own people and culture. Abdo starts
by putting Abouzeid’s self-translation into perspective. It is taking place in a context that
is politically overdetermined, and where the author is already consumed within a feminist
ethnographic frame, as Pickford would put it. Indeed, Abouzeid’s first translated work of fic-
tion, Year of the Elephant (1989), quickly made its way into courses on the Middle East and in
women’s studies (2). Further, it is the translation of an autobiography that engages both colo-
nial and patriarchal violence. In fact, one main thrust of the work is to expose the injustices
from which Moroccan women suffered not only because of colonization but also because of
political and social marginalization at the hands of the nationalists. The autobiography, how-
ever, is firmly grounded in what could easily be described as an Islamic feminist discourse that
promotes women’s agency and self-empowerment and constructs an Arab-Islamic identity
for them.
The first notable shift in the translation could be called a generic change. Conforming to the
Arabic-Islamic autobiographical tradition which prioritizes collective identity over individual
identity, and undergirded by a culture of “shame,” the Arabic original makes very scarce use of
the autobiographical “I” and refers very rarely to specific people and places. In contrast, the “I”
is conspicuous in the English translation, and so is a focus on Leila’s individuality (14–16). The
translation also involves more explicit criticism not only of men and patriarchy, in general, but
also of the father, than the original, in which the Arabic reviewers saw “a loving homage” to
the father (20). Abuse of women is enhanced in the translation, as well, and so is the mother’s
illiteracy. This, according to Abdo, “perpetuates a certain representation of the oppressed Arab
and Muslim woman” (21). Abdo, however, is quick to warn that these strategies should not be
perceived as self-orientalizing. In light of Abouzeid’s assertion in her preface to the translation
that her autobiography was an opportunity to challenge American misconceptions, these textual
choices could rather be seen as Abouzeid’s “strategizing to win a Western audience in order that
an Islam-centered critique of women’s status and colonialism can be heard” (22). Thus, numer-
ous changes and even “mistranslations” occur in the translation with the effect of playing up
women’s self-empowerment and agency (21).
Abdo’s analysis of the translation’s epitext, however, reveals a flattening of the subversive
ambivalence inherent in the English text and, thus, an undermining of its gender and identity
politics. Indeed, the paratext imbues the text with a markedly anthropological value, mediating it
as a window onto the mysterious life of the Moroccans, and a useful text “in courses on Islamic
women” (17). The Arabic original, being very different from the English version, naturally gar-
nered a different reception insofar as the critics hailed it as a work that is primarily of “political
and national significance” (ibid.).
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Sanaa Benmessaoud
Because of these contradictory pulls at work in Abouzeid’s writing, Abdo concludes that
while writing for a foreign audience may be liberating for Arab women, it is also a site of
“confrontation, for resistance to the Other” (22). All too often, however, and as seen from all
the preceding examples, this resistance to the Other, whether it is articulated in the language of
this Other or in conventions and discourses familiar to it, is significantly contained by editorial
practices that muffle the subversive voices of these women writers, either through exclusion
from translation or through multiple refractions during the processes of translating, packaging,
and marketing.
Future directions
In 1996, Amireh called out that:
We need to encourage a vigorous critical discussion about Arabic literature and culture in
the West [. . .]. The debate should go beyond “appreciative” criticism that condescendingly
praises Arab women writers for “daring” to put pen to paper. Serious debates about fiction
will remind readers that they are reading not documentaries, but “literature,” which draws
on particular conventions and emerges from specific traditions.
Exactly 20 years later, in 2016, Tareq Shamma wryly observes in his foreword to an issue on
Arabic literature in translation that “the most persistent of the traditional paradigms seems to be
what Susan Pickford calls the ‘ethnographic frame’ ” (7). The persistence of this frame indicates
a need for more research on the ethics of translating texts by third world women, especially
Arab (Maghrebi) women who seem to be consistently consumed in a culturally predefined
space. Such research should, therefore, problematize the concept of alterity in translation and
go beyond any such reductive dichotomous concepts as the foreignizing/domesticating one.
For although texts by Maghrebi women, being feminist in their breadth, might invite a femi-
nist translation that foregrounds difference and contamination (Luise von Flotow 1997, 44), a
translation that “strategically downplays cultural difference in the interest of expedient political
action” might be more appropriate since “what is at stake here is less the preservation of cultural
or linguistic specificity than the construction of a political narrative in a universal framework of
‘justice’ ” (Hassan 2006, 759).
But for Amireh’s call to be heeded, more work on the ethics of reading and teaching third
world women’s literature in translation is needed. In fact, Lawrence Venuti (1998) has already
explored the cultural and political ramifications of repressing translation in the teaching of trans-
lated texts, arguing that students should be made aware of the translation and, therefore, of the
contingency of the interpreting and translating act. Much work is still to be done, however, to
fill in a “pedagogical lack” in this area (Maier and Massardier-Kenney 2010, 2), especially when
it pertains to works flowing from the periphery to the centre.
On the other hand, and despite the complexity of this expanding creative corpus by Maghrebi
women writers, academic engagement with it, as with Arab women’s literary production as a
whole, only started gaining momentum at the turn of the 21st century, with a steady increase
in the number of book-length studies and doctoral projects exploring the writings of Maghrebi
women (Cooke 2001; Donadey 2001; Kelly 2005; Rice 2006; Gauch 2007; Valassopoulos 2007).
Much of the research, however, gives short shrift to Arabic texts. Cooke (2001), for instance,
when she engages Islamic feminism in Arab women’s writings, includes both Assia Djebar and
Fatima Mernissi but excludes Leila Abouzeid, when the latter grounds her critique of patri-
archal oppressive practices prevalent in Morocco in an explicitly Islamic discourse. Likewise,
76
Gauch (2007) maintains that her book aims to investigate the ways in which “women writers
and filmmakers from the Islamic world” resist local violence in their countries and frustrate any
hijacking of their narratives by imperialist critics abroad. However, her investigation is once
again limited to francophone Maghrebi women writers (xi–xii). In fact, the “minor canon of lit-
erature” that has emerged brings out, according to Lindsey Moore (2008), “the work of certain
women – particularly Djebar . . . and Fatima Mernissi,” both francophone writers. In this work
of selectivity, “the exigencies of translation certainly play their part” (4).
There is obviously much need for more translations to enlarge this canon, which includes
efforts within the Maghreb countries towards a healthier and more structured book market.
There is, however, even greater need for research that looks into the degrees of complicity
between publishing houses and corporate academia, including feminist academia, in the silenc-
ing of Maghrebi women writers who write in Arabic. Such canonicity-granting authorities
perpetuate the colonial trope of the voiceless Maghrebi woman. By canonizing and conferring
prestige on those writers who write their subjectivity through the former colonizer’s language,
they also perpetuate the margin/centre dyad where the margin needs the centre to mediate its
own “means of identification,” as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2005, 2) would put it,
thereby reproducing the same old colonial divides.
There is need for scholarship that looks beyond the paradigms of hybridity and transcul-
turation whereby linguistically transgressive francophone texts by Maghrebi women success-
fully subvert hierarchies, “exclude the monolingual,” and create an ‘in-between’ space for the
metropolitan reader, in Mehrez’ words; what is needed is scholarship that interrogates the very
concept of postcolonialism whereby (translated) postcolonial literature is a “space of resistance
to the Other” as argued by Abdo. In fact, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) aptly points out
that given “the neo-liberal traffic in cultural identity,” postcolonial novels cannot all be seen as
“post-colonial resistance” (127). In a globalized market, where cultural difference has, indeed,
become a commodity, and where the postcolonial has come to function as a “sales-tag” and “a
token of cultural value” (Huggan 2001, viii), translation studies has to engage more with the
material conditions under which Maghrebi women’s texts are circulated, and which still allow
for the containment of these women’s voices even as they ease them into the canon.
Another interesting avenue of research within the sociology of postcolonial translation is the
role of the postcolonial (Maghrebi) writer herself in the circulation of her texts. Addressing the
effects of colonialism on postcolonial Arab writers, in general, Moroccan critic Abdelafattah
Kilito (2004) suggests that these writers not only read Arabic literature through a Eurocentric
prism, but also produce literature with translation in mind. Echoing Kilito, Jenine Abboushi
Dallal (1998) claims that some Arab women writing in Arabic engage in self-orientalization and
“write for translation” to better accommodate the Western reader.
While Michelle Hartman (2012) rightly evinces wariness about any charges of complicity
because, according to her, they could contribute to the reductionist view of Arab women’s lit-
erature as a mere representation of some authentic reality, the cases discussed here show that as
a Maghrebi woman writer’s status grows in the centre, so does her margin for decision making.
She often becomes an important agent in the translation and dissemination of her own texts.
Abouzeid translated and refracted her own autobiography, one that was commissioned by Uni-
versity of Texas Press and which she thus wrote in Arabic but for translation and publication
in the US, and with the Anglo-American reader in mind (Abouzeid 2003). Likewise, Djebar
translated her novel Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, “intralingually” (Watts 2005) insofar as
she chose the peritext that would mediate and translate her French text to her French reader,
including the title, the image on the cover, the preface, and the afterword. Such agency warrants
more academic attention.
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Sanaa Benmessaoud
Further reading
Abu-Haidar, Farida. 2001. Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French, in M.P. Mortimer, ed., Maghrebian
Mosaic: A Literature in Translation. Boulder: L. Rienner, 13–26.
The chapter explores several works by Maghrebi francophone writers, including Assia Djebar and
Malika Mokeddem, and demonstrates that while these writers continue to pen their literature in
French for the freedom and flexibility it gives them, they bend and shape this language to their mother
tongue(s), including through the introduction of Arabic or Berber words and use of Arabic structures.
Such discursive strategies ultimately inscribe these writers’ Maghrebi and, thus, plural identity in their
francophone texts.
Benmessaoud, Sanaa. 2013. The Challenges of Translating Third World Women in a Transnational Con-
text. The Translator, 19(2), 183–205.
The paper analyzes Moroccan writer Fatima Mermissi’s autobiography Dreams of Trespass (1994) from
a translational perspective. It gives insight into the double bind where third world women writers, par-
ticularly Maghrebi ones, find themselves as they navigate the global market’s strictures and the pitfalls
of cultural representation, and how this bind can affect the discursive strategies these writers use as they
translate both their culture and their mother tongue in a text destined for international consumption.
Redouane, Rabia. 2014. Femmes arabes et écritures francophones. Machrek-Maghreb. Paris: L’Harmattan.
The book offers an insight into the writings of several francophone women writers from both the
Maghreb and the Mashreq regions. It explores this growing “Arab and francophone literature” from a
feminist perspective by shedding light on the feminist discourses on which these writers, established and
emerging ones alike, draw extensively in their French texts.
Related topics
Sociology of translation, postcolonial translation studies, ideology and translation, representation,
gendered identity, ethics of translation
Notes
1 The maqamah is a fictional narrative genre that emerged in the 10th century. Mixing didacticism and
entertainment, it is mainly characterized by a narrative frame with one narrator and one protagonist,
an ornate style, and rhyming prose reminiscent of the Qur’an. Drawing on pre-Islamic Arabic narrative
forms, and reproducing forms present in Islamic texts, the genre spread to new geographies, from Bagh-
dad through Cairo to Seville, and accommodated new expectations and tastes. As a result, the maqamah
lived on for over ten centuries to become a marker of Arab identity and an essential part of the Arabic
literary canon. Many contemporary Arab writers have thus redeployed this genre as a “form that would
anchor resistance” to any threat to national or cultural identity (Mohamed-Salah Omri 2008, 254). This
was the case in Algeria with such writers as Mohamed as-Saleh Ben Atiq who used this genre to depict
the suffering of the Algerian people in their fight against French colonialism (Abdel-Kader Bakader and
Siboubker Ismail 2013).
2 The linguistic landscape in North Africa is very complex with many regional varieties of Berber, or
Tamazight, cohabiting with Arabic – both modern standard and spoken – French, and, albeit to a much
lesser extent, Spanish. As a result, literary production in this region came not only in Arabic and French,
but also in Berber. Berber literature, however, has remained mainly oral due to the political marginalization
of the language. Indeed, Berber (or Tamazight) only gained official language status in Morocco in 2011
and in Algeria in 2016. It has, therefore, not been fully or successfully integrated in the educational system,
and suffers from the absence of a significant reading public. As a result, literature written in Tamazight is
still scarce. In Morocco, for instance, it is “often self-financed and scattered across the small or ephemeral
periodicals of cultural associations” (Daniela Merolla 2014, 51). Accordingly, Arabic and French remain the
two main languages of literary production in the Maghreb region, including by Amazigh (women) writers
such as Malika Mokaddem, Assia Djebar, and Taos Amrouche; hence the focus of this chapter.
3 By 2006, Mosteghanemi’s novels had already sold over 2,300,000 copies across Arab countries, making
her the top-selling Arabic novelist and the most successful Arabic writer of her time (Maximillien de
Lafayette 2013, 119).
78
4 Learning French language and embracing French culture during the colonial era were synonymous
with higher social standing and better access to education and, therefore, to material safety. After inde-
pendence, Arabization was implemented in all three countries as part of nation building. However, the
democratization of education and the presence of an economic and political elite that is still closely tied
to France meant that French has not only retained much of its prestige but has also become much more
widespread in society than before independence (see Farid Aitsiselmi and Dawn Marley 2008, for an
overview of the linguistic landscape in the Maghreb).
5 See Berrada (2008) for a panoramic study of Arabic literary production by women in North Africa.
6 According to Nahed N. Noureddine (2015), in the period from 2006 to 2012, twice as many franco-
phone Maghrebi titles were published in France as locally.
7 This difference could find its explanation in two factors. The first one is the language of production.
Mernissi penned her book in English whereas Djebar wrote hers in French. While Casanova (2004)
argues that French is the Greenwich Meridian of the World Republic of Letters, Heilbron’s (1999)
statistics reveal that while French is certainly one of the central languages in the international translation
system, English enjoys what he calls a “hyper-central role” in this system. Accordingly, books published
in English are bound to have more visibility than those published in any of the other central languages,
including French. The second and most important factor is the generic makeup of each novel. Indeed,
Dreams and L’amour display different generic features and, therefore, lend themselves to different types of
reading and, by extension, of circulation and consumption. Mernissi’s Dream was packaged and marketed
as an autobiography, with the promise of authenticity and truth that such genre holds. It makes use of
a transparent and easily accessible English language, interspersed with exotic terms and an alterity that
have long been domesticated, such as harem, sharia, and shish kebab. It also displays the generic features
of the realist novel, mainly linear chronology and lack of interpretative difficulty. As such, it lends itself
easily to consumption by a mainstream audience versed in the realist genre, hence an appeal to publish-
ers. By contrast, Djebar’s novel, while still semi-autobiographical and historical and, therefore, promising
authenticity and truth, is experimental in nature. It eschews linearity and is more polyphonic in that
it superimposes layers of narration and discursive strategies, ranging from historical documents and
accounts by French officers from the colonial period to autobiographical notes and conversations with
women who witnessed and took part in the war of decolonization. As such, the novel lends itself less
easily to a mainstream reading public.
8 It is worth mentioning that a retranslation of the novel was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. This one
did manage to garner some attention in the form of editorial reviews, including in The Independent.
9 A first translation was commissioned by the American University of Cairo Press in 2000 (Mosteghanemi,
Ahlam 2000), and was carried out by Lebanese journalist and translator Baria Ahmar Sreih. The title was
a literal translation of the original, “memory in the flesh,” and the book cover featured abstract art.
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6
Translation and gender
in South America
The representation of South American
women writers in an unequal
cultural scenario
Rosa Basaure, Marcela Contreras,

Andrea Campaña, and Mónica Ahumada
Introduction
This chapter explores literary works and representations of women within the South American
literary and cultural context, focusing on how translation processes into English deal with gender
in the original text, transferring not only the story, structure, and literary characteristics but the
world view of the writers – in this case women writers. The works chosen for discussion by
women in the Global South (Mahler 2017) reflect polarized power relations and gender inequal-
ity, and the analysis centres on gender-related markers in the categories of motherhood, female
body, and violence. Selected writers are María Luisa Bombal and Silvina Ocampo and their
reconstruction in the English translations, with self-translations by Bombal revised by Armand
Baker, and Daniel Balderston translating Ocampo. The analysis presents examples of the cultural
perspectives on gender that any translation of South American women writers may face.
Historical context of the writers

Up until the last two decades of the 19th century, the role of South American women of all
social strata was to meet family needs. They were subordinated to men and limited by social
codes that did not allow them to decide on their lives or their bodies, let alone participate in
civic life (Stuven and Fermandois 2013). Only a few women, from privileged social back-
grounds and with access to European intellectual knowledge, managed to break with these
codes. Most women, however, lived in a context of strong religious constraint due to the influ-
ence of the Roman Catholic Church (O’Neill 2016), lack of formal education, and generalized
female illiteracy (De Ramón 2003).
The situation in the region started to change in the 1880s, when the Argentinian state pro-
moted a strong European migration policy and established a common, secular, free, and com-
pulsory education, integrating all sectors of society regardless of their origin, gender, language,
83
Rosa Basaure et al.
identity, or religion (Sáenz Quesada 2001). This inspired other South American governments
to introduce similar reforms, which changed cultural codes and rearranged societies throughout
the continent.
Under these changing circumstances, a pioneer generation of women writers began to ques-
tion the role of women in South American literature, contrasting ideas about gender equality
and a concept of masculinity still largely perceived as superior.
The translation of these works is an important vindication of these women’s views on gender
inequality and its reflection in their writing, assigning translators the responsibility to understand
and transfer the social and cultural context of South America to a different cultural and gender
reality through their work into English.
Critical issues and topics: translation, culture, and gender

The question of gender in translation emerged in the 1980s, highlighting relationships between
source and target discourses, where gender representations of a particular culture are relevant
(Flotow 2011). This topic continues to challenge translation studies because gender difference
and inequality remain urgent. The selected South American writers address cultural particu-
larities that arise in much of the regional literature, and this chapter thus focuses on women
characters who are subject to power relations based on gender inequality and the conception
of ‘male superiority’ which they reflect as fictional themes and represent by particular narrative
elements, namely (1) manifestations of motherhood, (2) the female body, and (3) violence caused
by gender inequality.
Current contributions and research

Despite the importance of this topic – the analysis of gender in South American texts and
their translations – research contributions in this area are sparse. Most of the available research
on translation and Latin American women writers is found in anthologies, such as the one
edited by Sara Castro-Klaren et al. (1991), and present biographical and literary information
on different renowned women such as Clarice Lispector, Gabriela Mistral, and Rigoberta
Menchú.
Some research has also focused on general aspects of the life and works of certain Latin
American women writers such as María Luisa Bombal, Victoria Ocampo, and Clarice Lispector
(Bassnett 1990), including women film-makers, poets, and artists. Other works have addressed
the relation between Latin American women, literary culture, and political life, like the texts
collected in Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America: Seminar on Feminism and Culture in
Latin America (Bergmann et al. 1992). Naomi Lindstrom (1998), however, specifically connects
the literary work of women authors and feminist literary criticism as shaping factors of feminist
social criticism and gender-based debate.
Other studies have analyzed specific issues regarding the writers included in this chapter; for
example, Bo Byrkjeland (2013) focused on Bombal’s self-translated works and Carolina Suárez
(2013) approached the subversive treatment of the stereotypes of gender and age in Silvina
Ocampo’s work.
Regarding translation, Suzanne Jill Levine has largely written about being a woman transla-
tor translating Latin American male writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the difficulties she has faced in regard to these authors’ oppres-
sive views on women and their use of metaphors to suggest negative images of them (Furu-
kawa 2010).
84
Translation and gender in South America
Texts
This study analyzes María Luisa Bombal’s Spanish original La Amortajada (1938), self-translated
as The Shrouded Woman in 1948 and revised by Armand Baker in 2006, and Silvina Ocampo’s
Spanish original Cornelia frente al Espejo (1988), translated as Cornelia before the Mirror by Daniel
Balderston, in 2015, as examples of South American women writers’ perspectives on gender,
one from Chile and one from Argentina, respectively, with a focus on representations of mother-
hood, female body, and violence.
Central to the translation of South American women writers is the understanding of cultural
and semantic features that will allow an English-translated approximation of the text. In this
respect, and despite experiences common to women regardless of their origin, there are cultural
differences worth exploring that need to be considered when translating. This study examines
some narrative elements in relation to motherhood, female body, and violence which are com-
mon to the works analyzed here that could pose challenges to translators if these semantic and
cultural notions are not considered.
The original texts in Spanish are compared to the English translations, with the three catego-
ries subdivided into further subcategories: on motherhood, (1) the absent mother and women
caregivers and (2) child loss in South American societies; on the female body, (1) body image
and physical build and (2) rebellion against patriarchal ideals of beauty; and on violence, (1)
abandonment and (2) the role of women in male-chauvinist societies.
María Luisa Bombal: La amortajada (1938) –

[ The Shrouded Woman 2006]
María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980) is a Chilean writer, a representative of the Latin American
Vanguardia literary movement of the early 20th century, who combines fantasy and social criti-
cism, and sets her work in the upper class. Despite their subordination, her women characters
reveal an inner strength that breaks with the hierarchies imposed by marriage and family (Llanos
2009). In The Shrouded Woman, published in 1938 and translated in 2006, the author presents
a juxtaposition of life and death; the protagonist is dead, lying in state prior to her funeral, and
reviews her conventional life as she watches relatives and friends come to say goodbye.
Silvina Ocampo: Cornelia frente al espejo (1988) –

[ Cornelia before the Mirror 2015]
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993), an Argentinian artist and writer, “represents the fantastic in rela-
tionship to the psychological” (Espinoza Vera 2009). Ocampo depicts women as both objects
and perpetrators of violence, whose transformations lead to emancipation and constitute a kind
of rebellion against the patriarchal society. In Cornelia before the Mirror published in 1988 and
translated in 2015, Ocampo tells the story of a woman who goes to her parents’ old house to
take her own life. There she engages in a dialogue with the mirror in which she recalls episodes
of her life.
Translation and cultural representations: motherhood,

female body, and violence
Regarding motherhood, the first category to be discussed, the markers considered were the
absent mother and the role of women caregivers, and child loss in South American societies.
85
Rosa Basaure et al.
The absent mother and the role of other women caregivers: the social role assigned to moth-
erhood is closely connected to that of the absent father, which makes the mother the main car-
egiver in the family. However, if for any reason such responsibility is not fulfilled by the mother,
children are left without a socially accepted female role model.
In South America, another representation of motherhood comes in the form of female car-
egivers called nanas or mamas, who play a strong maternal role for other people’s children, often
giving up the possibility of becoming mothers themselves. This reflects the power that higher
social classes wield over the economically less favoured and particularly over indigenous women,
who historically have worked in domestic service under deeply precarious legal and economic
conditions.
The concept of nanas or mamas is not only related to domestic help in the form of clean-
ing and cooking but to a much more profound notion that relates to emotional support that
substitutes that of the mother when she is not present. Despite being extremely relevant in
the upbringing of a family, these nanas or mamas are subject to economic, ethnic, and gender
inequality. Given this situation, translations of South American writers whose work considers
the character of the nana, it is necessary to take into account not only the emotional component
but also the gender inequality that surrounds these characters. In Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman,
the author approaches the issue of the absent mother from the daughter’s perspective, delving
into the distant relationship with her mother who dies early, and whose mothering role is taken
on by Zoila, the nana in charge of raising the girl.
In the translation, meaning is lost in regard to this particular element of motherhood, since
limitations of the figurative language reduce the importance of this character and her emotional
depth. The following excerpt provides an example. It describes an episode of the girl protago-
nist’s childhood, in which her mother is leaving on a trip and she tries to stop her by holding
on to her skirt, but it is Zoila, the nana, who comforts the girl.
Está Zoila, que la vio nacer y a quien la entregó su madre desde ese momento para que la
criara. Zoila, que le acunaba la pena en los brazos cuando su madre lista para subir al coche, de
viaje a la ciudad, desprendíasela enérgicamente de las polleras a las que ella se aferraba llorando.
(Bombal 2015, 110)
Then there was Zoila, who knew her since she was born, to whom her mother gave her
to raise after that moment. Zoila, who rocked her in her arms after her mother, about to
get into the coach and travel to the city, detached her briskly from her overskirt which she
clung to, crying.
(Bombal 2006, 1)
In the Spanish text the emotional component is present, and makes clear the cultural impor-
tance of the caregiver as the one person who provides emotional support when the mother is
absent. This example shows the importance of Zoila’s role as a surrogate mother, who is able to
understand the ‘pena’ [suffering] while the biological mother seems to ignore it.
The English translation, however, does not express the idea of “acunar la pena,” [to cradle
an uncontrollable sadness,] limiting the action to a physical movement that is expressed by the
word ‘rock,’ which does not emphasize the purpose of the action, that is to alleviate the girl’s
sadness. As a consequence of this omission, and with the loss of the feeling evoked through the
visual imagery of the Spanish, the English version loses the dramatic depth of the source text.
Also, the idea of “la vio nacer” has changed in impact when translated as “who knew her since
86
she was born.” The idea in Spanish implies that Zoila, the nana, was present at the birth and
probably assisted with the delivery. The English translation reduces this to Zoila knowing Ana
María since she was a baby, but does not evoke the birth.
Regarding the category of child loss, this is a phenomenon that occurs globally, but in South
America it has been related to Catholic guilt, since the strong influence of Catholicism on South
American societies has perpetuated the idea that all women’s sexual activity is taboo. This has
been especially applied to viewing extramarital sex, on the one hand, and seeing the labour of
giving birth to a dead child as a sinful female flaw that receives punishment from God. Women
were burdened with a lifelong secret responsibility because, culturally, the responsibility for the
child’s well-being lay not with the family or the parents, but with the mother. An example of
this subcategory occurs in Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman when Ana María, the protagonist,
describes the miscarriage of her first baby, after she falls down the stairs. Again the nana, Zoila,
is the one who assists her:
Zoila vino a recogerme al pie de la escalera. El resto de la noche se lo pasó enjugando, muda
llorosa, el río de sangre en que se disgregaba esa carne tuya mezclada a la mía.
(Bombal 2015, 127)
Zoila came to pick me up at the foot of the stairs. She spent the rest of the night silent and
tearful, wiping off the blood that your flesh dispersed, mixed with mine.
(Bombal 2006, 10)
The translation to English again changes the intensity of the image in its symbolic and
emotional aspects of loss and guilt. On the one hand, the word ‘muda’ in the original Spanish
is used to describe the nana’s attitude. She was not only ‘silent,’ as in the English translation, but
‘mute,’ in complete silence by the shock of seeing Ana María’s blood spread over the floor. She
cannot speak, but she also chooses not to. Further, the metaphor included in the original, “el río
de sangre,” that compares the quantity of blood to a river is omitted in the English translation,
reducing the visual image. Finally, the clause “en que se disgregaba esa carne tuya mezclada a
la mía” is difficult to understand in the English version “that your flesh dispersed, mixed with
mine” because of its grammatical structure: in Spanish it describes Ana María’s dead baby as a
mixture of her own flesh and blood and that of her lover.
The second category analyzed in this chapter is the presentation of the female body in this
literature, and it includes markers related to body image and physical build, and women’s rebel-
lion against patriarchal ideals of beauty.
In South American Catholic societies, the female body has traditionally been modelled after
ideas of perfection and saintliness and associated with chastity, purity, and motherhood. Despite
the fact that anyone who breaks with this tradition will inevitably have to face social judgment,
departures from tradition have occurred historically, and they are reflected in the works of the
women writers analyzed here.
The first marker observed is body image and physical build. A symbolic element that depicts
this duality is ‘hair’: sometimes it appears as a symbol of beauty and femininity, according to
traditional canons; at other times, it comes to life, as an extension of women’s desires or actions,
or, in a masculinizing vision, as a “tangled cobweb that holds man even against his will” (Orsanic
2015, 224).
Throughout The Shrouded Woman, hair reflects the feelings and state of mind of the protago-
nist. In the following excerpt, the narrator describes in detail Ana María’s hair as she lies dead
87
Rosa Basaure et al.
surrounded by her loved ones. At that moment, she is concerned about the way in which they
have arranged her hair:
Ya no le incomoda bajo la nuca esa espesa mata de pelo que durante su enfermedad se iba
volviendo, minuto por minuto, más húmeda y más pesada.
Consiguieron, al fin, desenmarañarla, alisarla, dividirla sobre la frente.
Han descuidado, es cierto, recogerla.
Pero ella no ignora que la masa sombría de una cabellera desplegada presta a toda mujer
extendida y durmiendo un ceño de misterio, un perturbador encanto.
(Bombal 2015, 109–110)
And she is not bothered by the thick mat of hair under her neck that during her illness, had
become, minute by minute, more damp and more heavy.
They were finally able to disentangle it, smooth it out, and spread it over her forehead.
However, they still had neglected to arrange it carefully.
But she does not forget that the dark mass of her hair spread out that way gives a woman,
who is stretched out and sleeping a look of mystery, and unusual charm.
(Bombal 2006, 1)
Traditionally, the image of hair – when it is tidy – evokes the feminine and the aesthetic;
however, it can also be transgressive, as in the preceding example: Ana María expects her hair
to be drawn back and tied, in the appropriate way, but she lies with her hair loose, a symbol of
liberation.
Just as in the preceding examples of motherhood and miscarriage, the figurative visual image
of this unit is reduced in the translation, based on the nouns, adjectives, and verbs selected in
the English version. On the one hand, the word mata (‘mata de pelo’) in Spanish refers to plants
or bushes. When translating it to English the word ‘mat’ is used, which is a piece of thick carpet
or thick material, thus distorting the reference to wild vegetation. The same phenomenon can
be observed in the translation of the verb desenmarañar, which refers to maraña, a dense thicket.
On the other hand, when referring to hair, the Spanish verb recogerla means to ‘tie up,’ which
the English translation “arrange it carefully” does not provide. The protagonist thinks her family
was not careful in tying up her hair, but with her hair loose she feels more mysterious, more
interesting and disturbing: she feels free and liberated. It is important to mention that most
determinants and verbs related to ‘hair’ in this novel are evidence of the importance of hair for
South American cultures given that this feature is associated with and evokes nature’s fertility
and motherhood, a factor that needs to be considered for the cultural aspect of its translation.
The second subcategory concerns the rebellion against patriarchal ideas of beauty. The writ-
ers analyzed in this chapter, María Luisa Bombal and Silvina Ocampo, challenge the traditional
beauty canons of their times and societies, causing tension between tradition and transgression.
In their works they play with language, using comparisons and metaphors, and interweav-
ing their own standards of beauty with the voices of the characters. The translation might be
expected to incorporate this tension and duality in its depiction of women characters.
In Cornelia Before the Mirror, Silvina Ocampo also shows how corporeality is subjugated to
established standards. The mirror makes us face this phenomenon and see how “meditation
before the mirror represents a way of understanding the body and the identity in a manner
radically different from the masculine manner” (Klingenberg 1994, 271). The mirror becomes
a revealing agent that gives Cornelia access to an intimate reality that in the end subverts the
patriarchal authority. The following example evidences this transgression in terms of aesthetic
88
insights. Cornelia states that the mirror could be witness to a hypothetical poverty that would
make her mop the floors of the house, a circumstance in which women would, in the eyes of
many, look unattractive in comparison to someone who is well-dressed and wearing makeup.
Cornelia finds
belleza en el desaliño, una belleza natural que no tienen las otras con sus afeites.
(Ocampo 2014, 11)
a kind of beauty in their unkemptness, a natural beauty that other women with their
makeup don’t have.
(Ocampo 2015, 314)
From the point of view of the translation, the entire meaning of the text is kept; however, the
word ‘makeup’ in English does not embody the full meaning of ‘afeites’ in Spanish, since the lat-
ter implies a certain degree of criticism towards makeup, understood as an element that intends
to change the natural appearance of women up to a point that it could change their essence.
When translating Silvina Ocampo, the rebellion against patriarchal beauty canons present in her
work is an aspect to be considered. The interaction with the mirror leads Cornelia to reflect
on what is natural and what is artificial, valuing the former and rebelling against the aesthetic
impositions of her time.
Regarding the category of violence, the two following subcategories were observed: aban-
donment and the role of women in male-chauvinist societies.
In South America, violence motivated by the patriarchal values that have predominated in
different times and places has created a context which is reflected in literature and is presented
in the two texts analyzed here as more of a psychological than physical or corporeal violence.
The first subcategory is related to a passive form of violence reflected in women’s submission
to the established social order, where patriarchy, embodied by a priest, the father, the husband,
or some other male figure, tells women what is correct and punishes them if they attempt to
escape from a ‘normal’ life, in a restrictive marriage, for example. In Cornelia Before the Mirror,
psychological violence is interwoven with the concepts of patriarchy and morality. An example
of this is the rape that Cornelia invents to attract her friends Pablo and Elena’s attention, since
they are having an extramarital relationship Cornelia is jealous of. As rape is one of the most
serious acts of violence a woman can face, Cornelia expects her parents’ support and compas-
sion, but instead she faces their rejection. Cornelia at some point recounts how Elena reported
the fabricated rape story to Cornelia’s parents and how they reacted,
Enfurecida, se lo dijo a mis padres, que tenían muchos hijos y son muy religiosos; ante mi
impasibilidad, me echaron de la casa.
(Ocampo 2014, 47)
Furious, she told my parents, who have many children and are very religious. Because of my
impassivity, they threw me out of the house.
(Ocampo 2015, 341)
The translation captures the meaning of the original version completely, and again the ques-
tion of power arises as something to be noted when focusing on translating Ocampo: Cornelia
experiences rejection and abandonment by her parents, who, she reports, throw her out for her
89
Rosa Basaure et al.
‘impassivity’ at having been ‘raped.’ From a cultural perspective, the rules imposed by the Catho-
lic religion and the established patriarchal order crush any emotional behaviour that would lead
the mother to show maternal support. The moral cultural baggage behind this punishment and
the religious constraints predominant at the time are aspects to be considered in translation.
Finally, in regard to the second subcategory – the roles women play in male-chauvinist socie-
ties – in Cornelia Before the Mirror, Cornelia’s mother acts according to the existing strict moral
order, curtailing Cornelia’s freedom in line with the patriarchal parameters of women’s proper
conduct. When Cornelia talks to her friend Elena about wanting to become an actress, she
points to the barriers she has encountered:
Cuando le dije a Elena que yo quería ser actriz, me contestó que mamá se opondría: y fue
verdad. No soporta que le hable de teatros o actrices.
. . .
Verás si no me odia. Para ella, en primer término, están las ideas morales, y en segundo
término, yo. Además es ciega.
(Ocampo 2014, 40)
When I told Elena that I wanted to be an actress she answered by saying that my mother
would be against it. And it was true. She can’t stand my talk of theatres and actresses.
. . .
She hates me, you’ll see. For her, her moral ideas come first, then me second. Besides
she is blind.
(Ocampo 2015, 335)
The negative associations with ‘actriz/actress’ here point to other issues that arise concerning
women’s activities in the cultural and historical contexts of South America. In both the original
and the translation, the image of the actress represents an unacceptable activity for women, as it
is related to debauchery and bohemia, a vision shared among cultures at that time.
Conclusions
The intersection of translation studies and gender studies will continue to raise debates due to
the changing contexts where social movements consider both women and sexual diversity as
subjects of concern. These changing notions will have an impact on new visions of gender and
cultural particularities that literature will reflect and translation will have to take into account.
Regarding gender markers, the two works just discussed reflect South American culture in
the historical period in which these two writers lived and based their works. For translation,
three key factors are important in approaching this discourse: patriarchal values, the socio-
historical context, and the expression of feelings and emotions. The two writers approach the
topics related to motherhood, the female body, and violence with a certain estrangement from
the patriarchal order. The main female characters are caught in struggles between accepting and
rebelling against imposed subordination, and they experience radical changes that lead them to
lives of transmutation or thoughts of death as escape.
Concerning the English translations of the three categories of markers, the original meaning
in Spanish may be reflected to some extent, but a partial loss of emotional depth in the figura-
tive language is consistently observed, mainly in terms of structural and semantic considerations.
Translation has to consider women’s realities in the social context of the original writer, under-
standing cultural differences that will enable a more comprehensive transfer. The ideological role
90
of translation as a political tool to make visible gender realities from a South American perspec-
tive should be relevant and, therefore, emphasized, especially considering that most research on
South American culture and translation has been conducted from American or European view-
points. Contributions from South American scholars are urgently needed.
We may conclude that the intention of translation cannot be limited to accounting for what
is strictly cultural; translations of such women authors must also transmit women’s experiences
and reflect both female cultural elements and the discourse markers used to evoke them. These
elements not only transmit a particular regional context, but they represent the voices and con-
flicts of women in a global scenario.
Future directions
Analyzing the transfer of text markers reflecting motherhood, the female body and violence
from Spanish to English in texts written by South American women writers is only a first step in
defining elements that represent the voices and the conflicts that women face. Many other ques-
tions can be explored regarding the relationships between culture, gender notions, discourse, and
translation. With this in mind, future research might be directed towards defining other gender
related markers in texts written by women authors in different regions of the world. Further,
other South American women writers could be studied for the same gender-related markers
in their literary works, analyzing how those markers have evolved, as the notion of gender has
changed, and how they are translated into other cultural situations and contexts.
The discussion in this chapter has opened new possibilities to develop translation theory
from a South American perspective, as this region has historically taken in foreign theories to
understand local processes. This translatological reflection will contribute to a regional approach
to translation, becoming a communicative channel for South American women from diverse
linguistic and cultural backgrounds and expressing their experiences through literature from a
particular identitary perspective.
At the same time, this reflection, particularly regarding gender-related topics, responds to
the feminist movements’ demands that have raised gender awareness in the region over the past
years, promoting and making possible intercultural encounters as egalitarian interactions.
Related topics
Latin American women’s writing; gender studies in Latin America; translation of Latin Ameri-
can women’s writing; translation, gender, and cross-cultural communication
Further reading
Bombal, María Luisa. 1995. House of Mist and The Shrouded Woman. 1st ed. Self-translated by Bombal María
Luisa. Austin: University of Texas Press.
The translation by Baker presented in this chapter is based on Bombal’s self translation from 1948. This
may open the research to the self-translation topic for further studies. However, this new revised self-
translation also presents the ideas and conclusions proposed in this chapter.
Floria, Carlos Alberto and César García Belsunce. 2009. Historia de los Argentinos. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: El
Ateneo.
The authors avoid the classical ideological dichotomies of the studies of Argentinian history to approach
the events and milestones of almost five centuries in an objective and balanced narration.
Llanos, Bernardita. 2009. Passionate Subjects/Split Subjects in Twentieth-century Literature in Chile. Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press.
91
Rosa Basaure et al.
This book analyzes the works of Chilean writers Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Diamela Eltit
and how they develop a counternarrative to the Chilean literary canon, showing how motherhood and
womanhood inevitably conflict in the public sphere and rights of citizenship.
Stuven, Ana María and Joaquín Fermandois, eds. 2013. Historia de las mujeres en Chile, vol. I. Santiago de
Chile: Taurus.
The editors gathered ten papers written by different historians who studied the contributions made by
different groups of Chilean women between the 16th and the 19th centuries. They depict how these
women renounced their traditional roles and tried to participate in society in the way men did.
References
Bassnett, Susan, ed. 1990. Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America. London and New Jersey: Zed
Books Ltd.
Bergmann, Emilie, Janet Greenberg, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Francine Masiello, Francesca Miller, Marta
Morello-Frosch, Kathleen Newman, and Marie-Louise Pratt. 1992. Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin
America. Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bombal, María Luisa. 2006. The Shrouded Woman (As she looks back at her life) (La Amortajada). Translated
by Armand Baker. State University of New York-Albany. Available at: http://www.armandfbaker.
com/translations/novels/la_amortajada.pdf [Accessed 27 Mar. 2019].
Bombal, María Luisa. 2015. La última niebla/La amortajada. Santiago: Planetalector.
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7
Translating metonymies
that construct gender
Testimonial narratives by 20th-century
Latin American women
Gabriela Yañez
This chapter presents a study of translations of testimonial narratives by Latin American women
which constructs gender relations through metonymy. It is inspired by the many testimonial
narratives written by women over the course of the 20th century, in which they narrate their
experiences of dictatorial and oppressive male regimes and raise gender issues across languages
and cultures. In Europe, the atrocities committed by Franco’s regime in Spain,1 the Stalinist
purges in the Soviet Union,2 the Holocaust and World War II, and the Yugoslav wars in the
1990s3 gave rise to texts such as Lydia Chukovskaya’s Going Under (1972) in the Soviet Union,
Ana María Matute’s Primera memoria4 (1959) in Spain, Reska Weiss’ Journey Through Hell (1961)
in Germany, and Gertrude Schneider’s Journey into Terror (1981) in Austria. Testimonies of
trauma were conveyed by Afghan female poets like Nadia Anjuman (Marie 2015) in the context
of Taliban atrocities committed against women and by Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Aïcha
Lemsine, who recounted women’s experiences in the Algerian war of independence. In African
countries, the Somali and Nigerian civil wars in 1991 and 1967, respectively, and the Rwandan
genocide in 19945 – to name but a few – inspired women writers’ novels,6 such as Marie Béa-
trice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter (2004) or Never Again by Flora Nwapa (1975).
Twentieth-century Latin America was no exception to terror. The FARC actions in Colom-
bia and several coups, including the Pinochet coup in Chile and the military Junta in Argentina,7
provided the scenario for writers like Isabel Allende, Nora Strejilevich, Rigoberta Menchú,
and many other women to provide testimonies of the horrors of Latin American dictator-
ships.8 In fact, the testimonial narrative – or testimonio – as a literary genre rose to prominence
in Latin America in the 1960s as a result of turmoil, exploitation, social instability, and revolu-
tion (Nance 2006).9 Here, “testimony” refers to eyewitness accounts of historical events, usually
associated with trauma and human rights violations. Considered a hybrid form between history
and fiction, orality and writing, these narratives originate in a socio-historical event and articu-
late a version of it (Narváez 1983). In this framework, women victims assimilate and express a
collective experience in literature, through which a polyphony of other voices, lives, and experi-
ences are also evoked (Beverly 2008).
93
Gabriela Yañez
Against this backdrop, Latin American women’s narratives testifying against gender-based
oppression and violence in the 20th century have proliferated and been translated and dis-
seminated worldwide. By articulating denunciation and resistance, literary works of this kind
and their translations have become an instrument for social transformation, for testimonials by
women are not only documentation of events by survivors and witnesses, but they also seek to
expose gendered violence and, ultimately, subvert the status quo. In this context, the translation
of such texts plays a prominent role as a “tool and model of cross-border dialogue, resistance,
solidarity and activism in pursuit of justice and equality for all” (Castro and Ergun 2017, 1). It
is of interest to feminist translation studies to examine the discourse strategies activated in the
translation of such activist women’s texts in order to shed light on how such cross-border mobil-
ity works to reposition and transform female subjectivities and world views (Alvarez et al. 2014).
Discursively, women’s testimonials stage a construction of reality – rather than a copy of
it – by means of which their resistant subjectivity is reconfigured (Strejilevich 1991; Zambrano
and Strejilevich 2016). Therefore, texts cannot be taken as a reflection or representation of the
witnesses’ experiences but rather as a refraction mediated by memory, intention, and ideology
(Sklodowska 1985). The translation of these testimonials is a further refraction, where mime-
sis, i.e. the pursuit of real-life representation in literature, is far less important than poesis, the
writer’s/translator’s artistic recreation of events in the text.
Further, the fact that these literary works may be produced either in exile or in inxile (Stre-
jilevich 1991, 2) has a bearing on the writing strategies, and subsequently perhaps on the trans-
lation strategies. Different discourse mechanisms operate in the source texts. In the first case,
alienated, estranged, and exiled women create their narratives to appeal to a more international
audience. They often resort to discourse clarification procedures, such as notes, glosses, and
digressions on the political situation for an audience who is not placed at risk by reading this
material. Texts written in exile may be more accessible and readily available for dissemination
through translation as well as discursively more daring, bold, and descriptive – and, therefore,
perhaps more effective and ostensibly subversive. Women who write in inxile live in isolation
and turn to a more surreptitious type of writing. Allegories, metaphors, metonymies, and ambi-
guity abound in this literature, targeted at those readers who remain in the militarized space and
are surrounded by repression. Metonymy is of special importance, evoking with one word or
expression a whole history of women’s subjection to a position inferior to that of men.
Given the peculiarities of such a literary corpus, articulating Latin American women’s testi-
monials with questions of how gender relations are constructed through the use of metonymic
language and then translated for international audiences offers a rich theoretical and methodo-
logical framework of analysis. It means understanding how gender is discursively inscribed in
the text by means of metonymic imagery, rather than with extra-textual – social or historical –
information. In fact, this chapter relies on metonymy as a powerful evocative mechanism for
reconstructing gender relations in the translation of women’s testimonials, and explores how
metonymy – based on contiguity – mobilizes concrete objects such as the “washing board”
to evoke women’s confinement to household chores. Here, contiguity refers to how certain
expressions and terms, such as “washing board” or “apron” are used to represent experiences of a
specific culture and a specific time, associations that will face a test as the text moves into English
translation, into a different culture and time.
This chapter provides a brief review of some prominent theoretical perspectives on metonymy
in the literary field, and on metonymic aspects of translation. This is followed by an overview
of the research conducted on the translation of testimonial literature – written by women – in
the 20th century. In a separate section, the English translations of gender-related metonymies
in three representative women’s testimonios of different Latin American conflicts are analyzed.
94
First, we examine excerpts from Elizabeth Burgos’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la
conciencia10 (1983) (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984), which details the
genocide of indigenous populations in Guatemala. Then, we introduce Nora Strejilevich’s Una
sola muerte numerosa (1997) (A Single Numberless Death, 2002), a testimonial of the last dictator-
ship in Argentina. Finally, we look into Gioconda Belli’s El país bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y
guerra11 (2001) (The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War, 2002), bearing witness to
the guerrillas’ fight against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. In the last section, we suggest
some directions for further research on the topic.
Historical theoretical perspectives
Metonymy: an overview
Metonymy has been studied in several fields, including (cognitive) linguistics,12 textual13 and
literary studies,14 and – to a lesser extent – in translation studies. From a literary perspective,
metonymy – Greek for “a change of name” – may be defined broadly as an expression used in
place of another with which it is closely associated in experience, e.g. the “crown” can stand
for a king (Abrams [1957] 1999). This entails that the metonymic relationships are established
between two terms which are contiguous in time and space. In his seminal paper “Two Aspects
of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson (1956/1995) describes
metonymic relations on the basis of semantic contiguity, and distinguishes them from metaphoric
relations, which he associates with semantic similarity. From this approach, “contiguity” is con-
sidered as “the neighbourly correlation of aspects and elements within a network of associations
given by a joint frame of experience” (Burkhardt 2010, 249).
This view of metonymy posits metonymic language as dependent on extrinsic accidental
relations rather than on some predetermined natural essence. In expressions such as “the apron
and the rubber gloves” (Strejilevich 2002, 27), the metonymic terms “apron” and “rubber gloves”
evoke women’s position within a patriarchal society by relying on the contiguous association
between the two objects and women’s role as housekeepers. This metonymic use of language
reveals the arbitrariness and the conventionality of figurative meaning (Genette 1972; de Man
1979). Thus, intrinsic to metonymy are codes and cultural conventions which are bound in time
and space and are, therefore, contingent (Eco 1979). The spatial and temporal contiguity that
connects metonymy with experience adds a socio-historical dimension to this figure of speech
which is not necessarily easy to reconstruct in translation. In testimonial literature, metonymy
constitutes a prominent mechanism helping to expose culturally determined constructs with
regard to women and their place in mainstream male-dominated societies.
Testimonial narratives and translation

From a translation studies perspective, research on 20th-century testimonial literature is not
extensive. Raquel de Pedro Ricoy (2012) finds that one focus on these texts in translation stud-
ies is the study of how the Self in the source text is portrayed as the Other in the target text, due
to power relations between cultures, languages, and groups. In her work, de Pedro Ricoy (2012)
looks into the translation of Cuban testimonial literature, by both men and women, with a view
to analyzing how ‘otherness’ is materialized in the source text and how it is handled in the target
text. She is concerned with the translation of texts originating in non-hegemonic cultures. At a
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Gabriela Yañez
local level, she looks into culture-specific discourse elements in both texts, in order to examine
how the foreignness of the source text can be maintained while ensuring comprehension in
the target text. She weighs the translators’ choice of overall strategy in terms of the dichotomy
between foreignization and naturalization (Venuti 1995).
In regard to the translation of Holocaust testimonies, Peter Davies (2014) contributes to an
understanding of how translation reveals the cultural specificities of these texts, and also how
it can turn a text into a testimony. Interested in the effects of and influences on translation in
theorizing the genre, Davies explores the negotiations that take place between translators and
editors to determine how the genre is conceived of in both source and target texts. In his view,
translators of Holocaust testimonies must make these testimonies recognizable as truth telling,
i.e. they need to fulfil the truth criteria expected from the genre. Therefore, editors and transla-
tors use paratexts to explain and compensate for the extra layers of meaning that are added in
the translation process and the co-creation of the text by the translator. Davies concludes that,
on occasion, texts can even become testimonies as a result of translation.
Another contribution to the study of the translation of testimonial narratives is by Christi
Merrill in a postcolonial context. Merrill (2014) explores the emancipatory power of transla-
tion in Kausalya Baisantry’s book Dohra Abhishaap (2009) (Doubly Cursed). This life story is the
first written in Hindi by a Dalit woman. A feminist and activist, Baisantry writes an account of
women’s fight across generations, with traces of the Latin American testimonio genre. The novel
evinces a feminist critique of gender and caste inequality in contemporary India. As the transla-
tor of the book, Merrill studies the use of the genre as a political strategy and an instrument for
effecting social changes, and argues for the importance of feminist selection and dissemination
strategies. She examines how the subversive power of the source text can be transmitted to the
language of the former colonizer. She calls for rethinking “English’s mediating role beyond
top-down colonial paradigms in such a way that takes into account transnational, transling-
ual generic expectations” (Merrill 2016, 130). In her English translation, Merrill opts to leave
certain Hindi, Marathi, and Rajasthani words untranslated. A case in point is the expression
“harijan bai,”15 a mainstream discriminatory denomination for a woman deemed untouchable.
By retaining the phrase, the translation draws attention to the patronizing caste politics and gen-
dered discriminating practices in India. By adopting a feminist translation approach, the target
text contributes to portraying the character as the hero of her own story – an untouchable girl
riding her bicycle to college was inconceivable in 1930s colonial India – (Merrill 2019), while
bridging the language and cultural gaps with an accompanying glossary.

As with research on testimonial narratives, studies of the use of metonymy in the field of transla-
tion studies are not abundant. Here, it is worth acknowledging the relevance of Maria Tymoc-
zko’s ([1999] 2014) conceptualization of metonymy as applied to the study of the translation
of early Irish literature. To her, metonymy is a factor in literature that evokes certain aspects of
a culture and makes them emblematic of the culture as a whole. In the same vein, she applies
the concept of metonymy to the way in which translation can only partially encode attributes
or aspects of the source text which then come to represent the whole. Tymoczko observes
that translating the literary and culturally metonymic aspects of the source text poses difficul-
ties when the cultural distance is too large and the source metonymies are unreadable for the
intended target audience. Accepting that there is always a gain and a loss in translation, she con-
cludes that translation is by definition metonymic since translators select certain elements of the
source text to preserve, and have to drop the rest.
96
In this section, we observe how metonymic language serves to construct gender in Me llamo
Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos 1983/2007), Una sola muerte numerosa (Strejilevich 1997), and El país
bajo mi piel (Belli 2001). We examine excerpts from these three Latin American women’s testimo-
nios in Spanish, and look into the challenges that metonymy poses for their English translations.
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos [1983] 2007)

Transcribed by Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos, Rigoberta Menchu’s testimonial
account was made into the book Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. Published in 1983, the book imme-
diately rose to prominence, with translations into 12 languages worldwide (Virgen 2013). In
the text, Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan indigenous woman of Quiché Maya descent, bears
witness to the oppression faced by the indigenous populations, systematically slaughtered over
centuries in the name of progress not only in Guatemala but all across the Latin American con-
tinent (Burgos [1983] 2007). While denouncing (post)colonial genocide, Menchu’s testimonial
narrative immerses the reader in a minutely detailed description of the indigenous communities’
private lives, recreating birth and marriage ceremonies, male and female roles, and maternity.
The narration is a multifaceted testimony, namely that of an indigenous person, a peasant, a
woman, an activist, and a feminist.
In the extracts that follow, we explore how metonymic language functions as an effective
rhetorical procedure for evoking the gender relations entrenched in Guatemalan society.
Allí, le entregaron su piedra de moler,16 su olla que tiene que estar junto a ella para lavar
su nixtamal, para lavar sus trastos, para lavar el maíz.
(Burgos [1983] 2007, 103)
There she is given her grinding stone and her cooking pot. She must always keep her
pot for washing the nixtamal, her kitchen utensils and the maize.
(Burgos 1984, 77)
La niñita también tiene que tener su tablita para lavar. Y esos tienen que ser sus juguetes,
sus materiales que va a usar cuando sea grande.
(Burgos [1983] 2007, 36)
A little girl will have her washing board and all the things she will need when she grows up.
(Burgos 1984, 15)
“Nunca hija dejes de llevar delantal”, decía mi madre. Precisamente así se marca la etapa
de la entrada en la juventud; después de los diez años.
(Burgos [1983] 2007, 236)
“Never forget to wear your apron, my child,” my mother used to say. Our tenth year
actually marks the stage when we enter womanhood.
(Burgos 1984, 211)
Así es cuando yo sentí lo que mi hermana había sentido. Claro, mi hermana estuvo con
otro señor.
(Burgos [1983] 2007, 118)
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Gabriela Yañez
That was when I felt what my sister had felt although, of course, my sister had been with
another family.
(Burgos 1984, 92)
In all of the foregoing passages, the indigenous women’s role in Guatemalan patriarchal soci-
ety is revealed in the source text through a network of metonymic associations. The expressions
“piedra de moler” (grinding stone), “olla” (pot), “trastos” (implements), “tablita para lavar” (little
washing board), and “llevar delantal” (wear an apron) all refer metonymically to the indige-
nous women’s responsibilities for household chores, serving as mothers or wives. Furthermore,
metonymy helps to expose gender and class differences. In “mi hermana estuvo con otro señor” (my
sister was with another master), in the last passage, the masculine noun “señor” (master) evokes
the bourgeois house where the character’s sister was forced to work as a servant. This metonymy
exhibits the contiguous association between man and power, and thus the hierarchical relations
in this patriarchal societal structure.
The translation, on occasion, recreates gender-loaded metonymies in more explicit terms,
thereby establishing different metonymic relations. Other times, the target text erases all traces of
metonymic language. For example, in the first excerpt, the noun “olla” (pot) activates associations
by contiguity to women’s fixed tasks in the indigenous community. In Spanish, “olla” (pot) alludes
to a container used not only for cooking but also for boiling water and other purposes.17 In the
source text, the interpretation is controlled by the subsequent specification, i.e. washing the nixta-
mal. Rendered in English as “cooking pot,” it guides the reader in only one direction: the kitchen.
Similarly, the noun “trastos” (implements) refers to the set of tools used for certain activities18 per-
formed by the indigenous women, like washing maize. In the target text, “trastos” (implements) is
translated as “kitchen utensils,” also limiting the purview of women’s actions. In this way, the target
text establishes metonymic associations that reinforce gender stereotypes which, unlike the source
text tropes, do not recreate solely indigenous practices and world views but may also refer to main-
stream women.19 In regard to the cross-border activism that feminist translation studies calls for,
such relocation of figurative meaning into more mainstream-related gendered categories homog-
enizes the text and, therefore, reduces the potential of translation to act as a locus of resistance “in
pursuit of liberation, equality and social justice” (Castro and Ergun 2017, 4) for indigenous women.
In the third fragment, “llevar delantal” (wear an apron) also refers metonymically to a girl
assuming an imposed female role in society. And again, the following sentence points to what
it means for a girl to wear an apron. It is a sign of maturity, of leaving her childhood behind
and fulfilling the expectations of society. Even though the translation conveys the image of the
apron, it downplays its metonymic significance by emphasizing the girl’s “tenth year” – her age –
rather than the change in roles this “apron” imposes and which is embodied in the figure of
speech, namely her entry into womanhood. On the other hand, the metonymy “señor” (master)
in the last extract, which as stated here refers to the employer’s house, is rendered as “family” in
English. Here the metonymy disappears altogether, with the translation leaving no trace of the
trope or of the gender-based hierarchy it evokes. The target text repositions the resistant female
subjectivity of the source text proposing a more gender-neutral recreation of the female subject
for the readers of the translation, undermining the potential of feminist translation praxes to
convey resistance and activism across borders.
Una sola muerte numerosa (Strejilevich 1997)

Argentine writer Nora Strejilevich was also a victim of a male-controlled society. Kidnapped
in 1977 during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983), she was kept prisoner in the
98
clandestine detention and extermination centre “Club Atlético” in Buenos Aires. After her
release, Strejilevich went into exile in Canada, where she decided to give testimony of her
experience of the human rights violations committed during the Argentine dictatorial regime
through literature. Strejilevich narrates the untold and unofficial history through her testimony
Una sola muerte numerosa (1997), her most acclaimed literary work. The book was awarded the
National Award Letras de Oro (Golden Letters) for Hispanic Literature in the United States, and
was translated into English (A Single Numberless Death, 2002) and into German (Ein einzelner
vielfacher Tod, 2014).
Strejilevich underscores the place occupied by Latin American women in testimonial litera-
ture (Zambrano and Strejilevich 2016). She affirms that women’s characteristic way of writing,
speaking, and thinking – typically regarded as a flaw of the “weaker sex” – is a praiseworthy
virtue and a political act. For her, the testimonio genre is closely connected to women, since by
writing their testimonies women make public what others might think belongs in the private
sphere. Strejilevich’s own text Una sola muerte numerosa attests to this. The following fragments
reveal how women’s private life is brought to the fore in the Spanish text and how significant a
role metonymic language plays in this process.
La veo amasar su pasado en la estrecha cocina de madera que da al patio solitario.

(Strejilevich 1997, 32)
I watch her kneading the past in the narrow wood kitchen that looks out onto the
lonely patio.
Ante todo, tu aspecto señorial no va con el delantal y los guantes de goma.

You have a stately presence, an aristocratic look that doesn’t go with the apron and
the rubber gloves.
Metonymic expressions such as “el delantal” (“the apron”), “los guantes de goma” (“the rubber
gloves”), and “amasar su pasado” (“kneading the past”), employed in the source text to evoke
women’s status and role in Argentina’s dictatorial regime, are recreated in the translated passages.
Captive in the confined space of the house and reduced to a subservient role that is performed
for a patriarchal figure, women are portrayed in the duties imposed upon them as housewives.
The translation of these extracts exposes how the kitchen becomes women’s cage. Past dreams
and the freedom of youth vanish when the heavy burden of social dictates falls on the character.
Then, all that is left for the woman is “kneading the past” in the kitchen, with the apron and the
rubber gloves on, all of them metonymies of her place in society. Here the translation easily trans-
fers the metonymic language, thus easing the cross-border transit of the disruptive mechanisms
which operate in the source text to counteract mainstream hegemonic discourses about gender.
In the second fragment, the source text further emphasizes gender relations by establishing
a metonymic contrast between “aspecto señorial” (master-like appearance) and “el delantal y los
guantes de goma” (the apron and the rubber gloves). In Spanish, “señorial” (master-like) alludes
to “señorío” (mastership) – meaning the territory belonging to the master (señor) – and, conse-
quently, expresses mastery or command.20 Here,“aspecto señorial” (master-like appearance) conveys
a positive evaluation through a man-related metonymic expression, as opposed to “el delantal y los
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Gabriela Yañez
guantes de goma” (the apron and the rubber gloves), evoking the woman as a degraded female fig-
ure. In this manner, the source text introduces a metonymic binary opposition between the male
and the female figures in positive and negative terms, respectively. In the translated text, however,
the expression “a stately presence, an aristocratic look” removes this shade of meaning. It conveys
the notion of “dignity,” but not that of male superiority. In so doing, the translation relocates figu-
rative meaning in a genderless terrain, presenting the reader with a less complex interpretation of
the gendered relations of power evoked in the source text. From a feminist translation perspective,
this lack of engagement with the rhetoricity of the source text advances a more gender-neutral
version of the source culture.
Metonymy in Strejilevich’s narrative also brings to light how men’s control over women is
exerted through physical and sexual violence.
Interminable año de observar cuerpos deslizarse por la calle con su pesada carga se-
xual. . . . En la hora de historia imagino ejércitos de violadores, en la de geografía conti-
nentes de carne, montañas como esa barriga.
An endless year of observing bodies tread down the street, each with its heavy sexual
cargo. . . . During history class I envision armies of rapists, in geography I imagine conti-
nents of flesh, mountains of fat like that belly.
In this passage, the different metonymies operate together to create a female perspective on
men and women. The emphasis on human bodies and their sexuality reveals the narrator’s anxi-
ety over male sexual dominance. Indeed, the narrative exhibits women’s physical vulnerability –
the “heavy sexual cargo” – and the threat of sexual assault by men. This idea is supported by the
metonymical reference to male figures as rapists (violadores), flesh (carne), and a fat belly (barriga) –
in allusion to the sexual assault the character suffered in a lift when returning home from school.
Here the translation has reconstructed the same network of metonymic relations as in the source
text. It is worth noting that the last metonymy has been adjusted to preserve the full meaning
potential of the source trope. In the source text, the Spanish noun “barriga” (fat belly) conveys
both the meaning of belly and that of fat, and presents a negative evaluation on the part of the
enunciator. The metonymy embodies not only the reference to the assaulting man but also
to the disgust the girl feels towards him. In the translation, this metonymy has been recreated
through the noun phrase “fat like that belly.” Certainly, the noun “belly” alone does not express
the full meaning of the source text. The translation manages to compensate for the loss of mean-
ing with the noun phrase, thereby incorporating the notion of fatness, which is so significant
in the source text. The relative ease with which issues of sexuality travel through translation in
these cases suggests a narrower cultural gap between the source and target texts. This reveals
how feminist translation strategies may be influenced by the type of discourse involved. It
appears that the more universal the metonymic categories at play in the source text – vis-à-vis
the allusion to culturally entrenched concepts and practices – the more accessible and easy to
reconstruct they become for translation.
El país bajo mi piel (Belli 2001)

Around the same time that Strejilevich was enduring the atrocities of the dictatorship, Gioconda
Belli was involved in the Nicaraguan revolution as a guerrilla member of the Sandinist Party
100
(FSLN). In 2000, Belli, a Nicaraguan poet, writer, and political activist, wrote El país bajo mi piel
as a testimony21 of the revolution she actively participated in to overthrow the Somoza dictator-
ship in Nicaragua (1979). The book, published in 2001, presents readers with the feminist testi-
mony of a woman, mother, and revolutionary. As in the previous testimonial narratives, discourse
is used here to subvert the forms of representation of women and the social rules imposed by
the patriarchal Nicaraguan bourgeois. Within the Nicaraguan society of the time, women were
expected to yield to the dictates of the mainstream male‑governed society, i.e. marriage and
motherhood (Palazón Sáez 2006), as Belli evokes in the following extracts.
Dos cosas que yo no decidí decidieron mi vida: el país donde nací y el sexo con que
vine al mundo. Quizás porque mi madre sintió mi urgencia de nacer cuando estaba en el
Estadio Somoza en Managua viendo un juego de béisbol, el calor de las multitudes fue mi
destino. Quizás a eso se debió mi temor a la soledad, mi amor por los hombres, mi deseo
de trascender limitaciones biológicas o domésticas y ocupar tanto espacio como ellos
en el mundo.
(Belli 2001, 11)
Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. Perhaps because my mother went
into labor when she was at a baseball game in Managua’s stadium, it was my destiny to be
drawn to the warmth of crowds. My response to the multitude was an early indication
I would fear solitude and be attracted to the world of men, biological functions and
domestic life notwithstanding.
(Belli 2002, ix)
In this fragment, shifts in the translation of the metonymies of the source text efface some
layers of meaning. The metonymic expressions “el país donde nací” (the country where I was
born) and “el sexo con que vine al mundo” (the sex I was born with) suggest socially and culturally
determined roles for women in the country. In both phrases, lack of volition becomes a promi-
nent element of meaning, stressing the impositions Nicaraguan women suffer. In contrast, the
translation erases the involuntariness and the deterministic view of women’s fate that are clearly
announced in the source text by using the possessive adjective “my” (“my country” and “my
sex”) to express belonging and imply a certain affinity.
Furthermore, it can be observed that the translation also displaces part of the meaning of
the source metonymies by the end of the passage. In “mi amor por los hombres” (my love for
men), the Spanish text conveys a more forceful meaning than the translation “be attracted to
the world of men.” First, the notion of “attraction” lacks the expressive strength of the source
noun “amor” (love). Second, the metonymy “the world of men” can be interpreted simply as
referring to her being allowed to perform the same activities as men. Certainly, the source
trope “los hombres” (men) appears to be more encompassing, evoking the male figure and, by
contiguity, men’s highly esteemed position and status in society and all that comes to represent,
such as freedom and independence. This is opposed to women’s biological or domestic con-
straints (“limitaciones biológicas o domésticas”), which prevent them from taking up as much space
as men in the world (“ocupar tanto espacio como ellos en el mundo”). Again, here the translation
shifts part of the meaning of the metonymy by translating “limitaciones” (constraints) as “func-
tions” and “life,” respectively, thus eliminating a relevant aspect of meaning. Displacements
are made more manifest in the omission of the last metonymy “ocupar espacio” (take up space),
which is left untranslated. These translated passages fail to function as North-South vec-
tors of gender inequality, with the English translations demonstrating a more gender-neutral
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Gabriela Yañez
re-inscription of Latin American feminist knowledge, which skews the gender-related power
relations the source text evokes.
Los sueños revolucionarios encontraron en mí tierra fértil. Lo mismo sucedió con otros
sueños propios de mi género. Sólo que mis príncipes azules fueron guerrilleros y que mis
hazañas heroicas las hice al mismo tiempo que cambiaba pañales y hervía mamaderas.
(Belli 2001, 12)
Revolutionary dreams found fertile ground in my young mind, as did other, more con-
ventional kinds of dreams, although my knights in shining armor were guerrillas and
my heroic exploits would be performed between changing diapers and boiling baby
bottles.
(Belli 2002, ix)
Sin renunciar a ser mujer, creo que he logrado también ser hombre.
(Belli 2001, 12)
Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have also managed to live like a man.
(Belli 2002, x)
In both excerpts, the translation oscillates between recreating the source tropes and establish-
ing its own metonymic connections. Like in the Spanish text, “changing diapers” and “boiling
baby bottles” are metonymic for women’s tasks, which are contrasted to the “heroic exploits” the
character was engaged in. On the other hand, the target text introduces a metonymy not present
in the source text when translating “mí” (me) as “my young mind,” and leaves no trace of gender
when rendering “género” (gender) as “conventional.” The metonymic use of “género” (“sueños
propios de mi género” [the dreams that are typical of my gender]) takes on a particular significance
in Belli’s feminist text, one of whose main concerns is gender.
In the same vein, “ser mujer” (be a woman) and “ser hombre” (be a man) in the last passage are
strong metonymic parallel structures in this context. They create culturally bound roles which
the female character has managed to balance. In the target text, these metonymies are translated
as “femininity” and “live like a man,” translations which lack the expressive strength and the
evocative force of the Spanish, which translated literally would say “be a woman/be a man.” All
of these shifts in the English passage simplify the interpretation and reading of the prototypical
gender relations of power expressed in the Latin American text.
Concluding remarks
The fragments analyzed in this section have shown that metonymy is a useful mechanism for
gender construction in Latin American women’s testimonios and their translations. In effect,
metonymy portrays certain elements as contiguous to the female figure, i.e. contingently deter-
mined by culture at a certain time and place. This figure of speech obliterates the evocation
of a naturally inferior female essence. The contiguously metonymic allusions to baby bottles
and diapers, cooking pots, aprons and rubber gloves contribute to creating a locus of resist-
ance in discourse, since they act as a more or less surreptitious way of bringing gender issues
to the fore. Recreating gender relations through metonymic associations makes it possible to
foreground female deprecation in male-controlled, dictatorial, oppressive, and violent patriar-
chal regimes. The significant role played by metonymy in these testimonials requires careful
102
translation, adaptation, and/or explanation so that the subversive aspect of this discourse mecha-
nism is allowed to function for the target reader. Awareness of this mechanism can contribute
to privileging a feminist translation strategy, which, in the words of Castro and Ergun (2017),
fosters transnational epistemic exchanges, inspires political growth across boundaries, and facili-
tates new visions of equality and social justice.
Future directions
Much more work can be done not only to draw attention to the importance of metonymy in
this type of writing but also in regard to the translations of these texts, which risk losing their
effectiveness and their propensity to foster feminist sociopolitical awareness among readers. Other
testimonials written by women – on the Japanese “comfort women” of World War II, the Leb-
ensborn experiences of German women under Nazi rule, the narratives around Bosnian rape
camps in the 1990s, or current atrocities committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
among others – also merit study for the translations they trigger, how they process the texts and
what effects they produce. The ethical considerations involved in translating historically significant
testimonials written by women are also relevant, and questions regarding the role of metonymy
in constructing gender relations evoked in these texts are part of this. Additionally, future research
could examine how metonymy might work in target texts to raise gender issues not present in the
source text. Finally, since it is not uncommon for such testimonials to be self-translated, this opens
another set of complicated questions that might merit scholarly attention around the changes
such translations might see when produced for the other culture, but by the same author.
Further reading
Bartow, Joanna R. 2005. Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fic-
tion, and Theory. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures.
This book introduces perspectives on the testimonio genre in Latin America. It also raises gender issues
and focuses on the use of metonymic language.
DeRocher, Patricia. 2018. Transnational Testimonios. The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
This book offers an insightful transnational feminist perspective on the Latin American testimonio which
addresses questions of translation, knowledge, and power.
Matzner, Sebastian. 2016. Rethinking Metonymy. Literary Theory and Poetic Practice from Pindar to Jakobson.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matzner’s book presents a valuable and comprehensive overview of the development of the notion of
metonymy, which also includes a section on metonymy and translation criticism.
Related topics
Philosophical perspectives on metonymy and translation; Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, and Félix Guattari; metonymy and feminist retranslation; metonymy and feminist ethos
Notes
1 Cf. Cazorla Sánchez 2010; Bowen 2017.
2 Cf. Conquest 2008; Halfin 2009; Gottfried and Spencer 2015.
3 Cf. Mithander et al. 2007; Hall 2010; Tucker 2016.
4 The book was translated into English and published in 1963 under the titles School of the Sun and Awak-
ening in the US and in the UK, respectively.
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Gabriela Yañez
5 Cf. Nhema and Zeleza 2008; Tucker 2016; Williams 2016.

6 Cf. Smith and Ce 2015; Zulfiqar 2016; Uwakweh 2017.
7 Cf. Lewis 2006; Galván 2012; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2013.
8 Cf. Jehenson 1995; Rodríguez and Szurmuk 2016; Staniland 2016.
9 The origins of the genre are most often traced back to Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel
Barnet and his Biografía de un cimarrón (1968) (Biography of a Runaway Slave, [1968] 2016), the story of a
fugitive Cuban slave of African descent fighting in the Cuban War of Independence.
10 Henceforth Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú.
11 Henceforth El país bajo mi piel.
12 Cf. Gibbs 1994; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Otal Campo 2002; Panther and Thornburg 2003; Díaz
Vera 2015.
13 Cf. AI Sharafi 2004; Otal Campo et al. 2005.
14 Cf. Jakobson and Halle 1971; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Jäkel 1999.
15 “ ‘There’s a Harijan bai riding along! Just look at that brain, her baba is a beggar, and she’s riding a bicycle!’ ”
(Excerpt from Doubly Cursed published in Words Without Borders, 2018. Available at: www.wordswith
outborders.org/article/october-2018-dalit-writing-doubly-cursed-kausalya-baisantry-christi-merr).
16 Highlighting in bold type is ours in all cases.
17 Definition by the Real Academia Española. Available at: https://dle.rae.es/.
19 Menchu’s indigenous testimonial explicitly distinguishes between mainstream and minority women:
“I still haven’t approached the subject – and it’s perhaps a very long subject – of women in Guatemala.
We have to put them into categories, anyway: working-class women, peasant women, poor ladino
women, and bourgeois women, middle-class women. There is something important about women in
Guatemala, especially Indian women, and that something is the relationship with the earth – between
the earth and the mother” (Burgos 1984, 220).
21 Belli’s testimonial narrative has challenged the traditional definition of the testimonio emerging from the
literary production of Nicaraguan authors in the 1980s. This topic exceeds the scope of this chapter.
For more details, see Palazón Sáez 2006, 2010.
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8
Polish women translators
A herstory
Ewa Rajewska
Introduction
Through the centuries, the role – and later the profession – of a literary translator was regarded
as one which pushes her or him into the background, into the shadows of reclusive, painstaking,
and often anonymous or forgotten work. The dense shadow hovering over women translators
was doubled however, cast by both the authors and male translators (cf. the classical diagnosis
that in the Western culture translation is an archetypal feminine activity because it is considered
secondary; Chamberlain 1988). This chapter provides a herstory of Polish women translators –
that is history emphasizing the cultural role of translating women, previously overlooked, dimin-
ished, or even neglected – and studies a number of selected profiles from the earliest times to
the present day. In the following sections, this ‘herstory’ will be discussed diachronically and
synchronically, with emphasis on the professionalization of translation and the rising gendering
of the Polish language in the 20th century.
Historical perspectives
In the multicultural Poland of the past, translating was common as a part of everyday commu-
nication and personal religious practice – for example in church services conducted in Latin or
Church Slavonic. However, the documented history of women translators in Poland is not long
and dates back only to the late 16th century (Dębska 2016, 164). Written translation required
literacy, which among women, traditionally uneducated as they were, was not prevalent even
in the noblest houses. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the first woman transla-
tor mentioned in Polish records was a queen – Anne of Austria (1573–1598), married to King
Sigismund III Vasa. Apart from her native German, Queen Anne, thoroughly educated by
the Jesuits, spoke Latin, Spanish, and Italian; she soon became quite fluent in Polish. A fervent
Catholic, as a young girl the future queen translated the life of Saint Ignatius from Latin into
German (Dębska 2016, 166).
Contrary to conditions in later centuries, the very beginnings of women’s literary transla-
tion in Poland were quite democratic – among the translators we can find not only royals and
noble ladies but also townswomen. Especially printers’ widows, who were not only literate but
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Ewa Rajewska
also well acquainted with the secrets of their late husbands’ craft, often took up translation, and
had their work printed. As artisans’ widows, they enjoyed a special status, which allowed them
to take over businesses after their husbands’ deaths. Jadwiga Piotrowczykowa, widow of printer
Andrzej Piotrowczyk, ran his publishing house in Kraków; “having received no education in
her youth, only after she had brought up her sons she commenced to learn Latin, and with
such an effect that she wrote poetry in this language” (Sowiński 1821, 26). Jadwiga Piotrow-
czykowa’s daughter-in-law, Anna Teresa Piotrowczykowa née Pernus (c. 1600–1672), followed
in her footsteps, also becoming a publisher as a widow. She authored the Polish translation of
the Jesuit Philippe Hannotel’s Latin meditation Ćwiczenie, którym się wzbudzać mamy do miłości
Boga dla nas ukrzyżowanego (1649; The Exercise of the Love of God Crucified for Us) (Dębska 2016,
167). Rozmyślania męki Pana Jezusa (Religious Reflections on the Passion of Jesus Christ), translated
from Spanish and published anonymously in Kraków in 1594, was attributed to another print-
er’s widow, Anna Schreibenycher (Kapuścińska 2016). Zofia Bohowitynowa née Czartoryska
(c. 1580–c. 1603), a princess, who did not inherit a publishing house, but having become a
widow established her own, specializing in Church Slavonic texts; Bohowitynowa translated
religious writings and excerpts from the New Testament from ancient Greek (Dębska 2016,
166). Her works, like many of that time, have been lost and are only known from hearsay (or at
secondhand: a religious writer Kirill Stavrovyetski quotes her texts at length; Dębska 2016, 166).
Many of these earliest translations remain in manuscript.
Translations of Latin religious writings, also unpublished and only for private use, were still
popular in the mid-17th century and later, but the 18th century brought a change in the
translation repertoire. With French queens on the Polish throne (1645–1667; 1676–1697) and
accordant shifts in foreign policy, knowledge of French became trendy, and in the 18th cen-
tury, it became obligatory among the members of the noble class. Noble ladies enjoyed French
romances, theatre, and opera plays, and readily translated them by way of exercise.
But the hegemony of French was not absolute. Around 1730, Barbara Radziwiłłowa (1690–
1770), la grande dame, daughter of the governor of Minsk, Voivodeship Krzysztof Zawisza, trans-
lated La Dianea by Giovanni Francesco Loredan, an Italian adventure romance very popular all
across Europe. Her translation remained in manuscript (Miszalska 2015, 99–105). Radziwiłłowa’s
profile presented by Jadwiga Miszalska is characteristic for noble women translators of the time:
“This strong and active woman, Dame of the Order of Saint Catherine and the Order of the
Starry Cross, skilful manager of the ancestral estate, mother of fourteen, was able to find time
for literature and politics, and often significantly influenced the course of public activity of her
husband Mikołaj Faustyn. Apart from that she was a benefactress of the Convent of the Car-
melites and a founder of many churches” (Miszalska 2015, 99). Barbara Radziwiłłowa’s younger
sister, Maria Beata Zawiszanka-Łaniewska, also translated – from French; she prepared the Pol-
ish version of excerpts from Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (as Historia
Aria-mena, c. 1717–1719; Artamène, or Cyrus the Great).
French romances were translated – and published – also by the socialite Anna Narbuttowa
née Grozmani (second half of the 18th century) and the novelist Anna Mostowska née Radziwiłł
(1762–c. 1810). The former rendered into Polish Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (Diabeł
kulawy, 1777; The Devil upon Two Sticks), the latter, Le Saphir Merveilleux by Stéphanie Félicité de
Genlis (Szafir, czyli talizman, 1806; The Marvelous Sapphire).
Duchess Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (1705–1753) was a poet and the first Polish
woman playwright. Apart from writing her own plays (published posthumously in 1754 as
Komedyje i tragedyje), in the late 1740s she translated or rather adapted Molière’s comedies: Les
précieuses ridicules (Komedia wytwornych i śmiesznych dzieweczek; The Pretentious Young Ladies), Les
amants magnifiques (Miłość wspaniała; The Magnificent Lovers) and Le médecin malgré lui (Gwałtem
108
medyk; The Doctor in Spite of Himself ). They were staged in her own court theatre in Nieśwież,
which was an amateur théâtre de société, or rather family theatre – new performances were organ-
ized to add lustre and festivity to family celebrations. Komedia wytwornych i śmiesznych dzieweczek,
for example, was translated and staged in 1752 for a birthday party of the duchess’s daughter.
The actors were recruited from family members, friends, and servants; the plays often had a
didactic undertone, as Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa personally cared for the education of
a number of children, her own and those entrusted to her by others. She experienced some 29
pregnancies, which for an aristocratic woman of the time was no exception. Due to numerous
miscarriages and very high infant mortality, the duchess succeeded in raising only three children
to full maturity ( Judkowiak 2015, 11–12). Although renowned as a poet, “she characterized
her writings as ‘trivial,’ considering them merely ‘minor works of feminine simplicity,’ justifying
them to readers as ‘poor poetry’ because they were ‘written by a woman’ ” ( Judkowiak 2015, 14).
Unlike works by Radziwiłłowa, French comedies translated by Maria Potocka née Kątska
(c. 1720–1768) were neither published nor performed. Her translations of Molière’s Les précieuses
ridicules (Komedia z francuskiego na polski wytłumaczona o drożących się i wykwintnych białogłowych)
and Les fourberies de Scapin (Komedia druga zdradziectwa Skapina pokazująca, z francuskiego na polski
język wytłumaczona; The Impostures of Scapin) remained only in manuscript (Rudnicka 1996, 296).
Such works, testifying to the literary interests of their author and prepared without any prospect
of publication, are very common in private archives of that time (Miszalska 2015, 296).
Duchess Barbara Urszula Sanguszkowa (1718–1791), a poet, philanthropist, moralist, and
the hostess of a literary salon in Poddębice, modelled after French salons, was the translator of
a prayer book written by Louise de La Vallière, former mistress of Louis XIV of France turned
Carmelite nun (Uwaga duszy przez pokutę nawracającej się do Boga, 1743; Reflections on the Mercy
of God) and a collection of religious-moral reflections by cardinal Giovanni Bona (Przewodnia
do nieba droga, 1744; The Easy Way to God). She also translated a medical book which she com-
missioned from her court physician Francis Curtius (O chorobach prędkiego ratunku potrzebujących,
1783; On Diseases Requiring Quick Medical Assistance), as well as a French romance in letters by
Phillipe Louis Gérard (Hrabia de Valemont, czyli obłąd rozumu, 1788; The Count of Valmont, or the
Loss of Reason).
Like duchess Sanguszkowa, duchess Izabela Czartoryska née Flemming (1746–1835) was a
patron of artists, who were regular visitors and denizens at her court in Puławy. Her residence
became the seat of the first Polish museum. It was surrounded by a magnificent English-style
garden as the duchess was very keen on gardening. In 1783, she initiated the Polish translation
of the descriptive poem Les Jardins, en quatre chants (The Gardens, A Poem) by Jacques Delille,
completed by the poet Franciszek Karpiński and the duchess’s daughter Maria Wirtemberska
as Ogrody. In 1805, she published her own book on establishing gardens, Myśli różne o sposobie
zakładania ogrodów (Various Thoughts on Starting a Garden), with a motto translated from Alexander
Pope. She also translated into French and published an elegy by Ludwik Kropiński, Emrod (1825).
The intellectual atmosphere of the Puławy court was very favourable. Duchess Maria Wir-
temberska (1768–1854), Izabela Czartoryska’s daughter and wife to Duke Louis of Württem-
berg, was the author of the first Polish sentimental novel Malwina czyli domyślność serca (1816;
English: Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition). But before she became a successful novelist, Maria Wir-
temberska translated Le Bon Père, a one act comedy by Jean-Pierre. Claris de Florian (Ojciec dobry;
1786, in manuscript; English: The Good Father), dedicating it to her father Duke Adam Kazimi-
erz Czartoryski. In 1794, together with her younger sister Zofia Czartoryska (1778–1837), she
presented him with another literary gift: a collection of translations, including excerpts from
Tacitus, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Robertson. Zofia translated fragments
from Shakespeare (Szwach 2016, 246).
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Ewa Rajewska
Anna Nakwaska née Krajewska (1781–1851), a novelist, author of children’s books and the
hostess of a literary salon in Warsaw, translated Wirtemberska’s Malwina into French (Malvina,
ou l’instinct du coeur, Warszawa 1817; 2nd edition: La Polonaise ou l’instinct du Coeur, Paris 1822).
Countess Konstancja Raczyńska née Potocka (1781–1852), the wife of count Edward
Raczyński – a philanthropist, founder of a first Polish public library in Poznań, and publisher of
Polish historical records – helped her husband in translating numerous documents from French
into Polish. In the early 1840s she was the leader of the first team including Polish women
translators, who worked on Polish versions of French letters and documents by Queen Marie
Louise Gonzaga (Portofolio królowéj Maryi Ludwiki, 1841), French and Latin documents illus-
trating the reign of Stanislaus I (Materiały do historii Stanisława Leszczyńskiego, 1841), as well as
French and German documents illustrating the reign of King Augustus II the Strong (Archiwum
tajne Augusta II, 1843) (Wiesiołowski 2011, 69).
Wanda Malecka née Fryz (1800–1860), a noblewoman, poet, and the editor of the first Polish
women’s magazine in 1820s, Bronisława, czyli pamiętniki Polek (‘Bronisława, or Polish women’s
journals’), presented in it the latest trends in fashion, but also in foreign literatures, mostly in
her own translation. She translated prose from French and English, and edited the book series
‘Wybór romansów’ (‘An assortment of romances’) for the Warsaw-based publishing house of
Bruno Kiciński, in which she published her translations of novels by Walter Scott, George
Gordon Byron, Paul Lacroix, and François-René de Chateaubriand, among others. Her activity
had all the hallmarks of professionalism. The same was true of Klementyna Hoffmanowa née
Tańska (1798–1845), a children’s writer, educator, and the editor of the first Polish children’s
magazine Rozrywki dla Dzieci (‘Children’s Entertainment’), published in the second half of the
1820s. For Hoffmanowa, literary translation complemented her own writing; she translated or
adapted books for young readers by Pierre de Marivaux, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Charles de
Montalembert. However, full professionalization and emancipation of the translator’s work was a
process completed only in the 20th century, and as such will be discussed in the next subsection.

The Polish language is affected by gender asymmetry: masculine personal nouns are generic, which
results in the linguistic invisibility of women (Karwatowska and Szpyra-Kozłowska 2010). The Pol-
ish noun ‘tłumacz’, translator, is masculine, but may also refer to a woman;‘tłumaczka’ is more specific
and refers only to a woman translator. However, in the past the two names were not perceived as
equally prestigious and professional – their connotations have changed in the course of 20th century.
The semantic changes concerning the Polish noun ‘tłumaczka’ has paired with the emancipation of
women translators in Poland, both processes starting around the beginning of the 20th century.
In the second half of the 19th century, the field of literary translation in Poland, like the
field of literature, was – with some exceptions, of course – a masculine realm. One of strategies
adopted by women translators to join in was mimicry.
Zofia Trzeszczkowska née Mańkowska (1846–1911), a poet and a literary translator of Luís
Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (Luzyady 1890; The Lusiads) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du
mal (Kwiaty zła, 1894; The Flowers of Evil), among others, published her translations under her
father’s name as Adam M-ski, and contacted her editors and publishers mostly by mail. In her
anxious foreword to Luzyady she – as Adam M-ski – consequently used the masculine forms:
Pracę podjętą zrazu z przekonania, z czasem umiłowałem. [. . .] Robiłem, com mógł; dziś
jednak, w chwili rzucenia tego przekładu w świat, czuję wielką obawę, czym się dobrze
wywiązał z zadania? czy niezbyt pokrzywdziłem luzyjskiego pieśniarza? Pocieszam się
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tym, że w najgorszym razie przekład mój przypomni go naszemu społeczeństwu i może

lepszego tłumacza do wymierzenia mu sprawiedliwości zachęci.”
(M-ski 1890, 15)
With time I grew fond of that work, initially taken up out of conviction. . . . Although I did
my best, today, casting this translation out into the world, I feel very anxious. Did I manage
to carry out my task? Did I not treat the Lusitanian bard too wrong? I console myself with
the thought that in the worst case my translation will remind our society about him and
perhaps some better translator will decide to give him his due.
A subtler form of passing as a man – a man of letters – was to use the professional title of ‘tłumacz,’
the generic, masculine form, instead of ‘tłumaczka,’ which reveals gender. The noun ‘tłumaczka’ did
already exist; it was recorded in the first Polish dictionary published in the second decade of the
19th century by Samuel Bogumił Linde. The quoted examples of usage are rather curious – one is
impersonal/abstract: “Mowa, tłumaczka myśli mówiącego” (“Speech, the translator of the speaker’s
thoughts”), the other derogatory: “Pytia, prorokinia, czyli raczej czartowskich wyroków tłumaczka,”
(“The Pythia, the prophetess, or rather the translator of the devil’s decrees”) (Linde 1812, 629).
Among the source texts in her book on the first English translation of the Polish national
epic Pan Tadeusz, Aleksandra Budrewicz quotes a very interesting piece of early modern trans-
lation criticism. It not only reveals the ideal of translation of the second half of the 19th cen-
tury but is noteworthy because both parties – both women – engaged in the polemics use the
generic, masculine form ‘tłumacz’ (Budrewicz 2018).
In 1886 Maria Wentz’l (1859–1933), a reviewer of the magazine Biblioteka Warszawska (‘The
Warsaw Library’) and the future translator of Herbert George Wells’s The War of Worlds (Wojna
światów, 1899), criticizes inaccuracies in Master Thaddeus as translated by an English polono-
phile Maude Ashurst Biggs (1857–1933), using the forms ‘Miss Biggs’ and the masculine noun
‘tłumacz’ interchangeably. The effect is somewhat odd:
Czasem panna Biggs, zatopiona w trudnościach, z jakimi łamać jej się przychodziło, zdaje się
zapominać o wymaganiach angielskiego języka. [. . .] W niektórych znów razach tłumacz
zdaje się nie zrozumiał autora i, polegając na słownikach, napisał zdanie, które, gdyby je
drugi raz przeczytał, wydałoby mu się z pewnością nielogicznym.
Here and there Miss Biggs, struggling hard with the encountered difficulties, seems to for-
get about the demands of the English language. [. . .] Elsewhere the translator [masc.] must
have misunderstood the author, and, relying on dictionaries, has written a sentence which
would surely sound illogical to him had he read it again.
Countering these charges, Maude Ashurst Biggs defends herself, using also the masculine form:
“Pani Maria Wentz’l zdaje się głównie zarzucać mi, iż byłam nadto wyłącznie tłumaczem
liter i słów Mickiewicza ze szkodą jego poematu.”
“Mrs Maria Wentz’l seems to scold me primarily for being only a translator (masc.) of
Mickiewicz’s letters and words, to the detriment of his poem.”
Hiding in a man’s shadow is quite characteristic of the period between the turn of the 20th
century and the outbreak of World War II, when neither the noun ‘tłumaczka’ nor a woman
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Ewa Rajewska
translator’s professional activity were held in high esteem. It was a time of non-professionals,
who worked mostly on translations of children’s literature and popular novels – mostly French,
English, and Russian, although English was already starting to gain influence.
Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, an indisputable luminary of literary translation of that time and the
translator of the French literary canon into Polish, scornfully stated that for a woman deceived
in love, translation was a tempting alternative to other typical careers: that of an actress, mil-
liner, or a pension owner in the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane (Boy-Żeleński 1948, 13).
Interestingly enough, Boy-Żeleński’s wife Zofia Żeleńska was for many years a meticulous
proofreader of his translations; she never agreed to put her name on the book covers as his co-
translator, however (Winklowa 2001, 91).
Julian Tuwim, a famous poet and prominent translator of Russian poetry, claimed that
“a woman translator is, with few exceptions, a social and class phenomenon, but not a literary
one; she takes up translating solely for money, and out of ignorance makes hilarious mistakes”
(Tuwim 1950, 167–168). Julian’s sister Irena Tuwim (1899–1987), a poet and novelist, is the
most recognizable Polish woman translator in history; her literary translation of Alexander Alan
Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (Kubuś Puchatek, 1938) is considered a masterpiece. Irena’s first transla-
tions were published in cooperation with her husband Stefan Napierski; one of them appeared
in print as a work of Julian Tuwim. Irena Tuwim wrote ample memoirs on her famous brother
and just two short and impersonal commentaries on her translation practice. She translated more
than 60 books – by A.A. Milne, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Edith Nesbit, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
among others – which have been loved by her readers and reissued to this day.
Irena Tuwim was one of the first professional translators; in the course of her career she
gave up writing poetry and concentrated on translating, indeed out of mercantile reasons – to
make her living. And Aniela Zagórska was a professional translator who worked on only one
author – Joseph Conrad. However, in the first decades of the 20th century translating was rarely
a mainstream literary career. Many women poets of that time – Maria Konopnicka, Kazimiera
Zawistowska, Bronisława Ostrowska, Zofia Rogoszówna – regarded literary translation as an
activity complementary to their original writing.
Post-war times brought a radical change: in a communist country relatively close to the West
but isolated by the Iron Curtain, the classic works of world literature were translated within the
framework of a state publishing policy. Prestigious translation series published by newly estab-
lished, powerful state-owned publishing houses were very often designed, edited, and translated
by women – now professional editors and literary translators. The translator’s profession was
democratized. Among the most active women translators of the post-war period were Maria
Skibniewska, Mira Michałowska, Zofia Kierszys, Krystyna Tarnowska, Wacława Komarnicka,
and Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska – all born before the war and well-educated, also in
foreign languages.
However, women translators, even those valued as specialists and relatively well paid, were
still considered hacks, much inferior to ‘real,’ original authors. Zofia Chądzyńska (1912–2003),
a writer and a translator of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jean
Reverzy, among others, whose translations initiated a long-lasting literary fashion for Latin
American prose in Poland, depicts women translators’ concerns in an internal monologue of the
protagonist of her novel Skrzydło sowy (The Owl Wing) (1967):
Aniela Raszewska, nasza najlepsza tłumaczka. Kontraktów a kontraktów. Najwyższe stawki. . . .

Co z tego, że dobrze ich tłumaczy, że wynajduje prawidłowe ekwiwalenty dla ich słów,
jak śpiewaczka, która ma piękny głos i czyta nuty, ale która nigdy nie zrozumie, dlaczego tak
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a nie inaczej te nuty zostały napisane. . . . Nieraz się zastanawiała, czy słusznie w stosunku do
odtwórców używa się słowa talent. . . . Była tłumaczką, to znaczy nikim.
(Chądzyńska 1967, 12, 21, 24)
Aniela Raszewska, our best translator. Lots of contracts. The highest rates. . . . And what does
it matter that she translates them well, that she finds accurate equivalents for their words, like
a singer who has a beautiful voice and reads the score, but will never understand why it was
written in this way and not the other. . . . She often wondered whether the word “talent”
is justly used with reference to reproducers. [. . .] She was a translator [fem.], that is nobody.
On the other hand, the novelist and diarist Maria Dąbrowska and the poet Kazimiera
Iłłakowiczówna, both literary translators, unanimously claimed that translation is a threat to
their original writing; it impoverishes the mind and steals the time needed for creative work
(Dąbrowska 1954; Iłłakowiczówna 1958). Nonetheless, many poets, among them the Nobel
laureate Wisława Szymborska, but also Julia Hartwig, Anna Kamieńska, Ludmiła Marjańska,
Teresa Truszkowska, Łucja Danielewska, and Krystyna Rodowska, successfully managed to
combine these two literary activities.
Over the course of the 20th century, the connotations of the noun ‘tłumaczka’ have changed;
however, some of the most acknowledged women translators still tend to refer to themselves
with the generic form in interviews or paratexts. Małgorzata Łukasiewicz (b. 1948), transla-
tor of Robert Walser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and Jürgen Habermas use both forms:
Można [. . .] powiedzieć, że Walser ma już swoje miejsce w świadomości polskich

czytelników. I to jest ten miły moment w życiu tłumacza – może popatrzeć w lustro
i powiedzieć sobie: to ja się do tego przyczyniłem.
(Łukasiewicz 2007)
We may say that . . . Walser has already gained some recognition from Polish readers.
And this is this nice moment in a translator’s [masc.] life – he can take a look at himself in
the mirror and say: I take some credit for that.
Jako tłumaczka mam do czynienia przede wszystkim z różnymi idiomami albo stylami, z
różnymi indywidualnościami literackimi. To może być kłopot albo przygoda, wszystko
zależy od tego, czy jesteśmy pesymistami czy optymistami.
(Zaleska 2015)
As a translator [fem.] I deal with different idioms or styles, different literary individuals in
the first place. This might be a problem or an adventure, everything depends on whether
you’re a pessimist or an optimist.
A new era began in 1989, with the political transformation and the abolition of censorship
on 12 May 1990. The freeing up of the publishing market resulted in a flood of translations,
all too often of poor quality, and the prestige of the profession temporarily dropped. Yet a new
phenomenon has emerged: academic literary translators, who combine theory and practice,
teaching translation studies and successfully translating literary and academic texts (Rajewska
2015, 297). To this group belong Elżbieta Tabakowska, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jolanta
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Ewa Rajewska
Kozak, Jolanta Kozłowska, Olga Kubińska, Ewa Skwara, Ewa Kraskowska, Bogumiła Kaniewska,
Agnieszka Kuciak, Julia Fiedorczuk, Agnieszka Pokojska, and Magda Heydel. The latter
(b. 1969), translator of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Seamus Heaney, and Alice Oswald among
others, has no problems introducing herself as a female translator:
W posłowiu do przekładu [Jądra ciemności] pisałam o tym, co wydarzyło się pomiędzy Con-
radem podróżującym po rzece Kongo, a potem piszącym o tej podróży, a nami – tłumaczką,
która przekłada jego opowieść w kompletnie innym świecie, i jej czytelnikami.
(Zaleska 2015)
In my foreword to the translation [of Heart of Darkness] I wrote about what has happened
between Conrad sailing up the Congo River, and later writing about this journey, for us –
the translator [fem.] who translates his story in a completely different world – and its readers.

In her article discussing some “founding mothers of Polish woman-made translation” Karo-
lina Dębska states that “there are very few 17th-century women translators in Poland who are
known by name,” and concludes: “just knowing the names of our foremothers is very hearten-
ing” (Dębska 2016, 170). Indeed, such important sources of general knowledge as Odpowiednie
dać słowu słowo. Zarys dziejów przekładu literackiego w Polsce [Finding the exact word for a word. An
outline history of literary translation in Poland] by Wacław Sadkowski (2002; 2nd edition 2013), the
only Polish monograph on that topic, names no Polish women translators before the end of the
19th century; the “Polish Tradition” entry to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies,
written by Elżbieta Tabakowska (2009), names no women translators whatsoever.
New emerging projects which will certainly involve women translators’ biograms, although
they are not focused on women translators alone, include a digital bio-bibliographical dictionary
of Polish translators of foreign literatures and translators of Polish literature worldwide, prepared
under the guidance of Ewa Kołodziejczyk from the Institute of Literary Research of The Polish
Academy of Science in Warsaw. Renata Makarska of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
and Jadwiga Kita-Huber of Jagiellonian University in Kraków manage the Polish part of the
Germersheimer Übersetzerlexikon (www.uelex.de), which includes biograms of translators of
Polish literature into German.
Future directions
A herstory of Polish women translators – much more comprehensive than the outline presented
here – should be a partial effect of the complete history of Polish translations and Polish litera-
ture written from the perspective of translation. The group of researchers under the guidance of
Magda Heydel, TS scholar from the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in
Kraków, is gearing up for this task. Historiography is, however, only one aspect; the other side of
the coin would be developing feminist translation criticism, so far non-existent.
Further reading
Przekładaniec. 2010. Myśl feministyczna a przekład, no. 24; English version: Feminism and Translation, 2012,
no. 24. Available at: www.ejournals.eu/Przekladaniec/English-issues/%20Numer-24-english-version/.
114
This is a collection of articles on translation studies and feminist thought in Western context, with some
case studies on – mainly Polish – history of translation.
Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego. 2016. Part II: Women’s Voices in Translation, no. 29.
Available at: www.ujk.edu.pl/ifp/studia_filologiczne/?page_id=32&lang=pl.
This issue includes a collection of articles on feminine voices in TS studies and women translators in
the global context.
Urszula Radziwiłłowa, Franciszka. 2015. Selected Drama and Verse. Edited by P. J. Corness and B. Judkowiak,
translated by P. J. Corness. Toronto: Iter Academic Press.
This source offers a selection of works – dramas and lyric poems – by an 18th-century Polish savante,
with an excellent historical-biographical introduction.
Related topics
So far, in Poland we have witnessed no attempts at a comprehensive history of Polish literary
translation. Case studies of particular texts in different translations into or from Polish are quite
prevalent, but there are only few monographs on the output – style, strategy, translation choices –
of individual translators (such as Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Barańczak, Ludmiła Marjańska), nor
are there many translators’ biographies (for example, of Maciej Słomczyński, Zofia Chądzyńska,
Irena Tuwim).
New research in the field of translator studies is already emerging, and the social status of
translators is improving. In his article Niech nas zobaczą (Let Them See Us) from 2011, Jerzy Jarnie-
wicz, a prominent Polish TS scholar, poet, and a translator himself, proclaimed the c oming-out
of Polish translators (out of the insides of books onto their covers) ( Jarniewicz 2011). Five years
later Jarniewicz published a text in which he compared the changing place of literary transla-
tion within culture to the changing perception of roles traditionally ascribed to women, as well
as listing the names of most acknowledged contemporary Polish women translators ( Jarniewicz
2016). Apart from these publications, two recent volumes of interviews with translators are
worth noting: Zofia Zaleska, Przejęzyczenie. Rozmowy o przekładzie (2015) and Adam Pluszka,
Wte i wewte. Z tłumaczami o przekładach (2016).
References
Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz. 1948. Słowo od tłumacza. Translated by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, in Henri Murger
and Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, eds., Sceny z życia cyganerii. Warszawa: Wiedza, 5–16.
Budrewicz, Aleksandra. 2018. ‘Pan Tadeusz’ po angielsku: Spory wokół wydania i przekładu. Poznań:
Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk.
Chądzyńska, Zofia. 1967. Skrzydło sowy. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.
Chamberlain, Lori. 1988. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs, 13(3), 454–472.
Dąbrowska, Maria. 1954. Parę myśli o pracy przekładowej. Twórczość (9), 169–181.
Dębska, Karolina. 2016. Foremothers. First Women Translators in Poland. Studia Filologiczne Uniwersytetu
Jana Kochanowskiego (29), 163–172.
Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera. 1958. Niewczesne wynurzenia. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.
Jarniewicz, Jerzy. 2011. Niech nas zobaczą. Twórczość (4), 71–77.
Jarniewicz, Jerzy. 2016. Antygony wracają. dwutygodnik (188). Available at: www.dwutygodnik.com/
artykul/6623-antygony-wracaja.html [Accessed 13 Feb. 2019].
Judkowiak, Barbara. 2015. Introduction. Translated by Patrick John Corness, in F. U. Radziwiłłowa, Patrick
John Corness, and Barbara Judkowiak, eds., Selected Drama and Verse. Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 1–73.
Kapuścińska, Anna. 2016. Theatrum meditationis. Ignacjanizm i jezuityzm w duchowej i literackiej kul-
turze Pierwszej Rzeczypospolitej – źródła, inspiracje, idee, in Anna Nowicka-Jeżowa, ed., Drogi duch-
owe katolicyzmu polskiego XVII wieku, vol. VII. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego,
119–229.
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Karwatowska, Małgorzata and Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska. 2010. Lingwistyka płci. Ona i on w języku polskim.
Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej.
Linde, Samuel, ed. 1812. Słownik języka polskiego, vol. 6. Warszawa: nakładem autora.
Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata. 2007. Tłumacząc, staję się kimś innym. Nowe Książki (10), 4–7.
Miszalska, Jadwiga. 2015. Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski. Przekłady z literatury włoskiej w Polsce do końca XVIII
wieku. Kraków: Collegium Columbinum.
M-ski, Adam. 1890. Kilka słów o życiu autora, in L. Camoëns, Luzyady. Epos w dziesięciu pieśniach. War-
szawa: nakł. i druk S. Lewentala, 5–16.
Pluszka, Adam. 2016. Wte i wewte. Z tłumaczami o przekładach. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Słowo/Obraz Terytoria.
Rajewska, Ewa. 2015. Twórczość przekładowa kobiet, in Ewa Kraskowska and B. Kaniewska, eds., Polskie
pisarstwo kobiet w wieku XX: procesy i gatunki, sytuacje i tematy. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM,
270–298.
Rudnicka, Jadwiga. 1996. Maria z Kątskich Potocka jako tłumaczka Moliera, in Krystyna Stasiewicz and
Stanisław Achremczyk, eds., Między barokiem a oświeceniem. Nowe spojrzenie na czasy saskie. Olsztyn:
Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, 291–293.
Sadkowski, Wacław. 2013. Odpowiednie dać słowu słowo. Zarys dziejów przekładu literackiego w Polsce. 2nd ed.
Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek.
Sowiński, Jan. 1821. O uczonych Polkach. Krzemieniec–Warszawa: nakładem N. Glücksberga.
Szwach, Agnieszka. 2016. Women in Europe Read and Translate Shakespeare. Studia Filologiczne Uniwer-
sytetu Jana Kochanowskiego (29), 235–248.
Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 2009. Polish Tradition, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Ency-
clopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 501–509.
Tuwim, Julian. 1950. Traduttore – traditore, in Pegaz dęba. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 166–190.
Wiesiołowski Jacek. 2011. Najlepsza Polka o niepospolitym usposobieniu. Kronika Miasta Poznania, (1), 66–71.
Winklowa, Barbara. 2001. Boyowie. Zofia i Tadeusz Żeleńscy. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Zaleska, Zofia. 2015. Przejęzyczenie. Rozmowy o przekładzie. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne.
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9
Women translators in early
modern Europe
Hilary Brown
Introduction and definitions

The study of women translators in history is a vibrant field, and no part of this history has
received more attention than the early modern period (understood broadly here as the 16th
and 17th centuries). Scholars have been intrigued by the numbers of women who emerge as
translators as the Renaissance and Reformation spread through Europe: from queens (Katherine
Parr, Elizabeth I) and aristocrats (Anne de Greville, Mary Sidney Herbert, Catharina Regina von
Greiffenberg) to members of scholarly families (Margaret More Roper, Anne Dacier) and those
with more humble or obscure roots (Anne Lock, Margaret Tyler, Aphra Behn).
The state of research on women translators varies from country to country. There is a grow-
ing body of work on France, the Netherlands, and Germany, for example, but still very little
on Italy or Spain. The most systematically researched tradition by far is the English one, thanks
largely to the efforts of scholars in English rather than translation studies. The Renaissance,
usually dated c. 1500–1640, has been particularly well studied. Scholars have done invaluable
work in making primary material more readily accessible: from digital facsimiles in the Perdita
Manuscripts database, to reprints in the Ashgate Early Modern Englishwoman Facsimile Library
and MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series, to critical editions of the collected works of
author-translators such as Elizabeth I, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn.
We now also have the benefit of surveys in encyclopaedias and literary histories (e.g. Sankovitch
1999; Brown 2005; Hosington and Fornier 2007; Clarke 2009; Wright 2010) and a number of
edited volumes and monographs (e.g. Hannay 1985; Krontiris 1992; Belle 2012; Uman 2012;
Goodrich 2014).
This attention to early modern women translators has gone hand-in-hand with a surge
of scholarly interest in early modern cultures of translation more generally. It is now widely
acknowledged that translation was fundamental to an age defined by ‘renaissance,’ i.e. appro-
priations of the classical past, and ‘reformation,’ i.e. challenges to the dominance of the Latinate
Roman Catholic Church, and that translation played a central role in many different contexts:
in education, in negotiations of status and power, in the book trade, in religious and political
upheavals. Many of the recent edited collections on early modern translation include essays on
women (e.g. Hosington 2011a, Serjeantson 2013; Wilson-Lee 2015; Smith 2018).
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Hilary Brown
Nevertheless, there is no consensus about what translation signified for women. It has often
been stated that, as a second-rate, derivative activity, translation was particularly suitable for
women in pre-modern times and allowed them to engage in intellectual life without trespass-
ing into the masculine realm of authorship. However, this sits uneasily alongside the recognition
that translation was a widespread, often highly valued, and high-stakes practice in this period.
The study of early modern women translators thus challenges us to rethink the role of gender
in translation history.
Up until the late 20th century, if scholars were interested in early modern translation at all then
their focus was usually on men. Francis Otto Matthiessen’s seminal Translation: An Elizabethan
Art (1931, reprint 1965), for instance, is devoted to Thomas Hoby, John Florio, Thomas North,
and Philemon Holland. One exception is Anne Dacier, who has earned herself a place in liter-
ary history thanks to the renown of her Iliad and Odyssey and her involvement in the Quarrel
of Ancient and Moderns. Early critics who did write about women tended to pay little or no
attention to gender issues but were concerned, for example, with trying to establish facts relating
to publication history (e.g. Hughey 1934) or with (rather subjective) pronouncements on the
success of a translator’s efforts (e.g. Greene 1941).
The first influential studies of early modern women translators came in the wake of the
feminist literary project of the 1970s which sought to counter male-dominated canons by
reclaiming lost female voices. Theoretical impetus came from a still much-anthologized article
by Lori Chamberlain (1988/2012) which identified a sexualized discourse about translation
through history – inferior, reproductive, feminine translation vs. superior, productive, masculine
original – and called for feminist investigations into “the role of ‘silent’ forms of writing such
as translation in articulating women’s speech and subverting hegemonic forms of expression”
(267). In two pioneering works on the English Renaissance (Hannay 1985; Krontiris 1992),
scholars set about excavating a tradition of female translators and analyzing their lives and works
based on the notion that the female sex had been marginalized and oppressed by patriarchal
society. They argued that women were generally expected to adhere to the rule of silence but
as translation was a “degraded activity” (Hannay 1985, 8) it was permissible for women in a
way in which original discourse was not, at least if they limited themselves to religious works.
Women typically opted for word-for-word translation as this was less “assertive” than a freer
method (Krontiris 1992, 68) and they shied away from publication, usually only owning up to
their works if they were “restricted” to manuscripts circulated among the family (Hannay 1985,
9). Nonetheless, women occasionally subverted their source texts “in order to insert personal or
political statements” (Hannay 1985, 4) or chose transgressive, non-religious source material, as in
the case of Margaret Tyler’s version of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s chivalric romance Espejo
de príncipes y cavalleros which indirectly critiques contemporary gender ideology and is prefaced
by a bold attack on patriarchy (Krontiris 1992, 44–62). The conclusions drawn in the volumes
by Margaret P. Hannay and Tina Krontiris have shaped the field and reverberate to some extent
in more recent work on 16th- and early 17th-century England (e.g. Uman 2012).

Research has often continued to focus on women as part of a separate tradition. The questions
asked are the same as those asked about male translators – who translates? in what circum-
stances? why? what? for whom? how? to what effect? (cf. Burke 2007, 11) – but inflected by
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gender. Scholars are keen to tease out how the translator’s sex has affected the different aspects
of her work, and have been particularly interested in women who seem to display some form of
feminine or feminist consciousness. Thus studies provide ample evidence of women who used
translation to assert their agency and undermine patriarchal values, which is typically demon-
strated through their choice of authors, methods of presentation (dedications, prefaces, notes),
or translation strategies.
Douglas Robinson (1995) and Mirella Agorni (1998) were among those who extended the
notion of an English female translation tradition into the 17th century and beyond. Robinson
charts women’s progress towards finding a public voice, from Margaret More Roper to Aphra
Behn, showing how they subvert established rhetorics in their prefaces in increasingly self-
possessed ways; while Agorni examines women’s opportunities to “voice their experience as a
woman” (182) from Behn onwards (for Behn and feminine translation, see also e.g. Young 1999;
Cottegnies 2004). In a similar vein, Catherine M. Müller’s work on 16th-century France (2004,
2007) suggests female translators are linked by the way they intervene in woman questions, pre-
senting female characters in a positive light and expunging any misogynistic comment from their
sources. In a rare piece on a translator from the Iberian peninsula, Rosalie Hernández-Pecoraro
(2003) argues that Isabel Correa subverts the Spanish pastoral mode by producing a “feminine
transformative translation” (138) of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido: her amendments,
such as where an image of male potency becomes one of female desire, demonstrate that “Cor-
rea’s conscious and unconscious gendered understanding of the world pervades in the produc-
tion of her translation” (142). Recently there have also been efforts to uncover a transnational
female tradition, for instance the fascinating example of the Dutch poet Anna Roemers Visscher
who inserted her own handwritten translations into her editions of Georgette de Montenay’s
Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes in an attempt to “reformulate the meaning of female authorship
and imagine an international community of women writers” (Elk 2009, 184).

A growing body of scholarship is casting doubt on the traditional feminist view of translation
history. This is perhaps an inevitable development, as more and more research on early modern
literary and translation cultures is helping scholars to see the bigger picture, at least with respect
to England. Scholars are also of course becoming more wary of the essentialism of the labels
‘man’ and ‘woman,’ given poststructuralist ideas about the unstable, performative, and contin-
gent nature of gender. Increasingly, there is an awareness that the kind of ‘woman-interrogated’
approach advocated by Carol Maier for contemporary translation practice could be productively
applied to the study of women translators in history (see Brown 2018a).
Early revisionist work on England includes essays by Suzanne Trill (1996) and Micheline
White (1999a) who argue for a shift in focus: women’s translations may be interesting for aes-
thetic or religious/political reasons rather than as documents of feminine consciousness. Trill
sets out a critique of earlier statements about the ‘femininity’ of translation during the Renais-
sance, pointing out for example that translation was not a ‘degraded activity,’ that men engaged
in translation far more often than women, that women were not limited to religious texts, and
that men produced literal translations too. She uses the case study of Mary Sidney’s Psalmes to
illustrate how it is “inappropriate” to pursue “a desire to recover the ‘feminine voice’ ” (150), as it
is problematic to read them (auto)biographically; instead, the translations embody “the search for
a poetic language with which to address God” (153), a central concern for Renaissance poets,
and thus Sidney is making an important contribution to the development of religious lyric.
White re-examines assumptions about the ‘femininity’ of religious translation. Her case study
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Hilary Brown
presents Anne Lock’s rendition of Jean Taffin’s Calvinist Des marques des enfans de Dieu, et des
consolations en leurs afflictions in relation to the government’s efforts to repress radical Protestant-
ism in the years around 1590, and she contends that Lock’s religious identity as a member of the
Puritan community was a more relevant factor in the production of her text than her gender.
The current tendency, then, is to look at early modern women translators within broader con-
texts. Scholars have continued the work of situating women’s activities within religious and polit-
ical history. This affords new views of the significance of texts sometimes deemed innocuous or
uninteresting from a feminist perspective (cf. White 2011). Brenda M. Hosington’s work is par-
ticularly notable here: in a fine series of articles (e.g. 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2014), she demonstrates
how translations by women such as Margaret Beaufort, Anne Cooke, Margaret More Roper,
and Mary Clarke Basset were produced in response to momentous contemporary religious and
political events, just like those of their male counterparts. Continental examples include Barbara
Becker-Cantarino’s interpretation of a translation of Guillaume Saluste Du Bartas’s didactic poem
Triompfe de la Foi by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the most famous German-speaking
woman poet of the 17th century, against the backdrop of Austrian politics (2014). Hosington and
others have stressed the need to consider how women and men worked alongside each other in
kinship, political, or confessional networks (White 1999b; Hosington 2011b).
New perspectives have also been opened up by re-evaluations of literary history. Scholars
have a better understanding of the place of translation within literary culture and are no longer
likely to lump translations together with “epitaphs, letters, and private devotional meditations” at
the “margins of discourse” (Hannay 1985, 14). Acknowledging the fluidity of concepts such as
authorship and genre in this period, they see translation as one of a multiplicity of literary prac-
tices which were deeply embedded within intersecting cultural landscapes (Bicks and Summit
2010). Julie Crawford’s work on 16th-century literary circles, for instance, shows how translation
was one of a number of textual activities undertaken by participants, alongside others such as
the writing of letters and petitions and the promotion or protection of like-minded associates,
which together constituted different forms of these groupings’ religious and political activism:
“If considering only the handful of translations, poems, and epitaphs these women wrote may
keep them safely minoritized as women writers, looking at the full range of their related activities
shows their profound influence on some of the most important events of the sixteenth century”
(2010, 46). Scholars have also re-thought the role of manuscripts in this age of print, breaking
down the old dichotomies between public and private, masculine and feminine, and showing
that women who produced manuscript translations were unlikely to have felt “restricted” by a
sense of feminine modesty (Hannay 1985, 9). Margaret J.M. Ezell’s study The Patriarch’s Wife
(1987), which unpacks assumptions about the influence of patriarchy on women’s writing in
17th-century England, includes a re-assessment of manuscript culture which has been very
influential (62–100): Ezell finds translations among manuscripts by both men and women and
argues that for both the reluctance to print may be due to “geography, social status, or expense”
(82) – the attitude left over from times gone by that it was unseemly for the nobility to print
their works, for example – and cannot always be attributed in the case of women to patriarchy.
Moreover, manuscript circulation was often perfectly adequate to writers’ or translators’ needs
(83). Since then, critics have frequently stressed that early modern manuscript production should
be understood as a form of publication; writers who opted for manuscript publication did so
for strategic and positive reasons; and there were many potential gains to be had from choos-
ing manuscript publication, from social prestige to political influence at the highest levels (see
e.g. Justice 2002; Goodrich 2014, 107–143). Recent work on collaboration is further blurring
the distinctions between men’s writing (or translating) and women’s writing (or translating). It is
recognized that collaboration was a defining feature of literary life across early modern Europe:
120
the production of texts, whether in manuscript or print, often involved several co-writers, and
critics argue that we need to conceive of more inclusive concepts of authorship and allow that
even male-female partnerships could be enabling and productive for women (for England, see
e.g. the essays in Pender 2017; for Germany, see Brown 2018b). In her trailblazing monograph
Grossly Material Things (2012), Helen Smith extends the notion of collaboration to the material
production and consumption of the early modern book, arguing that female agents were present
at every stage of these processes in diverse and complex but now often unacknowledged ways.
She is interested in translation as an activity “traditionally assumed to be secondary or subse-
quent to the act of literary creation” (52) and returns to some now-classic examples from the
period c. 1557–1640 such as Elizabeth I, Margaret Roper, and Margaret Tyler to illustrate how
“[b]oth women and men presented female translators as partners in a collaborative endeavour
to discover the author’s meaning, a process which took place within an extended circuit of
exchange, comparison, and mutual correction” (40).
Main research methods

Scholars working on early modern women translators come from different disciplines and
employ a range of approaches, although the majority have a background in literary studies. Most
research has appeared as articles or chapters and takes the form of case studies of individuals
or small clusters of translators; few scholars to date have attempted broader, synthesizing work.
The construction of ‘microhistories’ has been regarded across subject areas as a fruitful means of
recovering the lives and works of those who have been neglected by grand historical narratives
(for renewed interest in microhistory within translation studies, see Munday 2014).
As indicated previously, many studies – particularly earlier ones – are works of feminist liter-
ary historiography and adopt the method favoured by first- and second-wave feminist literary
critics which came to be termed ‘gynocriticism’ (see Showalter 1977/1982). These critics placed
emphasis on the social and historical conditions of women’s writing and on women’s difference:
working on the assumption that a writer’s sex affected the circumstances in which she wrote
and the texts she produced, they set out to uncover a separate female literary tradition. They
did valuable service in making previously forgotten women visible and in establishing gender
as a legitimate category of analysis. But this reading of history carries risks of lopsidedness,
anachronism, and hagiography. It was often assumed that the acts of writing/translating were
in themselves transgressive, and critics were keen to tease out and celebrate instances where
women explicitly voice opposition, subversion, or proto-feminism. “In terms of our methodo-
logical approach,” explain the editors of The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, which
includes a number of translator biographies, “we asked the contributing scholars to focus on
the development of a ‘feminist’ consciousness, on each writer’s awareness of the ways in which
gender shaped her outlook and her opportunities, and to reflect on the way categorizations,
structures, and terms used to describe literary works have been defined for women and the ways
in which women writers have responded to these definitions” (Sartori et al. 1999, ix). The early
16th-century writer and translator Marguerite Briet, aka Hélisenne de Crenne, for example,
whose output includes a French version of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid, is described as
a “monument of early modern feminist consciousness and female accomplishment”; further, the
“hallmark of Crenne’s literary endeavours” is “[e]quality feminism” (Nash 1999, 134).
Approaches to women translators are diversifying. Gradually critics are moving away from a
gynocritical approach towards a more contextualizing one. They no longer insist on difference
but are alive to the possibility of sameness. This does not mean effacing gender altogether but
starting out from a position which does not regard gender as the defining category of analysis.
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Hilary Brown
Thus literary scholars will assemble a corpus which includes both men and women and
aim for a balanced assessment of the relevance – or not – of gender. Gillian Wright considers
translators of both sexes in her survey “Translating at Leisure” in The Oxford History of Literary
Translation in English, 1550–1660, carefully noting how gentlewomen “shared some but not all
of their male contemporaries’ motives, preoccupations and circumstances” (2010, 62). Deirdre
Serjeantson’s article (2013) on the English translator Jane Seager is another paradigmatic exam-
ple: Serjeantson compares Seager’s Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills, a manuscript translation
presented to Elizabeth I in 1589, to translations of sibylline literature from the same period by
John Napier and Richard Verstegan. At first glance, Seager’s authoritative interventions in her
source material may conjure familiar arguments about female agency. But in a dazzlingly intri-
cate exploration of the three texts, in contexts ranging from iconography to Protestant transla-
tion theory to contemporary debates about emblems and hieroglyphics, Serjeantson can show
where she believes the significance of gender lies: it is not in Seager’s interventionist stance,
which she shares with male peers and is motivated by political and religious beliefs, but in her
choice of subject matter, as she inscribes herself and the Queen into her refashioning of the wise
and powerful sibyl figures.
Julie Candler Hayes made a groundbreaking attempt to bring a fresh, interdisciplinary
approach to the field. Her monograph Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England,
1600–1800 (2009) analyzes early modern translation by men as well as women through the lens
of post-war French philosophy. Hayes offers a reassessment of neoclassical translation theory,
seeking to disprove the view that translation in this period was solely reader-oriented and thus
inward-facing, hegemonizing and ethnocentric, and to demonstrate instead how translators had
“multiple agendas and projects” (7). Close readings from her corpus of 450 to 500 translators’
prefaces are informed in particular by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and
Jacques Derrida. Hayes includes a chapter on Anne Dacier and her position within the Quarrel
of Ancient and Moderns. She argues that although Dacier sided with the Ancients, her pref-
aces show an engagement with issues of translatability and meaning which prefigure Derrida’s
reflections on monolingualism and show she was “more ‘modern’ than the Moderns” (121). She
discusses gender explicitly in a survey of women translators in a later chapter, positing that trans-
lation offered women an opportunity to negotiate between active and passive authorship to find
a Derridean “middle voice” (161). Interestingly, the findings presented in this chapter as a whole
do not differ significantly from the work of earlier gynocritics. Focusing largely on the 18th
century, her selection of material points again to a female tradition: translations aimed at women
readers, translators commenting on female characters, women translating women’s writing and
dedicating their work to women. Hayes names this last trend “gynocentric translation” (156) and
commends the women for building textual connections based on gender to create – quoting the
words of feminist translation critic Suzanne De Lotbinière-Harwood – “solid woman-ground”
(146). The notion of femaleness underpinning her readings transcends historical periods (141)
and is unshifting. Derrida leads us to see how the “explicit ‘positionality’ of translation [. . .] casts
the inadequacy of the [active-passive] dichotomy into sharpest relief,” Hayes argues, and thus it
is not surprising that women writers, “who must constantly confront their positionality with
regard to textual production and social relations (in ways that males, naturalized as agents and
producers, may not), should have found in translation a stimulating and creative environment in
which to work” (162).
Finally, exciting new approaches are emerging from research on the history and materiality
of the book. Hosington has done much to advance the study of translation in early modern
England within the context of the book trade, including the development of online resources
which provide detailed quantitative data as the basis for such study: the Renaissance Cultural
122
Crossroads catalogue (www.dhi.ac.uk/rcc/) and Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth

Britain: An Online Analytical Catalogue of Translations, 1641–1660 (www.translationandprint.
com/catalogue). Keeping in view the wider publishing context should help us to evaluate prop-
erly the activities of women. Hosington’s method involves not treating translations in isolation
but as “one of a range of works published at the same time on the same subject and in similar
socio-historical circumstances” and taking into account factors such as “the ideological motiva-
tions of both translator and printer” (Hosington 2014, 248; see also Belle and Hosington 2017).
Scholars are also suggesting that we need to be more attentive to texts as material objects. Mate-
rialist analyses posit that publication can be perceived as an “event” – which encompasses “an
originary publication moment as well as the text’s subsequent retransmission by different hands,
at different moments and in different media” (Smith 2018: 189) – and the text as ‘archive,’ and
it has been argued that we need to return anew to the material elements of women’s transla-
tions, i.e. paratextual material such as dedications, woodcuts, and marginalia. Rosalind Smith, for
instance, examines the woodcut of a lady at a lectern which prefaces Margaret More Roper’s
Erasmus translation: where critics have always interpreted this as an image of “private reading”
by a female subject cloistered by the extravagant border (192–194), Smith traces iterations of the
image through four previous publications and concludes that its cropping and reframing here
creates new and positive associations of female scholarship. This indicates that women’s transla-
tions “are materially positioned not as a subordinate activity, but as a kind of co-labour within
publication events extending across multiple hands and textual instances” (2018, 207).
Future directions
While some in English studies suggest that research on women’s writing should move into the
post-recovery phase, there is surely still a place for recovering women translators, particularly
in countries other than England. Indeed, scholars have begun to chart the field (e.g. Stevenson
2005 provides initial information about translators such as the Italian Tarquinia Molza and Dan-
ish woman Birgitte Thott; see also Dębska 2016 on Poland; Leturio 2018 on Spain; and Gibbels
2018 for a new bibliography of German translators). One hopes, too, that there will be efforts to
compile big data on different language areas along the lines of the invaluable Renaissance Cul-
tural Crossroads catalogue. The Women Writers database (http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/), which
seeks to chart the international reception of women writers pre-1900, is an encouraging start,
but we are a long way off from a comprehensive pan-European resource – incorporating men as
well as women, perhaps manuscript as well as print – which would transform research on early
modern cultures of translation and provide us with new ways of asking questions about gender.
In the meantime, there is a need for more conversation between subject areas. Increasingly
scholars identify transcultural approaches to women’s writing as fruitful new terrain – witness
Jane Stevenson’s call for investigations into “the variety of interfaces between early modern
Englishwomen and the wider world” (2007, 291; cf. Suzuki 2011, 18–19) – and this research
does not of course have to take an Anglocentric starting point. Is it possible to speak of a
Europe-wide female translation tradition in a period increasingly understood as transnational or
does the contingency of gender imply that we need to be very sensitive to national conditions?
In practice scholars will need to consider how to overcome language barriers (research on Con-
tinental women translators is often published in the language of the country) and whether such
work would entail individuals entering into new territory – a move which sometimes invites
scepticism from single-discipline experts – or larger collaborative projects.
Above all, we will need to keep interrogating gender as a useful category for our research.
If Luise von Flotow defined a key question in 1997 as “How has gender affected the work of
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Hilary Brown
translators in the past?” (90), that question is gradually becoming “Has gender affected the work
of translators in the past?” We are accepting that gender is just one of the factors which has
shaped translation history, alongside others such as family milieu, social class, political beliefs,
and religious confession. We do not need to start out from the assumption that all women
who picked up their pens were proto-feminists, using translation to assert their agency and
undermine patriarchal values. We can move away from an always defensive, negative critique of
patriarchy, from the privileging of oppositional voices, to a more positive and nuanced account
of women’s opportunities and a readiness to acknowledge that the translator could adopt a
broader range of positions. But writing a history of poets and Puritans as well as proto-feminists,
of complicity as well as agency, presents us with challenges – will it still be women’s history? will
it still be feminist history? – which future scholars will have to ponder.
Further reading
Belle, Marie-Alice, ed. 2012. Women’s Translations in Early Modern England and France. Special issues of
Renaissance and Reformation, 35(4).
This special issue provides a good overview of current topics and approaches and includes a useful
introductory essay by Belle entitled “Locating Early Modern Women’s Translations: Critical and His-
toriographical Issues.”
Hosington, Brenda M. 2014. Women Translators and the Early Printed Book, in Vincent Gillespie and
Susan Powell, eds., A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558. Cambridge: Brewer,
248–271.
An important example of revisionist work which demonstrates how studying women’s translations
within the context of book history sheds light on their role in contemporary religious and political
developments.
York: Routledge.
Chapter 2 of this standard work contains a useful overview of historical research up to the mid-1990s.
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Patronage, Courtly Love and Morality. The Translator, 1(2), 153–175.
Sankovitch, Tilde. 1999. Translation (Renaissance), in Eva Martin Sartori et al., eds., The Feminist Encyclo-
pedia of French Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 532–534.
Sartori, Eva Martin et al., eds. 1999. The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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23, 76–90.
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10
Women writers in translation
in the UK
The “Year of Publishing Women” (2018)
as a platform for collective change?1
Introduction: the Year of Publishing Women (2018)

as a watershed year?
In May 2015, writer Kamila Shamsie sent out a provocative call to action as part of an impas-
sioned speech at the Hay Literature Festival, in Hay-on-Wye, Wales: she called on British
publishing houses to make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women (YPW), to coincide with the
centenary of some women getting the right to vote. As she announced in her talk, published by
The Guardian and The Bookseller a few weeks later (Shamsie 2015), the idea was simple: women
are still underrepresented in publishing, as in other domains, and so for one year publishing
houses should only publish books authored by women. This would then have a positive impact
not only on figures for that one year but also subsequent years, as the collective action would
shake up an industry that has been shown to be fairly stagnant in terms of the gender distribu-
tion of published books (see Rudd 2013).
By issuing this challenge in 2015, Shamsie was, ostensibly, giving publishers plenty of time to
prepare – and to take part. And yet only one publisher, the independent publishing house And
Other Stories, declared their intention to participate. As the founder of And Other Stories, Ste-
fan Tobler, explained, they realized “it provided an opportunity, instead of relying on what hap-
pens on its own, to really make a public call” (Tobler, in Yates-Badley 2018, online, n.p.). Nicky
Smalley, the marketing director, reflected that Shamsie’s “incendiary solution” was “a provoca-
tion to all British publishers, big and small, she urged presses to highlight the problem, instigate
discussion” (Smalley 2018, online, n.p.). Reactions elsewhere were mixed: most famously, at
a panel on the Women’s International Day in 2016, writer Lionel Shriver defined Shamsie’s
campaign as “rubbish and a ridiculous idea” (in Flood 2016, online, n.p.). Our contention here
is that it was far from rubbish or ridiculous, but a message sent to the publishing industry about
equality, and one that, while not being the outright success Shamsie may have hoped for, has had
a significant effect on publishing in the UK, particularly among independent presses.
Though Shamsie was campaigning for women’s writing in general, the YPW aimed to
include women writers in translation too. If the situation is not promising for women writing
127
in English, it is even more challenging for translated authors, in a publishing context in which
translated literature “oscillates around 3%” of the book market in Ireland and the UK on average,
as confirmed by the Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–2012
Statistical Report (Büchler and Trentacosti 2015, 5).2 Given the “hyper-central position” of Eng-
lish (Sapiro 2008, 158), translated texts have traditionally been eschewed by the anglophone
marketplace, partly because of a tendency towards being “reactive in terms of translations, want-
ing to see (and know) what works have done in other markets before committing to buying
rights” (Mansell 2017, 53–54).
Linking this to the lack of women’s visibility in their own literary cultures, this may help
explain the fact that, out of that meagre 3%, less than one-third (around 28%) of books in
English translation are authored by women writers.3 Translator and activist Katy Derbyshire
laments:
Only a tiny fraction of fiction published in English is translated, and only about a quarter of
that translated fiction was originally written by women. For some reason, fiction in transla-
tion by women is an absolute rarity – black diamonds, palomino unicorns.
(Derbyshire 2016, online, n.p.)
Despite these figures, Alexandra Büchler and Giulia Trentacosti’s report also pointed at a
consistent increase in the number of titles in translation. This was confirmed by a more
recent report on Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations: A Picture from the UK,
whose authors assert that the widespread and enduring pessimism about the prospects for
translated literature in the UK is outdated, noting that “the concern has shifted from a focus
on the low amount of translated literature being published, to questions about the diversity
of literature translated” (Chitnis et al. 2017, 1). This diversity is mainly understood in terms
of the literary genres and the variety of smaller literatures (defined as those that depend on
translation to reach international audiences) that are rendered into English, most of them
representing smaller European nations and thus perpetuating Eurocentrism. When looking
at gender in translated literature, publication lists are still dominated by male authors (Chitnis
et al. 2017, 9), a trend which was also highlighted by Daniel Hahn, writing about the longlist
of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize (the most prestigious award for literary transla-
tion in English). Hahn noted that the longlist reflected “a significant gender imbalance (as
we see every year), and a significant bias towards European writers and European languages
(as we see every year, too)” (Hahn 2017, 48), and that these imbalances were indicative of the
overall submissions pool, and thus of a more widespread imbalance in the translated literature
industry.
Although there is reason to be optimistic about the upward turn in the percentage of lit-
erature being translated into English, initiatives such as the YPW in 2018 are essential to hold
gatekeepers to account for the continuing bias towards male-authored writing available in trans-
lation. While other stakeholders (booksellers, reviewers, literary festivals and others) also have
a part to play in tackling this bias, for the purposes of this study we shall focus on publishers
because of their role as primary “gatekeepers.” More precisely, we shall focus on small independ-
ent publishing houses in the UK, based on our contention that smaller presses are pioneers for
activism in translation. Indeed, Tobler identifies the independent and not-for-profit status of
And Other Stories as being the primary factor that gives them more freedom to embark on pro-
jects and initiatives such as the YPW, whereas larger publishers might be more hesitant, “fear-
ing a backlash or losing money” (see Tobler, in Yates-Badley 2018, online, n.p.). We identify
128
Women writers in translation in the UK
the smaller presses as important activists for gender parity in translation for two key reasons: first,
because of their contribution to the increased percentage of translated literature in the UK (as
noted by Chitnis et al. 2017, 2), a trend that explicitly includes women writers – indeed, Chan-
tal Wright, who was instrumental in setting up the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation,
notes that “smaller, independent publishing houses are pioneering in their activism for gender
in translation” (Wright, in Krstić 2018, online, n.p.). Second, independent presses are crucial to
activism in translated literature because of their work as “cultural talent scouts” (Freely, in Flood
2019a, online, n.p.), the importance of which is reflected in the fact that eleven of the thirteen
books longlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2019 were published by independ-
ent presses, and that eight of the thirteen were women-authored.
This focused approach will help us to assess the impact that the YPW has had on translation
into English in the UK in 2018 and whether it might lay the groundwork for equality-driven
shifts in the coming years. We shall situate our contribution within wider debates about gender,
publishing and translation, and also in the context of different initiatives put in place to encour-
age greater translation and dissemination of women writers into English. Special attention will
be paid to recent theorizations of translation as a tool for enabling transnational encounters
among diverse women, as claimed by transnational feminism, particularly when translation hap-
pens in a space we shall term “from-the-Rest to-the-West.” Underlining the importance of
the intersections between critical debate and literary activism, and the ways in which each
enlarges and empowers the other, we set in dialogue the theory produced by academics with
the immediacy of online publications and their relevance to such a time-specific debate. By so
doing, we accord equal importance in this study to traditional academic research publications
and contemporary methods of dissemination such as blog posts, online editorials, and podcasts,
responding to the “diversity” of advocates highlighted by Rajendra Chitnis et al. (2017, 2). We
shall then introduce our case study and carry out a statistical analysis of translated women’s
writing published in 2018 in the 13 independent presses forming our corpus, with particular
consideration of translation flows in relation to the geopolitical status of the source texts. Finally,
we shall offer some conclusions about the impact of the YPW on the UK translated literature
industry, highlighting areas of growth and areas that are still in progress.
Historical perspectives and critical issues on gender,

publishing and translation: intersections of
academic studies and literary activism
The topic of women writers in the circuits of translation is one of the most researched areas in
feminist translation studies (see Castro and Ergun 2018, 131–132). Thirty-five years after the
publication of the first panoramic study on women writers in translation in the anglophone
target culture (Resnick and de Courtivron 1984),4 the obstacles its authors noted (namely the
“lack of recognition by critics and lack of influence over the publishing interests,” Resnick and
de Courtivron 1984, 211) still significantly reduce the chances for foreign women writers to
be noticed and selected for publication in the English-language market. These two obstacles
are part of what Margaret Carson (2019) has recently categorized as the “first barrier” faced by
women writers in their journey to translation (i.e. the gender gap in publishing). Those writers
who succeed at overcoming it then face a “second barrier” (2019, 39–41): the lack of visibility
within their own literary culture owing to their not being featured in interviews or newspapers,
reviewed by well-known reviewers in well-regarded venues, or awarded literary prizes as pub-
lishers have not considered submitting their manuscripts.
129
Gender-biased attitudes towards women in translation are many and varied (for an overview,
see Castro 2017), and this is something that many publishers are becoming increasingly aware
of. In a 2018 interview, Smalley of And Other Stories confirms that
most of what gets translated has already had a level of success in its original language, and
often, in a lot of cultures, more attention is given to male writers. Men are favoured, con-
sidered more serious, considered to write better literature and so on, and so they’re the ones
that get the awards, they’re the ones that get the coverage in the news that bring them to
the attention of foreign publishers who might want to publish them.
(in Vassallo 2018, online, n.p.)
Exposing these male-centric/gender-biased trends of the publishing industry in literary circles

and media has given a renewed thrust to long-standing claims in academia to use translation
more consciously and strategically as a tool to help disseminate the works of silenced women
writers. One of the earliest examples is Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s pioneering proposal
for a “redefinition of a feminist translation practice,” in which different translator-centred and
author-centred strategies would make it possible to “change literary history by bringing to light
authors who were inaccessible before” (1997, 65). Indeed, if literary translation plays a major
role in the internationalization of cultural markets and becomes a marker of status in the eco-
nomic global system (Sapiro 2016), a feminist intervention seems vital to ensure a more balanced
representation. Some of the most recent initiatives developed in the English-language literary
scene include the ‘Women in Translation’ tumblr (Price and Carson 2015) and the ‘Women to
Translate’ series at the online literary website LitHub, including posts listing foreign authors that
should enter the English-language domain (see LitHub 2017).
However, the challenges for women in translation do not end when they enter the English-
language literary circuit. Carson contends that a “third barrier” is the lack of visibility of trans-
lated authors within the target book market (2019, 41–42), mainly owing to the fact that foreign
publishers are more likely to promote their men writers abroad (e.g. in literary festivals) and
that books in translation by women writers are less likely to be reviewed (see also Wood 2019;
Radzinski 2018). To overcome that invisibility and give greater status to what is already available
in English translation, different initiatives developed in the last few years have succeeded in link-
ing the growth of translated literature to the importance of technological advances. Indeed, as
Chitnis et al. conclude in their report, “[s]ocial media, book reviews sites, on-line reading groups
and bloggers are transforming the notion of word-of-mouth” (2017, 2), which is “the primary
means of spreading interest in a book” (2017, 6).
One such initiative is the Translating Women project that forms part of the basis for our
research, in which founder Helen Vassallo reviews, recommends and promotes books by women
in translation, working with publishers and translators to increase the visibility of women-
authored translated literature. Equally important in making women in translation visible is the
“Warwick Prize for Women in Translation” (Warwick 2017), established by the University of
Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature. Coordinated by the
literary translator and scholar Chantal Wright, it is awarded annually to the best work of litera-
ture by a woman published in English translation by a UK or Irish press. Besides the recognition
and prestige awarded to the winner each November, by announcing the longlisted selection
first and the shortlisted titles a few weeks later, this prize creates an invaluable portfolio easily
accessible to the general public. A third initiative worth considering is the “WITMonth” cam-
paign, founded by Meytal Radzinski (2014) on her blog in 2014 to encourage and challenge
readers to seek out translated texts by women every August, for “as long as the huge imbalance
130
in publishing women in translation persists” (Radzinski 2016, online, n.p.). Most of the actions
occur on Twitter under the hashtag #WITMonth or #womenintranslation, which gives pub-
lishers the chance to promote their existing titles and readers the opportunity to find excellent
books to read. Many of the initiatives just mentioned are featured in an article in the literary
magazine Words Without Borders for International Women’s Day in 2019, which highlighted 15
women and organizations working for gender parity in literature, and which shows the differ-
ence that activism can make (Words Without Borders 2019).
Calling for an increased translation of (simply) women writers as a way to address the gender
imbalance in translated literature may, however, risk erasing the complexity of gender identities
and promoting essentialist understandings of what a woman is or may be. Needless to say, gender
is not the only imbalance in translated literature,5 but a uni-dimensional understanding of it may
lead to the situation Shamsie warned about at the very end of her talk at the Hay-on-Wye liter-
ary festival, showing her commitment against different “areas of exclusion” in women’s writing:
If we are to truly claim that we’re pushing back against inequality, it’s essential that the
YPW doesn’t end up looking like the year of publishing young, straight, white, middle-
class, metropolitan women.
(Shamsie 2015, online, n.p.)
The only way to avoid this undesirable situation is to consider the YPW from an intersectional
perspective (Crenshaw 1989) or a metramorphics approach (Flotow 2009), looking at how
gender interacts with other social categories. Different categories (such as race, class, ethnicity,
age, religion, geography, sexual identity, sexual orientation, etc.) are interconnected with gender
to create intertwined systems of privilege or discrimination; taking on a “politics of location” as
formulated by Adrienne Rich (1986, 212), identities are inexorably complex and situated. In our
analysis, we shall focus on how gender is linked to geography (McDowell 1999); in particular,
we shall address the power dynamics within languages and literatures in different geographical
spaces or, put differently, between the hyper-centralized English-language literature field (Sapiro
2008) and other smaller literatures in less translated languages (Branchadell 2005).6
By tracing the flows of women in translation in the YPW, our aim is to assess the extent to
which this initiative may be creating opportunities for women’s encounters that ultimately lead
to better contextualized understandings of intersectional experiences in different geopoliti-
cal situations. As argued by theorists of transnational feminism (Lock Swarr and Nagar 2010),
these women’s encounters and understandings transcending national boundaries are crucial to
global social justice – and for them to happen we need translation; as Kathy Davis explains:
“there can be no successful feminist politics without translation” (Davis, in Nagar et al. 2017,
111). Translation is a crucial tool for enabling transnational encounters among diverse women
and alternative cross-border connectivities and solidarities (Costa and Alvarez 2014, 557).7 Yet,
literary exchanges have flowed far more easily from north to south and from west to east, par-
ticularly leading to the (subtle and sometimes not so subtle) imposition of Anglo-American
cultural values through translation (Venuti 1995, 14–15), whereas travel in other directions has
proved almost non-existent. To challenge this trend, which reinforces neo-colonial practices so
commonly incurred in previous formulations by Western feminism, some scholars have called
for the need to “avoid West-to-the-Rest narratives, and develop more South-to-South oriented
dialogues” (Costa 2006, 73). Alongside this, it is our contention that narratives ‘from-the-Rest
to-the-West’ are crucially important too. For these feminist alliances to be truly productive,
efforts must be made to incorporate narratives from other languages, literatures, and cultures in
English translation. In our study of the YPW, we want to explore the extent to which women’s
131
encounters may be facilitated by translation from other languages into English, and how diverse
(from a geopolitical point of view) those translated women writers are.
A gendered and geopolitical overview of the YPW

in small UK independent presses
We carried out extensive data analysis of the 2018 publications of 13 UK-based independent
publishing houses who normally publish works in translation as a significant part (or all) of their
list, discarding large or mainstream publishers and restricting our corpus to those that can be
defined as small presses (see Tables 10.1 and 10.2 in Appendices for full list and breakdown of
publications).8 Though we do not have scope in this piece to present all the analysis undertaken,
we shall summarize our principal findings, and use these to draw tentative conclusions about the
impact of the YPW for women in translation in the UK.
The 13 publishers in our corpus published 39 translations of women-authored books (see
Table 10.1 in Appendix I). Most of these independent publishers publish women in translation
as part of their ‘generalist’ series, but some have specific series devoted to women in translation,
such as Parthian’s Europa Carnivale series. Another distinctive feature is that some publishers
or imprints are committed to specific geographical areas: while many focus on Europe (Istros
Books publish translated literature from the Balkans, and Norvik Books publish Scandinavian
literature in translation, while Parthian Books offer the aforementioned Europa Carnivale
series), two concentrate on other areas: Tilted Axis Press publishes work from South Asia, and
Charco Press publishes writing from Latin America.
Of these 13 presses, 11 published books by men writers too – the only exceptions being
And Other Stories (as a result of taking part in the YPW) and Parthian (with all prose books
in translation being part of their women writers in translation series). The total number of men
writers in translation by these presses is 45 (see Table 10.2 in Appendix II).
Though the take-up of YPW seemed disappointingly small, with only one out of our 13
small publishers taking up the YPW challenge, these figures demonstrate that other presses have
nonetheless made significant contributions (deliberate or otherwise) too. The total number
of books published by the publishing houses in our corpus did not indicate total parity, but it
did suggest an improvement: books by women in small presses made up 46% of the translated
literature publications, compared to 54% for books by men. While this is not the 100% women-
authored total that the YPW had sought, it is certainly an improvement on the overall statistic
of women’s writing accounting for less than one-third of publications.
WIT (women in translation) books represent 21 languages and 25 countries, as Figures 10.1
and 10.2 show respectively.
Translated literature by women writers in the UK remained determinedly Eurocentric
in 2018. Only 15 of the 39 books come from non-European source literary systems, in five
different languages. The existence of specific series devoted to WIT (e.g. Parthian’s Europa
Carnivale) and publishers’ commitment to specific European geographical areas (such as Istros
Books, Norvik Press or Parthian’s series) clearly helps; Charco’s focus on Latin America also
accounts for two of the Latin American books (see Figure 10.1). Translations into English from
stronger literary languages such as French, German, and Italian (the three having a colonial
tradition) came in all cases from the metropolis. This trend is the direct opposite of the case
with translations from Spanish, as all books come from Latin America. Our survey shows a
timid openness towards writing representing ‘lesser translated languages’ or ‘smaller European
nations,’ that we can only hope might grow and extend to other continents in the years fol-
lowing the YPW.
132
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Figure 10.1 WIT books by language
There are three particularly striking absences: firstly, the absence of some ‘strong’ European
languages such as Portuguese (seventh most spoken language), despite the increase in transla-
tions of Latin American authors (which would have included Brazilian Portuguese); secondly,
the absence of writers from Spain who write in Spanish (the three books from Spain are written
in Basque and Catalan); and thirdly, the absence of languages with an official status within the
UK such as Welsh – the YPW could indeed have been used to disseminate Welsh-speaking
women writers in the rest of the UK, and although Parthian Books publish many titles in Welsh,
and some in both Welsh and English, no Welsh women-authored books were translated into
English in 2018. Equally surprising is the scarcity of literatures in languages spoken by first- or
second-generation migrant communities settled in the UK, especially those with strong liter-
ary traditions and among the most spoken languages in the world, such as Arabic and Chinese.
The one continent with no representation at all for either men or women writers (apart
from the English-speaking territories of North America and Australia) is Africa, with nothing
translated by African women authors writing either in African languages, in Arabic, or in colo-
nial languages such as French or Portuguese; this is clearly a priority area in translated literature
more generally.
MIT (men in translation) books also represent 21 languages, spread across 30 countries, as
shown in Figures 10.3 and 10.4.
A similar Eurocentric trend in translated literature in the UK can be perceived when it comes
to foreign men writers. In quantitative terms, 12 books (out of 45) are from non-European
source literary systems; in qualitative terms, however, those 12 books span nine different lan-
guages spoken in the Americas and Asia (see Figure 10.3), adding to the non-European texts
a diversity not quite as evident in the women-authored translations. As was the case for WIT,
publishers’ commitment to specific European geographical areas is responsible for some of the
areas of emphasis evident in the results.
Although MIT has less variety in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries than WIT, it
has more variety of spaces when it comes to other metropolitan/colonial languages. MIT also
133
134
1 4
Image 10.2 WIT books by country

se
Du e
m se
C ian
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k
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ai
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e n
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h
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be
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is
a
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Figure 10.3 MIT books by language
had a greater geographical spread in 2018, though the linguistic spread was even between both
women and men writers. However, quantitatively speaking, the number of spaces and literary
traditions represented by men writers and not women, and vice versa, is very similar; as such, we
can begin to distinguish between those issues that are important for translated literature more
generally, and those which specifically affect women writers.
The main gender-specific issues in our corpus of publishing translated adult prose into
English in the UK in 2018 by small independent presses is a quantitative one: despite 2018 being
the YPW, fewer books by foreign women writers were published in English translation by small
presses in 2018 than books by men writers, and overall fewer literary systems were represented.
Other issues encountered are true of both MIT and WIT, which suggests that they are geopo-
litical issues, and that this should be considered alongside the gender issue. Yet, when looked
at from a gender approach some trends can still be identified. For example, there is slightly less
diversity in languages and literary spaces in the case of WIT. This happens mainly in two areas:
first, translations from non-European literary spaces, and second, translations from European
colonial languages used in non-European spaces. These findings raise questions of the correla-
tion between different forms of cultural and gendered dominance that the YPW brings to light.
Through the analysis of which women writers entered the literary Anglosphere in the YPW,
we wanted to participate in a transnational feminist practice by bringing new insights into
the power relationship between languages and literary systems. We argued that flows ‘from-
the-Rest to-the-West’ (and more specifically in this case, to the Anglosphere) were crucial for
two reasons: first, to add geopolitical diversity while addressing a gender gap. Translation has a
particularly important role here: it is a powerful means to give voice to women who are doubly
silenced – because they are women and because they do not speak a dominant world language
which, as Mansell notes, symbolizes the “gatekeeping power” essential to the publication of lit-
erature in translation (2017, 50); and second, to facilitate dialogues with different women writers
that have an impact on canon formation and the British literary landscape. Studying the role of
translators as cultural mediators would be of paramount importance, inasmuch as the inexorable
135
ideological interventions in-between texts would determine the reception of the translated
works. This is especially true at the present time, with the cautious opening up of the literary
translation market, especially to small European literatures.
This study has had a very specific scope. In order to assess the impact on the literary land-
scape, further studies beyond the stage of “creation” (Nelson and Maher 2013, 1) analyzed in
this chapter would be necessary, specifically addressing the stages of circulation and reception.
It would be fruitful to undertake studies that also consider the gender of the translator, and
common ‘gender pairings’ in this respect, as this would shed light on how often women or men
translators work with women or men writers. Another aspect worth researching would be the
historical period when the source texts were published to ascertain the ratio of contemporary
books being published as opposed to ‘classics’ or rediscovered/reclaimed texts from other histor-
ical periods; this would also show the type of contemporary or historical alliances made possible
between women. A further possible area of inquiry is the allocation of translation grants (from
the UK or from the source system) to specific areas or languages. Finally, a similar study to the
one conducted here, but considering major publishers and big publishing corporations would be
necessary to be able to assess whether our findings are representative of the publishing industry
as a whole, or whether small presses and major publishers show distinct patterns.
Future directions and lasting effects: towards

gender parity in translated literature?
The extent of the legacy of the YPW will emerge over the months and years to come, and
this long-lasting effect was Shamsie’s main concern when she challenged literary stakeholders
to commit to a YPW. Towards the end of her 2015 talk at the Hay Literary Festival, she posed
another subtler challenge:
What will it look like, this changed landscape of publishing in 2018? Actually, the real
question is what will happen in 2019? Will we revert to the status quo or will a year of a
radically transformed publishing landscape change our expectations of what is normal and
our preconceptions of what is unchangeable?
(Shamsie 2015, online, n.p.)
Though it might not have been “a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape,”
and in the course of 2018 it might have seemed that the YPW was having little impact, we
propose that there is reason to be cautiously optimistic: early in 2019, retail sales analysis adviser
Nielsen Book found that sales of translated literature had risen to 5.5% (see Flood 2019b), and
the proportion of WIT in our YPW corpus (46%) is significantly more encouraging than the
traditional 28%. One first lasting impact is the recognition from several publishing houses that
the lack of gender parity needs to be addressed: following the YPW, a number of small presses
have increased the percentage of women-authored books in translation in 2019.9 For example,
Peirene Press (who publish primarily translations) committed to publishing only women writ-
ers in 2019, and Oneworld Books included four WIT in their 2019 catalogue. Charco Press
also included four women writers (out of a total list of six), and after a quiet year in 2018, Les
Fugitives (a small press focusing on translating women writers originally published in French),
announced five publications of French women’s writing in translation for their 2019 catalogue.
Other publishers not included in our study have also made commitments to fostering inclusiv-
ity and diversity: most notably, the 2019 catalogue of Manchester-based UK publisher Comma
Press (a press specializing in short stories, not included in our corpus because their WIT title for
136
Image 10.4 MIT books by country

1
137
2018 was pushed back to 2019) included two single-author collections by women in translation
(one from Palestine and one from Sudan). This all bears out Carson’s claim that “[t]here is no
lack of women writers in any literary culture: the question is how to find them” (Carson 2019,
39), and we have highlighted the crucial activist role of publishers in combatting this invisibility
of women writers worldwide.
Another very clear way in which the YPW can have a lasting impact is in terms of liter-
ary prizes. For example, if And Other Stories normally puts forward eight books for the Man
Booker International Prize, of which up to half are by women, then in 2019 this figure dou-
bled; indeed, one of the YPW books was shortlisted for the prize (Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The
Remainder, translated from the Chilean Spanish by Sophie Hughes). It can be no coincidence
that directly after the YPW, eight of the thirteen books on the 2019 Man Booker International
longlist and four of five on the shortlist were by women authors,10 and this move towards gender
parity might be connected to the already mentioned rise in the representation of independ-
ent presses on the longlist (see Mansell in Chandler 2020 for new research that upholds this
hypothesis). Thus, And Other Stories’ commitment to the YPW has generated some positive
transformations that will hopefully lead to a lasting change not just in our expectations of what
is normal but also in the reality of a move towards gender parity in translated literature. The
more publishing houses that publish WIT, the more women’s writing will be put forward for
these prizes and, given the attention that the longlist and shortlist receive, this means that more
women’s writing in translation will be given media coverage and publicity.
The increasing importance of technological advances for the growth of translated literature is
a further source of encouragement. More specifically, WIT were disseminated via blogs, crowd-
sourcing campaigns, podcasts, or social media such as Twitter or tumblr, and new formats are
constantly emerging – for example, the first Women in Translation Edit-A-Thon workshop
took place on April 18, 2019, organized by Goethe Institute New York, and June 2019 saw the
launch of Project Plume, an initiative which champions women’s writing in translation from
underrepresented languages with the publication of a yearly anthology focused on a particular
literary tradition. As such, it is urgent to develop a new methodology which sets into dialogue
the theory produced by academics with the kinds of technological ‘word-of-mouth’ highlighted
by the Translating the Literatures of Smaller European Nations Report (Chitnis et al. 2017); this dia-
logue is exemplified by Project Plume’s inaugural interview with Vassallo (Benaissa 2019) and
we hope that our study here will encourage more to adopt this approach.
A fourth positive change is the perception that the awareness of this lack of equality is “going
mainstream” (Danek 2018, online, n.p.) and awareness is the first step towards action. A move in
this direction is the announcement in September 2018 that PEN International (the worldwide
writers’ association) will team up with VIDA (a non-profit organization monitoring gender and
diversity in the literary arts) to create a new PEN/VIDA count to monitor gender disparity in
publishing. Chronicling disparity and inequality is the first step towards challenging and chang-
ing them, and so the YPW is not an isolated historical benchmark but a catalyst for change and
the start of a potentially seismic – if slow-burning – shift in the translation industry.
Another positive step revealed by our study with small independent presses pioneering trans-
lation is an increasing tendency to greater diversity, with some smaller nations and regions
being represented in translation, mainly from European languages. This geopolitical diversity is
especially true for MIT (and slightly less prominent for WIT). Despite this preliminary progress
towards enlarged understanding of what ‘women writers’ means (not just from hegemonic, met-
ropolitan languages), it is in this area of diversity that the most important challenges remain; for
example, our study revealed some unjustifiable (and easily filled) gaps such as African, Asian, and
South American authors writing in colonial languages (e.g. Portuguese or French) and authors
138
writing in widely spoken languages by migrant communities settled in the UK (e.g. Arabic or

Chinese); in all cases, easily filled since plenty of qualified literary translators work with these
language combinations. Challenges to diversity in translated women’s writing had already been
anticipated in August 2018 by Theodora Danek (at the time, Translation Manager at English
PEN) when the YPW was at its highest:
while I would say that it is not exactly the Year of Publishing Women I think that there is
a shift where there is more of an awareness and more of an appreciation that we do need
to bring more equality into the publishing industry, not just in publishing women, but in
publishing voices that might not have been heard as much as they should be until now.
(Danek 2018, online, n.p.)
But the geopolitics of women’s writing in translation is just one aspect of diversity. In order to
embrace all those “publishing voices that might not have been heard” we must remember all
the different social categories (such as race, class, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual identity, etc.) that
intersect with gender to create intertwined systems of privilege or discrimination. The limited
scope of our study, focused on geography, ideally should be complemented by other analyses
that help strengthen debates about diversity in translation. In this way, recent efforts to discuss
diversity in UK publishing industry (Akbar 2017; Saha 2019) could be extended to translation,
in order to develop strategies that help to better understand the needs and challenges faced by
(women) writers in translation who belong to minority groups.
Despite the limited direct response to Shamsie’s challenge, the YPW led to various initiatives
and forms of activism that had a demonstrable impact in translation. Although there is much
more work to be done, we believe that the YPW can indeed be considered a platform for
collective change and, as such, there is much to celebrate. Our study focused on specific small
presses who are advocates for translation; we would like to finish with a call for action so that
the ‘going mainstream’ means that major publishing houses also start behaving proactively to end
the gender imbalance in translation, while ensuring diversity. For the months and years ahead,
we hope that this activist agenda will expand and extend, so that more stakeholders talk about
and advocate for WIT, and thus we may come closer to equality.
Further reading
Resnick, Margaret and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1984. Women Writers in Translation: An Annotated Bibli-
ography 1945–1982. New York: Garland.
First annotated compilation of more than 700 texts by women writers in English translation that had
been published between 1945 and 1982. Each section of the book focuses on a specific geographical
area and language, and includes a socioliterary context about the visibility of women authors in their
source literary field and cultural system.
Büchler, Alexandra and Giulia Trentacosti. 2015. Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and
Ireland 1990–2012 Statistical Report, Literature Across Frontiers. Available at: www.lit-across-frontiers.org/
wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Translation-Statistics-Study_Update_May2015.pdf
First report on literary translation into English published between 1990 and 2012 in Ireland and Great Brit-
ain, commissioned by the European Platform for Literary Exchange, Translation and Policy Debate ‘Litera-
ture Across Frontiers.’ The report justifies the corpus and analyzes data gathered paying attention to source
languages and genres. It offers a final case study, focused on the translation of Balkan literatures into English.
Chitnis, Rajendra, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Rhian Atkin, and Zoran Milutinović. 2017. Report: Translating
the Literatures of Smaller European Nations: A Picture from the UK, 2014–2016. Available at: www.bristol.
ac.uk/media-library/sites/arts/research/translating-lits-of-small-nations/Translating%20Smaller%20
European%20Literatures%20Report(3).pdf
139
Final report of the AHRC-funded project on recent translations into English of literature from smaller
European nations. The report identifies trends and challenges, and specifically highlights the need for
greater focus on women in translation and understanding of how modern communication methods
affect literary success.
Related topics
Women in translation, translation and publishing, the politics of literary translation, UK-based
small independent presses, translated women in the UK
Notes
1 This research has been funded by the Project “Bodies in Transit 2: Difference and Indifference.” Ref.:
FFI2017–84555-C2–2-P, MINECO-FEDER.
2 This report was commissioned by Literature Across Frontiers, a platform for literary exchange, trans-
lation, and policy debate. This report also shows that while all translations represent 3% of the mar-
ket, translations of creative writing (fiction, poetry, and children’s books) are slightly higher at 4% or
5%. Despite these low percentages, translated literature is growing significantly, proportionally to the
increasing number of books published in general.
3 There are varying exact percentages from year to year and in different English-language countries, but
the rough figure of one-third is standard throughout (see Radzinski (2014).
4 The compilation Women Writers in Translation: an Annotated Bibliography 1945–1982 included more
than 700 women-authored texts in different genres translated into English from German, Castilian and
Latin American Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, or Russian. In their introduction, the two editors
shared their intention to create “a starting point for studies in a field that is richly deserving of thought-
ful, informed, and committed exploration” (Resnick and de Courtivron 1984, viii).
5 In line with this, in her Twitter account, Radzinski (2017) defines the #womenintranslation project as
“international, intersectional, and built around the notion that all women* (*and transgender or non-
binary or intersex individuals) deserve to have their voices heard. This project is committed to giving
voice to women from all countries, all languages, all religious, all ethnicities, all cultures, all sexualities,
all marginalized gender identities, all abilities, all bodies, all classes, and all ages.”
6 The notion of “less translated languages” applies “to all those languages that are less often the source of
translation in the international exchange of linguistic goods, regardless of the number of people using
these languages” (Branchadell 2005, 1), including widely used languages such as Arabic or Chinese and
long-neglected minority or minorized languages.
7 Having a book translated and available ‘in circulation’ is only the first step in enabling such encounters
between foreign women writers and English-language readers that can only access those texts via
translation. Attention should also paid to how those narratives are translated, which is beyond the scope
of this chapter.
8 We considered imprints of larger presses if they had a defined separate identity and published a signifi-
cant proportion of translation. To be included in the survey, the presses must have published at least
three books in 2018, at least one of which must be by a woman author in translation. When selecting
titles published, we focused on adult prose (including fiction, non-fiction, and single-author short story
collections) published in the UK in 2018, regardless of the year of publication in the original language;
but did not include academic books, multi-authored anthologies, poetry, children’s books, or Young
Adult fiction. Our corpus only includes original releases, not re-editions or paperback releases if the
hardback was released in a previous year.
9 The YPW has also had an impact on English-language publishers who do not publish translations; for
example, Yorkshire-based Bluemoose Books will publish only women authors in 2020.
10 It is also worth noting that in four years of the Man Booker International Prize (relaunched in 2016
after merging with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), it has been awarded to a woman author on
three occasions (South Korean Han Kang in 2016, Polish Olga Tokarczuk in 2018, and Omani Jokha
Alharthi in 2019). All four winning translators were women: Deborah Smith in 2016, Jessica Cohen in
2017, Jennifer Croft in 2018, and Marilyn Booth in 2019.
140
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APPENDICES
Table 10.1 Appendix I Women in Translation in our corpus (2018)
Publisher Language Country Author Translator Title
And Other Stories Spanish Dominican Republic Indiana, Rita Obejas, Achy Tentacle
(2009) Italian Italy Jaeggy, Fleur Parks, Tim Sweet Days of Discipline
Catalan Spain Kopf, Alicia Lethem, Mara Faye Brother in Ice
Spanish Argentina Lange, Norah Whittle, Charlotte People in the Room
Spanish Mexico Rivera Garza, Cristina Booker, Sarah The Iliac Crest
Spanish Chile Trabucco Zerán, Alia Hughes, Sophie The Remainder
Balestier Press (2015) Chinese Taiwan Shih, Chiung-Yu Sterk, Darryl Wedding in Autumn
Chinese China Yan, Ge Harman, Nicky The Chilli Bean Paste Clan
Charco Press (2016) Spanish Colombia García Robayo, Margarita Coombe, Charlotte Fish Soup
Spanish Argentina Maliandi, Carla Riddle, Frances The German Room
Fitzcarraldo Editions French France Ernaux, Annie Strayer, Alison L. The Years
(2014) German Germany Kinsky, Esther Galbraith, Ian River
Polish Poland Tokarczuk, Olga Lloyd-Jones, Antonia Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Istros Books (2011) Croatian Croatia Drndic´, Daša Hawkesworth, Celia Doppelgänger
Serbian Serbia Jovanovic´, Biljana Cox, John K. Dogs and Others
Croatian Croatia Tulic´, Tea Petkovich, Coral Hair Everywhere
Norvik Press (1980s) Danish Denmark Brøgger, Suzanne Allemano, Marina A Fighting Pig’s Too Tough to Eat
Swedish Sweden Lagerlöf, Selma Graves, Peter The Emperor of Portugallia
Swedish Sweden Lagerlöf, Selma Shenck, Linda Banished
Norwegian Norway Skram, Amalie Messick, Judith and Betrayed
Hanson, Katherine
Oneworld Books (1986) Arabic Iraq Al Rawi, Shahad Leafgren, Luke The Baghdad Clock
French France Julien, Maude Hunter, Adriana The Only Girl in the World
Finnish Finland Lindstedt, Laura Witesman, Owen Oneiron
Parthian Books (1993) Basque Spain Agur Meabe, Miren Gabantxo, Amaia A Glass Eye
Basque Spain Jaio, Karmele Addis, Kristin Her Mother’s Hands
143
(Continued )
Table 10.1 (Continued)
144
Peirene Press (2008) Lithuanian Lithuania Grinkevicˇiu¯te˙ , Dalia Valiukenas, Delija Shadows on the Tundra
Latvian Latvia Ikstena, Nora Gailitis, Margita Soviet Milk
Portobello Books (2005) Spanish Argentina Enriquez, Mariana McDowell, Megan Things We Lost in the Fire
Korean S. Korea Han, Kang Smith, Deborah The White Book
Japanese Japan Murata, Sayaka Tapley Takemori, Ginny Convenience Store Woman
Japanese Japan Tawada, Yoko Mitsutani, Margaret The Last Children of Tokyo
Pushkin Press (1997) French France Frenkel, Françoise Smee, Stephanie No Place to Lay One’s Head
Spanish Argentina Gallardo, Sara Sequiera, Jessica Land of Smoke

Dutch Netherlands Meijer, Eva Fawcett, Antoinette Bird Cottage
Danish Denmark Nors, Dorthe Hoekstra, Misha Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
Icelandic Iceland Ólafsdóttir, Auður Ava Fitzgibbon, Brian Hotel Silence
Italian Italy Ortese, Anna Maria Goldstein, Ann, and Evening Descends Upon the Hills
McPhee, Jenny
Scribe UK (1976) German Germany Haratischwili, Nino Collins, Charlotte and The Eighth Life
Martin, Ruth
Tilted Axis Press s(2015) Korean S. Korea Jungeon, Hwang Yae Won, Emily I’ll Go On
Table 10.2 Appendix II Men in Translation in our corpus (2018)
Balestier Press Chinese Singapore Yeng, Pway Ngon Tiang, Jeremy Unrest
Charco Press Spanish Peru Cisneros, Renato Petch, Fionn The Distance Between Us
Portuguese Brazil Fuks, Julián Hahn, Daniel Resistance
Spanish Uruguay Mella, Daniel McDowell, Megan Older Brother
Fitzcarraldo French France Énard, Mathias Mandell, Charlotte Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants
Editions Spanish Chile Zambra, Alejandro McDowell, Megan Not to Read
Istros Books Bosnian Bosnia Avdic´, Selvedin Petkovich, Coral Seven Terrors
Romanian Romania Eliade, Mircea Bartholomew, Christopher Gaudeamus
Slovene Slovenia Flisar, Evald Limon, David A Swarm of Dust
Slovakian Slovakia Vilikovsý, Pavel Sherwood, Julia & Sherwood, Peter Fleeting Snow
Norvik Press Estonian Estonia Tammsaare, Anton Moseley, Christopher and Shartze, Olga The Misadventures of the New Satan
Estonian Estonia Taska, Ilmar Moseley, Christopher Pobeda, 1946
Oneworld German Switzerland Beck, Peter Bulloch, Jamie Damnation
Books Portuguese Portugal Chagas Freitas, Pedro Hahn, Daniel The Day I Found You
French Belgium Colize, Paul Rogers LaLaurie, Louise Back Up
Polish Poland Dehnel, Jacek Lloyd-Jones, Antonia LaLa
Icelandic Iceland Helgason, Hallgrímur Fitzgibbon, Brian The Woman at 1,000 Degrees
French Canada Thériault, Denis Hawke, Liedewy The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea
Russian Russia Vodolazkin, Eugene Hayden, Lisa C. The Aviator
Russian Russia Vodolazkin, Eugene Hayden, Lisa C. Soloyov and Larionov
Peirene Press Icelandic Iceland Thorsson, Guðmundur Andri Cauthery, Andrew And the Wind Sees All
Portobello Spanish Spain Barba, Andrés Dillman, Lisa Such Small Hands
Books French France Mingarelli, Hubert Taylor, Sam Four Soldiers
Pushkin Press Spanish Spain Barea, Arturo Barea, Ilsa The Forging of a Rebel
Russian Russia Gazdanov, Gaito Karetnyk, Brian The Beggar and Other Stories
Dutch Netherlands Hermans, Willem Frederik Colmer, David An Untouched House
German Germany Herrndorf, Wolfgang Mohr, Tim Sand
Japanese Japan Horie, Toshiyuki Howells, Geraint The Bear and the Paving Stone
Norwegian Norway Houm, Nicolai Paterson, Anna The Gradual Disappearance of Jane
145
Ashland
(Continued)
146
Indonesian Indonesia Kurniawan, Eka Tucker, Annie Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
French France Merle, Robert Kline, T. Jefferson Fortunes of France 4
French France Merle, Robert Kline, T. Jefferson Fortunes of France 3
French France Merle, Robert Kline, T. Jefferson Fortunes of France 1: The Brethren
French France Merle, Robert Kline, T. Jefferson Fortunes of France 2: City of Wisdom
and Blood
Turkish Turkey Mumcu, Özgür Wyers, Mark David The Peace Machine
Japanese Japan Nosaka, Akiyuki Tapley Takemori, Ginny The Cake Tree in the Ruins
Japanese Japan Okada, Toshiki Malissa, Samuel The End of the Moment We Had
Dutch Netherlands Reve, Gerard Garrett, Sam Childhood: Two novellas
Italian Italy Righetto, Matteo Curtis, Howard Soul of the Border
Arabic Syria Sirees, Nihad Weiss, Max States of Passion
Finnish Finland Statovci, Pajtim Hackston, David My Cat Yugoslavia
Polish Poland Wittlin, Józef Corness, Patrick Salt of the Earth
Scribe UK Dutch Netherlands van der Kwast, Ernst Vroomen, Laura Giovanna’s Navel
Tilted Axis Uzbek Uzbekistan Ismailov, Hamid Rayfield, Donald The Devil’s Dance
Press Thai Thailand Yoon, Prabda Poopoksakul, Mui Moving Parts
11
Censorship and women
writers in translation
Focus on Spain under Francoism1
Pilar Godayol
History, women, translation, and censorship in Europe:

theoretical origins and definitions
Censorship “blocks, manipulates and controls”

Over the last three decades, translation scholars have provided various definitions of the concept
of “censorship” differing in their nuances (e.g. Abellán 1980; Merkle 2002; Billiani 2007; Seruya
and Moniz 2008; Rundle 2010; Larraz 2014). However, they all agree that in general there are
two majority views which must be clearly differentiated, even though they are interconnected
with regard to the production of literature. On the one hand, there is the freer version of cen-
sorship applying to what Fernando Larraz refers to as “more or less spontaneous practices of
social communication, mercantile strategies, norms and canons of a specific cultural field or the
legitimate laws adopted by a State to protect its individual citizens” (2014, 22). On the other
hand, there is the stricter version, the political censorship by totalitarian states that consists of “an
administrative and institutionalized restriction of the freedom of speech as a means of preventing
the diversification of political, moral or religious discourses” (2014, 22). In this chapter, we will
concentrate on this second definition, referring to a coercive power established and imposed
by force by an authoritarian regime wishing to prevent the entry and diffusion of the Other, of
difference and modernity, in this case of the influence of foreign feminine and feminist literature
that deviates from the views of the government in power.
Political censorship in totalitarian systems implies the existence of a legislative body or of
norms to be applied in determining if a text can be published (or not), or if it requires modifica-
tions or cuts in order to bring it into line with the official discourse and make it tolerable from
the orthodox state viewpoint. According to Denise Merkle, “[c]ensorship refers broadly to the
suppression of information in the form of self-censorship, boycotting or official state censor-
ship before the utterance occurs (preventive or prior censorship) or to punishment for having
disseminated a message (post-censorship, negative or repressive censorship)” (2002, 9). That is
to say, governmental censorship may be ‘preventive or prior,’ when it is applied before publi-
cation, preventing it or drastically correcting the text, or ‘negative, repressive post-censorship’
when, after publication, the distribution of the book is paralyzed or the book withdrawn and
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Pilar Godayol
sometimes even completely destroyed. Obviously, censorship of the publication of originals

and translations is one facet of the system of cultural repression put in place by authoritarian
regimes. Other measures are imposed, such as the destruction or raiding of libraries, or other
types of censorship applied to the theatre, music, cinema, and the press that we will not deal
with here.
Francesca Billiani defines censorship as “an act, often coercive and forceful, that – in vari-
ous ways and under different guises – blocks, manipulates and controls the establishment of
cross-cultural communication. Primarily, it aims to guide the coming into being of forms of
aesthetic, ideological and cultural communication” (2007, 3). Since the 1990s, various research
work has focused on censorship and translation, mainly centred on repressive political regimes
of the 20th century in Europe. Of particular interest are the studies carried out on the selec-
tion, the circulation, and the publication (or not) of translations in Fascist Italy (1922–1940)
(Ferme 2002; Billiani 2006; Rundle 2010; Rundle and Sturge 2010), in National Socialist Ger-
many (1934–1945) (Sturge 2004), in the Portuguese Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar
(1926–1974) (Seruya and Moniz 2008; Seruya 2018), and in Spain under the dictator Fran-
cisco Franco (1939–1975), with special reference here to the work carried out by the TRACE
(TRAnslations CEnsored) (Rabadán 2000; Merino 2008; Camus Camus et al. 2017). A number
of monographs have also appeared presenting various types of censorship, from different peri-
ods and geographies (Billiani 2007; Seruya and Moniz 2008; Ní Chuilleanáin et al. 2009). Less
has been published on periods before 1900, but an outstanding work is The Power of the Pen.
Translation & Censorship in Nineteenth-century Europe (Merkle et al. 2010), which includes studies
of systems of censorship in the 19th century and before in countries such as Germany, Spain,
Portugal, and Russia. So as to present a case of unified criteria, strategies, and actors, this chap-
ter concentrates on works dealing with political censorship in Europe, especially in Spain during
Franco’s dictatorship.
“ ‘Lost’ in Patriarchy”
Luise von Flotow’s Translation and Gender. Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (1997) is one of the
foundational texts of theoretical studies of gender and translation along with Gender in Transla-
tion. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996) by Sherry Simon. In her work, Flotow
insists on the need to fight against the vertical patriarchal lines of culture and the invisibility to
which women writers and translators have always been condemned stating the following:
Feminists point out that the patriarchal canon has traditionally defined aesthetics and liter-
ary value in terms that privileged work by male writers to the detriment of women writers;
as a result, much writing by women has been ‘lost’. [. . .] Translation has begun to play an
important role in making available the knowledge, experiences and creative work of many
of these [earlier] women writers.
(1997, 30)
Almost two decades later, Rebecca Solnit still urges us to go on building a female lineage, com-
plex and interconnected:
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers.
Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and
the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until
you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to
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Censorship and women writers in translation
construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning. [. . .] Those excluded influ-
ences I call the grandmothers.
(2014, 72)
Both Flotow and Solnit support the archaeological work of retrieval of the “grandmothers”
(symbolic grandmothers, mothers, sisters, etc.) to render them visible. Since cultural geneal-
ogy has always been masculine, with the incursion of some token women, legitimized by the
dominant regimes, feminist scholars advocate contesting this chronic cultural lack of mothers
by retrieving and revaluing feminine and feminist protagonists and texts. Therefore, translation
plays a part in this restoration of women’s influence and leadership.
Over recent decades, many researchers and research groups have worked in the historio-
graphic area of feminine and feminist retrieval through translation (Delisle 2002; Bacardí and
Godayol 2014, 2016; Flotow 1997, 2011; Castro 2011; Santaemilia and Flotow 2011; Castro
and Ergun 2017; Flotow and Farahzah 2017). With the aim of foregrounding translation (often
considered a subaltern discipline in the literary canon), and translated women writers and trans-
lators (often considered subaltern literary figures in the translating canon), these studies have
vindicated the memory of women in the history of translation: firstly, by retrieving translators,
translations, and their paratexts (prefaces, introductions, notes, correspondence between women,
etc.), and secondly, by retrieving translations of feminist texts and authors that had been rendered
invisible by the dominant context.
Towards a non-androcentric and ‘feminized’ history, or histories

Thanks to new transnational and anti-essentialist approaches to translation (e.g. Bastin and Ban-
dia 2006; Bandia 2014; Vidal Claramonte 2018), which are not based on a vertical and periodiz-
ing concept of history but are, rather, hybrid, decentred, inclusive, and open to the interrelations
between histories, other forgotten histories of translation, made invisible by dominant discourses,
are beginning to be studied. These include histories with “issues of gender, ethics, postcolonial-
ism, globalization, and minority in translation, all related to what is generally referred to as the
postmodern condition” (Bandia 2006, 54). Vidal Claramonte further points out that “writing
new histories of translation with the voices of those who previously have been silenced may
be a first step towards questioning what is established and exploring methodological paths of
research. Translation as an experience of difference and opening to the Other” (2018, 120–121).
In keeping with the postmodern construction and systematizing of subaltern histories of
translation (non-Eurocentric and non-national histories of translation, for example), here, fol-
lowing in the footsteps of Lori Chamberlain (1988), we vindicate the non-androcentric and
“feminized” histories of translation, which retrieve, analyze, and propagate texts written by
women of yesterday and today but which are little-known owing to various political and social
factors. These histories bring to light and promote women (writers, translators, publishers,
mentors, etc.) and their accomplices (publishers, mentors, critics, etc.) who struggled against
the established regime to bring the translations to the public eye. Lola Sánchez underlines
the importance of “a greater collaboration and feedback between the History of Translation
and the History of Women” (2015, 71). It is essential to go to historiographic sources to study
the context in which the translation of a foreign woman author was published (or not) and to
reveal the various factors involved in the production and circulation of such a translation. Histo-
riographic excavation of the texts and paratexts of women authors must be carried out and the
inherited patriarchal history rewritten with the aim of making women visible as an active social
group within the history of translation.
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Pilar Godayol
In order to achieve a history of translation that is less asymmetrical, Paul Bandia (2014) and
Jeremy Munday (2014) propose applying microhistory to translation history in order to merge
micro- and macro-histories. Bandia states that
Translation history must account for the power inequalities inherent in global relations by
shifting attention away from the dominant metropolitan cultures and canonical subjects to
include those marginalised cultures that have been consigned to the periphery by forces of
imperialism and colonisation.
(2014, 117)
Similarly, Munday (2014, 64–72) encourages us to give importance to the details, experiences
and actions of the actors and institutions that influenced the process and the reception of the
translation, by means of a methodological consultation of primary sources (such as archives,
manuscripts, and personal papers) as well as secondary sources (such as memoirs, letters, biogra-
phies, interviews, press, and criticism in general). In the case of censorship applied to works of
foreign women authors, which is our subject here, it is essential to consult the censors’ reports
on the publishers, which are kept in national and personal archives. The consultation of primary
and secondary sources can help us to cast light on the existing power relationships, institutional-
ized or not, between the various actors at the time (politicians and members of the body of state
censors, publishers, writers, translators, critics, etc.), and the production of the texts.
Having established the general basic concepts of our chapter, we now present a line of study
that has appeared in recent years, mainly in Spain, and that reflects on the relationship between
history, gender, and translation, between censorship and the reception of foreign women authors in
authoritarian European states in the 20th century, and, more specifically, on how literary censorship
affected the selection, production, and distribution of their works, because most of them were not
in tune with the ideology of these regimes. The convergence of “woman,” “translation,” and “cen-
sorship” encourages scholars to work towards a non-androcentric and “feminized” history of trans-
lation that foregrounds “microhistory” and constantly poses questions about the circumstances,
actors, and power relations involved in the circulation of knowledge: which foreign women’s texts
were selected, canonized or marginalized during these dictatorships? What kind of strategies and
editorial policies were adopted by the Ministries/Institutions to exert control over the importation
of foreign women’s works? Is it possible to identify a network of intellectuals, publishers, and trans-
lators who were able to challenge and even elude the censors’ control of translation? If potentially
‘subversive’ concepts were involved, who proposed the foreign women’s publications? Who were
the translators? Did they have political and ideological affinities with the authors?
Women writers, translation, and censorship in Spain:

current contributions and research
Over the last decade, in Europe, and especially in Spain, various research groups have been
working on censorship and translation. Among others are the pioneering group TRACE of
the University of León, the University of the Basque Country and the University of Cantabria,
the GETCC of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the GETLIHC of the University
of Vic–Central University of Catalonia, and the MUTE of the University of Valencia. In this
research, gender has come to be considered alongside censorship and translation with the result
that scholars are beginning to study and systematize a history of translation that takes into
account the history of women and gender during the period of the Francoist dictatorship. One
particular research vector pays particular attention to the censorship and reception of foreign
150
women writers during this totalitarian period. Researchers have access to the dossiers on liter-
ary censorship during the Francoist regime, and work in close coordination with the General
Archive of the Administration (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid.
The first Spanish studies in this field that incorporate “gender”/“feminism”/“woman,” along
with “translation” and “censorship” are relatively recent: they include “Women, Translation and
Censorship in the Franco Regime” (2011) by Carmen Camus Camus (TRACE), which deals
with the effect of censorship and auto-censorship in the Spanish translation of Larry McMur-
try’s opera prima Horseman, Pass By (1961) and the techniques used by Ana Maria de la Fuente
when translating violence against women in the discourse of this contemporary Western, and
“Censure, féminisme et traduction: Le deuxième sexe de Simone de Beauvoir en Catalan” (2013)
by Pilar Godayol (GETLIHC), which concentrates on the literary censorship suffered by the
publishing house Edicions 62 when the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic from French
into Catalan was proposed in 1965.
In 2015, a special issue of Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris (Zaragoza Ninet, Martínez
Sierra and Ávila-Cabrera, eds.), concerned with “Translation and censorship,” included a section
on “Translation, gender and censorship” consisting of three articles: “Simone de Beauvoir bajo
la dictadura franquista: las traducciones al catalán” [Simone de Beauvoir under Franco’s dictator-
ship: the Catalan translations], by Pilar Godayol (2015); “En terreno vedado: género, traducción
y censura. El caso de Brokeback Mountain” [In fenced ground: gender, translation and censorship.
The Case of Brokeback Mountain], by Cristina Gómez Castro and María Pérez (2015); and
“La identidad censurada: representación y manipulación de la homosexualidad en la obra Té y
simpatía” [The censored identity: representation and manipulation of homosexuality in the work
Tea and Sympathy], by Antonio Martínez and David González-Iglesias (2015). All three articles
point to new directions in the research into gender, translation, and censorship in Spain: the first
opens up the examination of the censors’ dossiers on the translations of foreign feminist writers
during the Francoist regime; the second approaches the analysis of translations of literary texts
into Spanish and their film adaptations, taking into account gender stereotypes; and the third
studies censorship and self-censorship in literature and the theatre with regard to the treatment
of homosexuality under the dictatorship. In this chapter we concentrate on the theme related to
the first article and the evolution of this approach to the present.
From 2015, mainly as part of the research projects of the groups GETLIHC (Vic) and MUTE
(Valencia), the study of foreign women authors censored during the Francoist dictatorship has come
to the fore and become the subject of monographs (Godayol 2016, 2017a), collective volumes
(Godayol and Taronna 2018; Zaragoza Ninet et al. 2018) and articles and book chapters (Godayol
2017b, 2017c, 2017d, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; Gómez Castro 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Julio 2017, 2018;
Somacarrera 2017; Zaragoza Ninet 2017; Riba and Sanmartí 2017, 2018; Bacardí 2018; Camus
Camus 2018; Larraz 2018; Pérez 2018). These works analyze different aspects of censorship, such as
1 The censorship and the reception of foreign women authors translated into Spanish and
Catalan (Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Elinor Glyn, Radcliffe Hall, Margaret Law-
rence, Harper Lee, Mary McCarthy, Mary Wollstonecraft);
2 The literary censorship applied to collections and publishing houses (“Biblioteca Breve”
and “Biblioteca Formentor,” of Seix Barral; “La Educación Sentimental,” of Anagrama);
3 The task of the cultural agents during this period of dictatorship (censors, mentors, pub-
lishers, correctors, and critics) ( Josep Maria Castellet, director of Edicions 62; Carlos Barral,
director of Seix Barral);
4 The profiles of the translators (the outstanding figure of the journalist Maria Luz Morales,
both censor and translator).
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Pilar Godayol
All the aforementioned cases share the experience of suffering Francoist literary censorship,
one of the most organized censorship systems of the European totalitarian regimes of the 20th
century. We will now describe this briefly.
Notes on the context and criteria of Francoist

censorship with some examples
For years, the Francoist regime (1939–1975) impeded the work of Spain’s publishing houses.
From 1938 onwards, all printed texts (books, translations, newspapers, magazines, etc.) were sub-
ject to the procedure of “prior censorship.” During the first two decades of the dictatorship, all
originals and translations not in tune with the regime were prohibited, as were books in Catalan,
Galician, and Basque, and translations into these languages. The persecution of dissident titles
was partial, whereas that of the latter group was total and destructive. From 1946, with the vic-
tory of the Allies and Franco’s estrangement from the Falange, literature in Catalan, Galician, and
Basque began to be tolerated, albeit in an arbitrary fashion that privileged minority titles such
as those on religious topics, poetry, or local monographs. Translations continued to be vetoed.
In 1962, the new minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, altered
the regulations controlling the publication of books in Spain and began to allow translations
‘minority.’ It was not a complete opening, but it meant a certain “liberalization” of the censor-
ship, coinciding with the economic growth and the expansion of international tourism, and the
abolition in 1966, after the II Vatican Council, of the List of Books Prohibited by the Church.
Whenever a Spanish publisher submitted a request to the Ministry of Information and Tour-
ism (MIT) to translate a book, a file was opened, numbered, and distributed to the censors
(usually two or more, depending on how controversial the work was). Then, knowing several
languages (especially English, French, German, and Italian), the censors read the original book
and produced a report, which included answers to questions: (1) Does the book attack dogma?
(2) The moral code? (3) The Church and its Ministers? (4) The regime and its institutions?
(5) People who collaborate or have collaborated with the regime? (6) Are the passages to be
censored typical of the whole work?, a summary of the book, an evaluation in which the pas-
sages or pages hostile to the regime were marked, and a verdict. The verdict could be to approve,
approve with cuts, or reject. If the MIT’s decision was negative, the publisher could present an
appeal. If the verdict was positive, the translation was carried out and sent in for review. The
official administrative procedure ended with the deposit of six copies of the book in the MIT.
Commissioned for academics of the Church and specialist supporters of the regime, the first
censors’ reports of works by feminist writers such as Beauvoir, (Godayol 2015, 2018a), com-
pleted according to the Press Law of 1938, were negative. However, after 1966, it was no longer
in the interests of the regime to hear accusations from the opposition within the country or
from the foreign press, or to be seen to persecute outstanding contemporary women authors.
So, the censors’ reports of these works (Beauvoir, Friedan, or McCarthy) (Godayol 2017a, 2019),
evolved towards positions that were more tolerant of feminism and women’s rights. Neverthe-
less, for the censors there existed two insurmountable barriers right up until the last days of
the dictatorship: national unity and moral freedom. The editor Carlos Barral summarized it
in the following way: “There are two criteria on which prohibition is based. On the one hand
are the books that differ in their treatment of political problems from the orthodox politics of
the present Government. And on the other hand, there is a censorship of a moral, clerical nature,
which aims to eliminate all reference to sexual intimacy or to moral freedom” (2000, 31).
In relation to this, in the recent book Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan
y Mary McCarthy (Three censored women writers) (2017a), Pilar Godayol analyzes the censorship
152
and reception of three feminist works during the last years of the Francoist regime: Le deuxième
sexe (1949), The Feminine Mystique (1963) and The Group (1963). In spite of the many obstacles
imposed by the censors, the first two translations, being specialized texts for a specific reader-
ship, were finally permitted (Friedan’s text was published in Catalan and Spanish in 1965 and,
Beauvoir’s in Catalan in 1968), whereas the third was not.
Addressed to a wider readership, McCarthy’s The Group was a best-seller throughout the
world, with frankly modern content that vindicated the economic, social, and physiological
rights of women, and was, therefore, considered more dangerous because it projected an image
of women that clashed with the principles of so-called National Catholicism of the period.
Labelled pornographic and frivolous, The Group was considered a bête noire from which Spanish
women were to be protected. To give an example, Manuel María Massa, one of the two cen-
sors, concentrated on the indecency of the work: “A very well-written novel, but of immoral
and repugnant substance in numerous passages.” He added: “From contraceptions to the dirtiest
methods of erotic stimulation, Miss McCarthy (who incidentally shows her Republican sympa-
thies in Spanish matters) narrates lives that are far from being in accordance with the Catholic
moral code” (Godayol 2017a, 88).
After Franco’s death, these arguments could no longer be defended and the translation was
authorized and published in Spanish in 1976, in a version by Carmen Rodríguez and Jaime
Ferrán. This version had previously been published in Mexico in 1966, but had never circulated
legally in Spain, where only the occasional clandestine copy brought from the Americas could
be found. That same year, 1966, The Group had been made into a film, directed by Sidney Lumet.
In the USA, the film was released on March 4, 1966; in Spain, after Franco’s death, it was released
on June 11, 1976. The publication of the translation and the arrival of the film coincide with
the end of the dictatorship. In 2004, the Barcelona publishing house Tusquets commissioned
Pilar Vazquez to do a new peninsular translation of The Group (see Godayol 2019, 103–105).
Beyond Spain: new voices on the censorship of foreign

women authors under fascism
Although many of the European works on the censoring of foreign women authors refer to
the situation in Spain under the Francoist dictatorship, research is beginning to focus on other
contexts. In that sense, a comparative study has recently appeared: Foreign Women Authors under
Fascism and Francoism: Gender, Translation and Censorship (2018), edited by Pilar Godayol and
Annarita Taronna, with chapters by Italian and Spanish specialists (Valerio Ferme, Eleonora
Federici, Vanessa Leonardi, Annarita Taronna, Montserrat Bacardí, Fernando Larraz, Carmen
Camus Camus, Pilar Godayol, and Cristina Gómez Castro). In spite of the different timelines,
parallels can be drawn between the power of the censorship exerted on Italian and Spanish
publishing and translation under both the Fascist (1922–1940) and the Francoist (1939–1975)
regimes. In particular, there are a number of common cultural features and processes that char-
acterized translation practices under these two dictatorships, and that can be extended to other
totalitarian situations.
First of all, the only publications allowed were books and translations in Italian and Spanish of
the authors in tune with the conservative ideology of the regimes. Secondly, more ideologically
controversial texts began to be translated under the suspicious eye of the censors, who required
all publishing houses to apply for written approval from the Italian and Spanish Ministries of
Culture, or a similar body. Thirdly, there were similar ideological limitations imposed on works
that discussed or invoked national identity, communism or obscenity. Fourthly, censorship was
very arbitrary and publishers were on occasion able to dodge it in order to publish authors and
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Pilar Godayol
titles that might have seemed at first sight too ideologically threatening. Last but not least, the
system of censors’ reports adopted by the regimes was an effective way of exercising control over
the political and ideological value of the works.
Looking to the future: “there is never a single story”

Recent studies on the intersections of women writers/translation/censorship in the context of
the dictatorship led by Francisco Franco have generated serious thought on how totalitarianisms
affect the choice, production, and distribution of translations of foreign women writers, on how
history discriminates as to who and what is translated (and studied in translation), and on the
essential role of subversive publishers and intellectuals in the struggle against power imposed by
force. These publications are the embryo of future research on the reception and censorship of
foreign women authors under European and non-European authoritarian regimes.
Sadly, the human race has suffered, and is still suffering, totalitarianisms that attack freedom
of speech in all its dimensions, and these attacks include the censorship of publications when the
ideology of these works deviates from that of the governments, as is the case of works by many
feminists and defenders of women’s rights. Although there already exists abundant academic
literature on the intersection translation/censorship, there is still a great need for studies on
women writers/translation/censorship under other European totalitarian regimes of the 20th
century (Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, the USSR, Yugoslavia, etc.), as
well as in other parts of the world. Studies of similar situations in the 19th century and before
would be useful, as would comparative studies on 20th century totalitarian regimes on other
continents, such as Asia, the Middle East, or South America (especially in countries such as
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, etc.).
To conclude, any dictatorship, although in different historical, political, and social contexts,
will attempt to impede, manipulate, and condition the entry of ‘subversive’ foreign literature
written by women, especially if it contains discourses and representations on the conditions and
the moral codes of those women opposing the orthodoxy of the regime. Its purpose is always
to prevent the entry of the revolutionary feminine Other, with the aim stopping the female
population from denouncing the system’s misogynous and androcentric controls and claiming
the civil and political rights that have been usurped. During such times and despite censorship,
translation, usually backed by dissident intellectuals, becomes a political act, one of the compo-
nents of social change, essential for the importation of foreign “women mothers” in an attempt
to (re)construct “a different memory, a different tradition” (Marçal 2004, 142).
Further reading
1 Godayol, Pilar. 2017. Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy. Granada:
Comares. [Godayol, Pilar. 2016. Tres escriptores censurades. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan & Mary McCa-
rthy. Lleida: Punctum.]
This book presents the censorship and reception during the Francoist regime of three translations of
20th century feminist writers: Le deuxième sexe, by Simone de Beauvoir; The Feminine Mystique, by Betty
Friedan; and The group, by Mary McCarthy.
2 Godayol, Pilar and Annarita Taronna, eds. 2018. Foreign Women Authors Under Fascism and Francoism.
Gender, Translation and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
This collection of essays highlights cultural features and processes which characterized translation prac-
tice under the dictatorships of Mussolini (1922–1940) and Franco (1939–1975). The nine chapters
presented here (Bacardí; Camus; Federici; Ferme; Godayol; Gómez Castro; Larraz; Leonardi; Taronna)
bring to the fore the “microhistory” that existed when translating a foreign woman writer during those
two totalitarian political periods.
154
3 Zaragoza Ninet, Gora, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset,
eds. 2018. Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación. Granada: Comares.
This panoramic monograph is divided into four large sections: “Translation and censorship in publish-
ing,”“Translation, censorship and literature,”“Translation, censorship, literature and cinema” and “Trans-
lation, censorship and audiovisual media.” The 20 chapters included here (Aja Sánchez; Bosch; Calvo;
Carcenac & Ugarte; Dot; Estany; Fernández Gil; Godayol; Gómez Castro; Julio; Kurasova; Meseguer;
Panchón; Pérez L. de Heredia; Riba & Sanmartí; Sanz-Moreno; Santaemilia; Seruya; Williams; Zaragoza
Ninet, Martínez Sierra, Cerezo Merchán & Richart Marset) present a general survey of translation stud-
ies that have concentrated their research on the field of gender, translation, and censorship over the last
few years in European countries.
Related topics
History of translation; feminist historiography and translation; women, translation, and censor-
ship in Europe; women, translation, and censorship under Francoism
Note
1 This chapter is the result of work by the consolidated research group “Gender Studies Research Group:
Translation, Literature, History and Communication” (GETLIHC) (2017, SGR 136) of the University
of Vic–Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC) (C. de la Laura, 13, 08500, Vic, Spain), and the
R&D project “Traducción y censura: género e ideología (1939–2000)” (ref. FFI2014–52989-C2–2-P),
financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Author’s ORCID number: 0000–0003–
2513–5334. Email: pgodayol@uvic.cat. Translated by Sheila Waldeck.
References
Abellán, Manuel L. 1980. Censura y creación literaria en España (1939–1976). Barcelona: Península.
Bacardí, Montserrat. 2018. Catalan Women Translators Under Francoism: (Self-)Censorship, Exile and
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12
Gender and interpreting
An overview and case study of a woman
interpreter’s media representation
Biyu (Jade) Du
Introduction
The past three decades have seen rapid processes of globalization and an expanding scale of
migration, during which frequent interlingual, intercultural contacts, and communication take
place at various local, national, and transnational levels. There is a growing demand for language-
related jobs, such as language teachers, translators and interpreters. Interpreters are often used
to mediate communication between speakers of different languages on occasions ranging from
meetings of international organizations and conferences to local social service settings; they
provide linguistic support to people from all walks of life, including government officials, pro-
fessionals, businessmen, as well as migrants who cannot speak the dominant languages of host
countries.
However, it has been observed that there is a gender imbalance in the interpreting profes-
sion, which reflects similar conclusions drawn in other studies in other industries. It is generally
observed in many universities, including Ingrid Kurz’s (1989) and mine, that far more female
than male students are enrolled in translation and interpreting programmes. Take my university
as an example: of all the students enrolled in the MA Chinese Translation and Interpreting
Programme in 2019, male students accounted for less than 10%; in the previous year, there were
only two males out of 67 students in total. Though the number of females who remain in the
profession may decrease after graduation, statistics show a preponderance of women interpret-
ers. According to the survey conducted by Franz Pöchhacker and Cornelia Zwischenberger
(2010), of 704 conference interpreters, 74% were female. In the Annual Review of Public Ser-
vice Interpreting in the UK, a total of 1807 interpreters were on register in 2017 and 65% were
women (NRPSI 2018, 8). Noticing female preponderance in both conference and community
interpreting, some may have the impression that interpreting is a feminised profession. Kurz
even claims that “[t]he study of interpreting is clearly a ‘female study’ ” (1989, 73). Rachael Ryan
(2015) thus raises the question: why are there so few men?
Interestingly, despite the noticeable gender imbalance, gender-related issues in interpreting
do not receive much scholarly attention. Compared with the amount of work on gender in
translation studies, research on gender in interpreting is relatively scant. This chapter is devoted
to surveying and discussing gender issues in interpreting studies in an attempt to draw more
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scholarly attention to this area. After tracing the historical development of interpreting as a
gendered profession and reviewing main research topics in the intersection of gender and inter-
preting, I will proceed to present a case study from China to investigate how gender and the
professional role of a woman interpreter are represented in the media. Finally, I conclude by
suggesting directions for future research.
Historical background
A historical approach is needed to understand the underlying relationships between gender and
interpreting (Flotow 1997). One approach to understanding the cause of gender imbalance in
the interpreting profession is to return to early language education and the traditional view of
gender-related subject choices.
Joanna Carr and Anne Pauwels (2006) base their research on data collected from secondary
schools in major anglophone countries including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, and find that boys generally show less interest in foreign language learning across all
these countries. Analyzing the factors contributing to boys’ lower rates of participation in foreign
language education through interviews with boys, girls, and their teachers in those schools, they
discover that in addition to the gendered curriculum and pedagogy that work better for girls,
boys, surrounded by the discourse of masculinity, perceive foreign language learning as something
not ‘masculine’ and choose not to do language as a way of gender performativity. Influenced by
the “traditional narratives of innate predispositions and brain differentiation” (2006, 169), many
boys and teachers subscribe to beliefs about what boys/girls excel at – foreign language learning
is considered a difficult choice for boys and suitable only for smart girls (2006, 172).
Though Carr and Pauwels’ study centres on boys’ resistance to foreign language learning,
their findings shed light on ways to understand how gender stereotypes and ideologies shape
individuals’ choices, desires and actions with regard to whether or not they learn foreign lan-
guages. While the ideology that links gender and language demotivates boys and men, it inspires
girls and women to get involved in foreign language education, take up language-related jobs,
and outperform boys and men in this area.
In terms of the interpreting profession, similar perceptions of gender, aptitude and career
trajectories are shared by male conference interpreters in Ryan’s study (2015). When asked why
there is such a preponderance of women in interpreters, many of them state that women gener-
ally have better aptitude for language, with better working memories and multitasking capabili-
ties, and therefore are more inclined to enter the profession.
In the broader context of globalization, the symbolic capital associated with language has the
potential to be transformed into economic and social capital (Bourdieu 1991). With language
acquiring value as a commodity in a new globalized economy (Heller 2003, 2007), bilingual or
multilingual skills have become more commodified in language work, such as call-centre opera-
tors, child-rearing workers, and interpreters (Piller and Pavlenko 2007, 2009). Within these
language-related service industries, “the workforce is heavily feminised” (Piller and Pavlenko
2009, 15), so Ingrid Piller and Aneta Pavlenko contend that multilingualism “is a gendered prac-
tice” (2009, 22). However, there is a clear distinction of social status ascribed to these language
workers: while jobs in call-centres, often outsourced to developing countries, are relatively
poorly paid, interpreters, especially conference interpreters, are financially rewarded and enjoy
high recognition, which is one of the main motivations for women to enter this profession (Cho
2017). Such is the case in countries like China and South Korea where there has been a great
demand for conference interpreters in the course of globalization and expanded international
exchanges (Choi and Lim 2002). In addition, the flexible and casual nature of interpreting work
160
fits in well with women’s unpaid work of reproduction and child-care (Piller and Pavlenko
2009) and the perception of interpreting as service occupations is said to deter men from choos-
ing this career (Ryan 2015). These factors combined result in gender imbalance in the interpret-
ing professions. In sum, the acquisition of second language skills enables women to gain access to
labour markets and make economic advancements in the globalized new economy.

As mentioned in the introduction, very little research explores the intersection of gender and
interpreting. A survey of the literature shows that these studies primarily address gender dif-
ferences in conference interpreting performance, and they mainly draw on previous work on
gender in language use which shows linguistic differences between men and women in regard
to speech style (e.g. Lakoff 1975; Holmes 1990; Tannen 1990).
Robin Lakoff ’s seminal study (1975) indicates that women hedge more than men do in
spoken discourse. Use of hedges, she claims, is associated with speakers’ uncertainty. Based on
these findings, it is natural to hypothesise that gender difference exists in the interpreting of
hedges as well. To find out whether the hypothesis is true, Cédric Magnifico and Bart Defrancq
(2017) use corpora to investigate whether men and women interpret the same source speeches
differently, and why that might be the case. They examine the performance of professional
simultaneous interpreters at the European Parliament, analyzing their interpretation of hedges
in two language pairs of French to English and French to Dutch. Their findings show that even
though interpreters produce more hedges than their speakers overall, gender differences are not
as significant as they have hypothesised. The only significant difference is found in the language
pair of French to Dutch: in places where source texts contain none, women interpreters add
more hedges than their men counterparts, which might be a result of the linguistic difference
that Dutch contains more hedges than English. They believe that addition of hedges is a strategy
by interpreters to tone down face-threatening acts in the source texts and deal with cognitive
overload.
In a similar study on hedges using a corpus approach, Feng Pan and Binghan Zheng (2017)
compare the interpretation produced by men and women interpreters at the press conferences
of the Chinese government. They find that men interpreters generally use more hedges than
women interpreters, especially in the accuracy-oriented and speaker-oriented categories, while
the latter use more audience-oriented hedges (Pan and Zheng 2017).
Using hedges is said to be part of women’s politeness strategies (Lakoff 1975), which, accord-
ing to Janet Holmes (1993), is attributed to the different social status of men and women. Hol-
mes (1993) argues that women are generally seen to be inferior to men, so they use more polite
language that features discourse markers, such as hedges, which William O’Barr and Bowman
Atkins (1980) term a “powerless” language style. But this gender difference in linguistic behav-
iour is not confirmed in a study conducted by Magnifico and Defrancq (2016), who, drawing on
the same corpora of simultaneous interpreting at the European Parliament, attempt to investigate
the relationship between gender and politeness strategies in interpreting. Surprisingly, their find-
ings show that men interpreters tone down more face-threatening acts than women interpreters.
Gender differences in interpretation have also been observed at the Chinese government’s
press conferences. Analysing a corpus of 28 recordings from 1989 to 2014, Kaibao Hu and
Lingzi Meng (2018) discover that men and women interpreters differ in their use of English
forms and interpreting strategies. Men interpreters are found to adopt English low-value modal
verbs, intensifiers, verbs of cognitive attitude, and the pronoun we more frequently than their
women colleagues; in terms of interpreting methods, women interpreters tend to remain closer
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Biyu (Jade) Du
to the source texts and use fewer strategies of strengthening, weakening and addition. Explaining
such gender differences in linguistic behaviour, Hu and Meng (2018) argue that they are linked
to the traditional gender norms in Chinese society, where women are expected to be passive and
obedient, so women interpreters pay more attention to being faithful to the source texts, while
men interpreters tend to intervene and be creative in their interpreting because of men’s social
roles as initiators and creators.
Apart from conference settings, a few studies have been devoted to gender impact on public
service interpreting. Public service interpreting, also known as community interpreting in some
countries, takes place in “face-to-face encounters between officials and laypeople, meeting for a
particular purpose at a public institution” (Wadensjö 1998, 49). It is mobilised in the provision
of public services, such as social services or medical care. Typical public service settings include
courtrooms, police offices, healthcare centres, hospitals, immigration and asylum tribunals, and
prisons. Researchers on gender-related issues in public service settings have varied foci. Some
address cognitive aspects in interpreting: Marianne Mason (2008) observes that when handling
cognitive overload in court interpreting, men tend to omit more discourse markers than women;
some are interested in the participatory role of interpreters and their stance: Ester Leung and
John Gibbons (2008) observe that in interpreting rape trials in Hong Kong courts, certain men
interpreters take a hostile stance towards the victim of sexual assault and seem to blame the vic-
tim rather than the perpetrator; other researchers are more concerned with gender-sensitivity
issues in cases of sexual assault and violence: Yukiko Nakajima (2005) calls for the provision of
medical interpreters with gender sensitivity when doing medical examinations of victims, and
Carolina Norma and Olga Garcia-Caro (2016) believe that there is an urgent need to include
feminist education in the training of community interpreters.
In addition, certain researchers also examine the gendered aspect of the profession itself. In
Jinhyun Cho’s study of women interpreters in South Korea (2017), she finds that in a language
market where clients are predominantly men and interpreters are predominantly women, there
is a market demand for physical attractiveness. To be more competitive, women interpreters
have to do self-styling and use beautification as a strategy to gain more aesthetic capital in addi-
tion to the linguistic capital associated with their English language skills. Cho (2017) argues that
women interpreters’ self-commodification represents gendered power exerted by employers in
a patriarchal society.
With regard to the media portrayal of interpreters, Ebru Diriker (2003, 2005, 2009) conducts
research on the discourse about simultaneous interpreters in the Turkish media in the period
from 1998 to 2003, but these studies regard interpreters as a homogeneous group and do not
address gender difference in representation.

The preceding overview shows that the area of gender and interpreting has hardly been subject to
research. In order to appeal for more scholarly attention and to show possible directions for future
research, this section presents a case study, which is part of a larger project on the representation
of interpreters in public discourse. It explores how a Chinese woman interpreter is portrayed in
the media. The data consist of Chinese media reports produced in both Chinese and English
between 2010 and 2018; national and local media, such as People’s Daily and Southern Metropolis
Daily, major news websites of big Internet Technology companies including Sina, NetEase, Ten-
cent, English websites of Chinese media and institutes, such as China Daily, All-China Women’s
Federation, as well as English media such as South China Morning Post are included.
162
This case study does not present a comprehensive analysis of all media discourse on this
woman interpreter. Rather, it highlights some prominent recurrent themes and shows how these
are articulated into representing the woman interpreter as a role model.
The themes are not exhaustive but they give some idea of the general attitude and prevail-
ing perceptions. Adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach that views discourse as
socioculturally shaped and not neutral (Fairclough 1989, 1995; Wodak and Meyer 2015), I do
a close reading of the dominant men’s narrative on women and unpack the gender stereotypes
and ideology underlying the representation of women interpreters in Chinese media.
CDA sees discourse as a social construct, so it is important to understand the status of inter-
preters in the Chinese context before we embark on the analysis of media discourse. Since the
adoption of the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, China has undergone rapid
economic growth and dramatic social changes. The increase in foreign investment, international
trade and intercultural exchanges has created many job opportunities that require multilingual
skills and a huge demand for translators and interpreters. As a result, Chinese foreign language
learning, especially the learning of English, as well as translation and interpreting programmes,
have developed at a rapid pace. It is reported that the number of universities offering Master
of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programmes exceeded 200 in 2017, only ten years after
the MTI degree first started (China Daily 2017), not to mention hundreds of English degree
programmes offered by many universities in the country.
The huge market demand has brought about a rise in the translation and interpreting profes-
sions as a popular choice for young people. Conference interpreters, in particular, enjoy a high
social status and are often labelled ‘gold-collar’ professionals because of their high remunera-
tion, flexible working time, good working conditions, and the opportunities they have to work
with celebrities and high-level officials. This positive perception of conference interpreters is
also noted in many studies on the occupational status of the interpreting profession (e.g. Jones
2002; Pöchhacker 2011; Setton and Guo 2009; Diriker 2003, 2005, 2009). Despite this status
and reputation, however, individual conference interpreters are normally not known or visible
to the general public (Dam and Zethsen 2013).
Zhang Lu, the subject of this case study, however, enjoys an extraordinary visibility in China.
She became famous overnight for her excellent interpreting performance at Premier Wen
Jiabao’s press conferences at the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and Chinese
Peoples’ Political Consultative Conference in 2010. She has been providing consecutive inter-
preting on the same occasion for many years and has become a well-known figure.
The Chinese government’s practice of holding Premier’s press conferences started in the
1980s and these have become important events since the 1990s, events that are seen widely by
the outside world as a gesture with which China demonstrates its determination to build an
open, transparent, democratic government and its willingness to have dialogues with Western
countries. The press conferences are also used as windows for the Chinese government to
publicise its national policy and promote China’s discourse, which is part of a nation-branding
strategy. It is on these occasions that foreign journalists, alongside Chinese domestic reporters,
are permitted to be present and sometimes given opportunities to pose questions to the Premier.
As the press conferences are broadcast live to the whole world, their success is closely linked to
the quality of interpreting provided on site. Interpreters’ renditions are often quoted verbatim
by foreign media. In other words, the voice of the interpreter becomes the voice of the Chinese
government (Gu 2018). Zhang Lu, the interpreter in question here, also points out that, “when
you speak, when you interpret, people will not only take your words as the individual’s voice,
but also as the voice of authority” (Wong 2016).
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Sitting next to the second highest-ranking officials of the government, Zhang Lu is thus at
the centre of global attention. She, more than any other interpreter, enjoys an extremely high
publicity and popularity in media coverage. Her interpreting performances, especially her trans-
lations of ancient Chinese poems, are studied, analysed, commented upon by numerous students
and teachers in translation and interpreting studies. She is a celebrity in the country, a star of the
profession and an icon to many people. My textual analysis of media reports in the following
sections centres on what the media foregrounds about her.
Appearance
Noticeably, in the media headlines and contents, ‘nvshen’ is often used to describe Zhang Lu.
Literally meaning ‘goddess’, ‘nvshen’ is the term people use to refer to a beautiful woman they
highly respect and deeply admire. Following is how the media describe the audience response
to Zhang when she gave a public lecture in Hong Kong:
Excerpt (1)
She was greeted with cries of ‘You are a goddess to me!’ by women – and even a few men –
during her trip to Hong Kong.
(Wong 2016)
With the ‘goddess’ label, Zhang’s charming appearance is often highlighted in the media. Since
her first appearance at the Premier’s press conference, she has been constantly praised for her
attractive looks and demure temperament. When commenting on her appearance, the media
also stress that she is neither too eye-catching nor too flashy, appropriate to the official occasion.
Here is an excerpt from the media to depict her appearance, covering the hairstyle, dress, and
manner:
Excerpt (2)
Sitting beside Li, Zhang sported a short haircut and wore a dark tailored suit. “Elegant,”
“calm,” “clear,” “coherent” and “capable” were some of the adjectives used to describe her.
(All-China Women’s Federation 2017)
The media’s interest in the appearance of women professionals is also common in the case of
women politicians. Elizabeth van Acker notes that media reporters are more likely to “comment
on women’s personal appearance, discussing their hairstyles, weight, clothes, shoes or glasses”
whereas they are “generally less [likely to] comment on men’s beer bellies, suits, size and family
roles,” which “perpetuates gender norms” (2003, 117).
Poetry translation
Apart from appearance, what is foregrounded in the media discourse on Zhang Lu in relation to
her professional role is her skilful interpreting of Chinese poetry. This is another reason why she
became well-known. Praising her eloquent renditions of ancient Chinese poems quoted by the
Premier, the media often refer to comments by scholars in translation studies:
164
Excerpt (3)
“I think that her interpretation is excellent and indeed meets the national level,” Luo
Lisheng, dean of the Foreign Language Department of Tsinghua University, told reporters.
He added that from a professional standpoint, the interpretation during the entire press
conference was fluent and much of the political vocabulary was translated properly.
(People’s Daily Online 2010)
In this excerpt, Zhang Lu’s interpreting performance is given credit as “excellent,” “the national
level,”“fluent,”“proper,” which are very generic rather than specific comments. Dissimilarly, in Turk-
ish media reports on simultaneous interpreters and interpreting, the discourse not only addresses
positive aspects, such as “big event,” “big name,” but also a “big mistake” (Diriker 2003, 2005).
Hard working
Working for high-ranking officials is regarded as a privilege and an honour. Only the most
talented and outstanding people can win the opportunity in the fierce competition through
which interpreters are recruited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Zhang’s rise to fame is
often attributed to her diligence. In Excerpt (4), she is described as extremely hard working and
devoted to her work:
Excerpt (4)
According to one of Zhang’s classmates, Zhang is very smart and diligent. She often works
until 1 or 2 a.m., and listens to radio programs from the BBC, VOA and CNN. She likes to
take notes while reading the Reference News and Global Times.
(All-China Women’s Federation 2010)
In summary, while in most cases interpreters are invisible and remain backstage, in this case
study, Zhang Lu is highly visible and influential. She has come to the front of the stage (Goff-
man 1978). This is owing to the status of her professional role, and especially the link her job
provides to high-level officials in the country. The textual analysis of the media reports shows
that in the process of iconization, she is portrayed as a role model for Chinese women: beauti-
ful, talented, and hard-working. Francis Lee (2004) observes a similar discourse in the Hong
Kong media that aims to construct women politicians as perfect women who can balance both
work and family.
Though Zhang Lu’s fame is mainly a result of her professional role as a government inter-
preter, what is foregrounded alongside her expertise is her appearance. Her beautiful looks, her
feminine manner, and her style of dress are often given a detailed description. Other studies
have also shown that in the media coverage of women professionals, such as American Congress
women members (Carroll and Schreiber 1997), women politicians in Australia and New Zea-
land (van Acker 2003), the media are keen on their appearances. Even though women profes-
sionals stand out because of their professional identity, their gender and gender-related features
also come into the spotlight, which is a gendered practice. This is particularly the case in the
so-called service industries where women are predominantly employed. In the case of South
Korean women interpreters, in addition to language services, they also need to perform aesthetic
labour to cater to the demand for good-looking interpreters in the language market. They often
165
Biyu (Jade) Du
use beautification to increase their competitiveness, which, according to Cho, is a new mode of
“objectification and commodification” (2017, 502).
Further, the fact that interpreters are predominantly women and government officials are
predominantly men reflects another gendered aspect of this profession. What is more, in the case
of Zhang Lu whose professional role is highly politicised, her good looks provide added value to
promote the national image. As mentioned previously, the Premier’s press conferences are part
of China’s nation-branding strategies to present the country positively to the outside world, and
the image of the interpreter is part of this portrayal and positive construction. In a sense, inter-
preters’ beautification serves the “display” function on the front stage (Goffman 1978).
Future directions
As is evident from the preceding discussion, gender and interpreting is an area that has not
been fully explored. Further research can be done on how men interpreters are portrayed and
whether this is different from the portrayal of women interpreters, given that media representa-
tion of women politicians is different from that of men (van Acker 2003). Comparative studies
can also be conducted across different countries and regions to see whether and how cultural
and social factors impact perceptions of men and women interpreters.
Though women are dominant in overall numbers, men interviewees in Ryan’s study (2015)
say they have a privileged status in the profession. For instance, in international organisations
that have their own language services sections, men are often seen to take up important posts.
So, it is worth exploring the occupational status of women interpreters in the job market in
comparison with that of their men counterparts, to investigate whether there exists gender
inequality in employment and career development, such as recruitment, income, promotion,
and position. Following this, research on employers’ and audience’s reception and perception
of women and men interpreters in relation to their role performance could also be carried out.
Quantitative methods such as surveys (Pöchhacker and Zwischenberger 2010) can be used to
gain insights into general trends in the workplace of the interpreting profession.
With regard to professional role performance, more empirical data are needed to probe into
gender differences in other linguistic behaviours – as in the studies conducted by Leung and
Gibbon (2008) and Nakajima (2005) in legal and medical settings, for instance, that examine
how men and women interpreters differ in interpreting gender-related source texts/speeches.
Methodologically, corpus studies using large data (Magnifico and Defrancq 2014, 2016, 2017;
Pan and Zheng 2017; Hu and Meng 2018) provide a useful tool to investigate whether and how
gender impacts interpreting.
Going beyond linguistic analysis, a critical discourse perspective could be used to explore
how gendered linguistic behaviour is shaped by sociocultural factors. Adopting the qualitative
approach of interviews (e.g. Cho 2017) for an in-depth understanding of individual’s perception
and personal view towards certain issues, we can inquire how these differences relate to inter-
preters’ personal stances, positioning, and ideology.
Further reading
Magnifico, Cédric and Bart Defrancq. 2017. Hedges in Conference Interpreting. Interpreting, 19(1), 21–46.
This paper examines gender differences in simultaneous interpreting of hedges of French speeches into
English and into Dutch at the European Parliament. Findings show that women interpreters make more
hedges in both target languages and use more additions as interpreting strategies to cope with hedges
in the source speeches.
166
Cho, Jinhyun. 2017. Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labour of Language Workers.
Gender and Language, 11(4), 482–506.
Drawing upon theories of language commodification and the concept of ‘aesthetic labour’, this paper
uses interview as the research method and shows that beautification is used by women interpreters in
South Korea as a strategy to gain aesthetic capital in addition to language capital in a patriarchal lan-
guage market.
Diriker, Ebru. 2003. Simultaneous Conference Interpreting in the Turkish Printed and Electronic Media
1988–2003. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 12, 231–243.
Analysing the discourse of Turkish media over a span of 15 years, the author discovers that media
representations of simultaneous interpreters are mainly positive and typically centre on Big Events, Big
Money, Big Mistakes, Personal Fame, and Big Career.
Related topics
Critical discourse analysis, gender and identity, language and gender, media discourse, gender and
interpreting
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Part II
Translating feminist writers
13
The Wollstonecraft meme
Translations, appropriations,
and receptions of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s feminism
Elisabeth Gibbels
Introduction and definitions

The existence of translations has often been celebrated as evidence of the successful transmis-
sion of ideas. Indeed, translation is considered a key indicator of international cultural transfer
(Even-Zohar 1997), and, when discussing how Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792) (Rights of Woman) became the founding text of international feminism, pub-
lications rarely omit the fact of its immediate translation (Botting 2013). Versions in French
(1792) and in German (1793) were produced immediately; Dutch and Danish translations fol-
lowed soon. However, these translations differ significantly. Whereas in France, Wollstonecraft
was presented as a political thinker, in Denmark, she was positioned within conventional litera-
ture on women’s education. In Brazil again, for almost 200 years, a different text circulated as
Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s legacy, the posthumous Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798)
(Wrongs of Woman) with its startling parallelism in title was immediately translated as well but
met with a starkly different reception. In view of these disparate framings, it seems evident that
the fact of translation alone may not suffice to guarantee the transfer of content or the impact
of a book in translation. This chapter analyzes Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman and traces
the transfer of feminism. It argues that, besides the translations as such, it was their appropriation
and reception through the texts surrounding them, their presentation in the other culture, and
the dissociation of Wollstonecraft’s fame from her actual texts that constructed her as a feminist
meme and established her as the founding author of feminist discourse.
The discussion thus revolves around three key issues: feminism, paratexts, and memes. It
follows Karen Offen’s definition of feminism as (1) recognizing women’s lived lives as valid for
interpreting their experience and needs, (2) raising consciousness of institutionalized injustice,
and (3) advocating the elimination of that injustice by challenging coercive power and author-
ity (2010, 16). Both Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman meet this definition. The content of
these works is surrounded by titles, prefaces, and footnotes, and evaluated in reviews. As para-
texts, such interventions by publishers and reviewers form “a consciously crafted threshold for
a text which has the potential to influence the way(s) in which the text is received” (Batchelor
2018, 142). Further, metatexts, such as private correspondence, also comment upon the text,
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Elisabeth Gibbels
though they do not establish a threshold (149). With the reception thus dissociated from the
actual text, the name of the author may assume a signal function and become a meme. Memes as
units of cultural transmission substitute an icon for the actual content (Dawkins 1976) and may
operate without access to the original texts or translations. Feminist discourse was produced in
the name of Wollstonecraft even where her texts were not available anymore or were misattrib-
uted. Wollstonecraft thus dissolved into the genre of her field and became a discourse founder
for feminist discourse in Michel Foucault’s sense (1977).
Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) lived during the Age of the Enlightenment, when “western and
central Europe first became, in the sphere of ideas, broadly a single arena integrated by mostly
newly invented channels of communication” (Israel 2001, vi). Bluestocking aristocrats established
large cross-national collections of books by and on women ( Johns 2014, 61–62) and enlightened
journals like The Spectator made liberal philosophy accessible for women. Such ideas reached
Germany, for example, when Luise Gottsched translated complete volumes (Der Zuschauer,
1739–1742). A pan-European phenomenon, with main impulses coming from France, Britain,
Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, the Enlightenment “effectively demolished all legitimation
of monarchy, aristocracy, woman’s subordination to man, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery,
replacing these with the principles of universality, equality and democracy” (Israel 2001, vi).
Wollstonecraft was well integrated in enlightened circles and published widely. Her oeuvre
includes, besides her own fiction and non-fiction, numerous reviews (women’s fiction, historical
and scientific books) and some translations (from French and German).

There is extensive research on Wollstonecraft’s life, work, and position within feminism. Apart
from numerous editions of Rights of Woman and of her complete works (Todd and Butler 1989),
several biographies and bibliographies exist. In addition, each wave of feminism has produced its
own body of Wollstonecraft literature: re-discovery for first-wave feminism (Rauschenbusch-
Clough 1898), reception ( Janes 1978), writing style (Poovey 1988), pedagogy (Myers 1988),
feminism versus misogyny (Gubar 1994), philosophy (Falco 1996), and translations (Bour 2004,
Gibbels 2004; Kirkley 2009a, 2009b).
Recent research has acknowledged the second volume, Wrongs of Woman, as a philosophi-
cal book in its own right (Mackenzie 2014), analyzed the feminism in her literary translations
(Kirkley 2015a) and reclaimed her as a religious writer (Taylor 2016) and educationist (Hanley
2013). Most importantly, work on paratexts has emphasized how the agents around a translation
affect cultural transfer (Batchelor 2018), and Wollstonecraft research has begun to assess the role
of publishers, reviewers, and biographers (Bour 2013, Botting 2013). Work analyzing the role of
Wollstonecraft as a meme has recently begun (Botting and Hammond Matthews 2014).

This chapter traces the role played by translation in Wollstonecraft’s rise as a feminist meme
and discourse founder. Starting from key feminist concepts in Rights of Woman and Wrongs
of Woman, French and German translations will be analyzed as to their treatment of feminist
content. Next, prefaces, reviews and other paratexts will be examined for the effect they had
on how Wollstonecraft was presented and received. The discussion of misappropriations and
174
misattributions as well as the absence or presence of a translation in a culture will help assess
Wollstonecraft’s function as a meme. Finally, current manifestations of Wollstonecraft’s status as
a discourse founder for international feminism will be listed.
Feminist concepts in Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman

Rights of Woman (1792) challenges power and authority, addresses injustices and inequality and
accepts women’s lived experience as valid indicators of their needs. Throughout the text, Woll-
stonecraft emphasizes the importance of independence (“it is vain to expect virtue from women
till they are, in some degree, independent of men” (230)) and shows how domination and social
oppression hinder women from achieving independence. To achieve autonomy, women need to
become independent thinkers (“then you ought to think, and only rely on God” (88)) because
“enlarging the mind” will “enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render
it independent” (89). In their intellectual endeavours, Wollstonecraft insists that “not only the
virtue, but the knowledge” should be the same for “the two sexes” and should be acquired “by the
same means” (110). Furthermore, she argues against “docile blind obedience” (87), contests “the
divine right of husbands” (112), and flatly refuses male domination (“I love man as my fellow; but
his sceptre, real, or usurped, extends not to me” (107)). Wollstonecraft even demands participa-
tion in civic life (“When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense,”
(262)) and professional life (“enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of
independence [so] that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends” (165)).
Wrongs of Woman widens the feminist scope of Rights of Woman and investigates “different
classes of women” (74). Here, Wollstonecraft attacks patriarchal marriage and drastically exposes
physical and emotional abuse of women, but also addresses issues of legal and political equality,
economic independence, sexual self-determination, and custody of children. Wollstonecraft’s
criticism of legal injustice is assertive and outspoken (“I wish my country to approve of my
conduct; but, if laws exist, made by the strong to oppress the weak, I appeal to my own sense
of justice” (197)). Exhibiting “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out
of the partial laws and customs of society” (73), Wrongs of Woman shows how the private is
political. Her pairing the story of a lower-class woman ( Jemima) with that of a middle-class
woman (Maria) allows Wollstonecraft to discuss women’s oppression as a group and across
classes (“Thinking of Jemima’s fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of
women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (120), and to show female soli-
darity as the way to overcome this oppression (Maria, sympathizing with Jemima’s sufferings,
promises her “a better fate,” which she “will procure” for her (121). This female solidarity, which
has made the book a “founding text for modern organized feminism” (Botting 2016, 219), may
also be detected in Wollstonecraft’s choice of genre as the novel format increases accessibility
for a female readership.
The German and French translations of Rights of Woman

and Wrongs of Woman
The 1793/94 German translation of Rights of Woman is by Georg Friedrich Christian Weis-
senborn, a teacher at the school run by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the German educationist
and publisher. Although supportive, the translation often softens Wollstonecraft’s claims, mostly
through modal particles that qualify her statements. For example, in the passage where Woll-
stonecraft addresses potential weakness in women, writing “should experience prove that they
cannot attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues
175
Elisabeth Gibbels
be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree” (106), the translation
adds a “wirklich” [really] and reads “cannot really attain.” The next part of the phrase: “let their
virtues be the same in kind” is drowned in hedging “verstatte man ihnen doch wenigstens [one
should at least grant them], so that the power of the English statement is considerably reduced:
“Sollte indessen die Erfahrung ausweisen, dass die Weiber wirklich nicht so viel Seelenstärke,
Beharrlichkeit und Muth als die Männer erreichen könnten, so verstatte man ihnen doch
wenigstens eine der Art nach gleiche Tugend, wenn sie gleich umsonst nach demselben Grad
ringen würden” (Wollstonecraft 1793, 120).
In contrast, the French translation of 1792 radicalizes the text. For instance, “Femme”
[woman] is continuously capitalized. When Wollstonecraft writes of kings as “men whose very
station” sinks them necessarily below the meanest of their subjects, the (anonymous) translator
chooses “méchants” [villains] whose “vices” always sink them. Wollstonecraft’s hope that the
rights of women might be respected one day becomes an assertive “they will be respected as
they should be.” All over the text, the translator intensifies the passionate tone through impera-
tives and exclamation marks (Kirkley 2009a).
When Wrongs of Woman appeared, it was immediately translated into French (1798), just like
Rights of Woman. Here, however, the translator Basile-Joseph Ducos softens or eliminates pas-
sages, in particular, references to sexual and physical abuse, pleas for women’s freedom or attacks
on marriage as an institution (Bour 2004, Kirkley 2015b). Such omissions and changes are pre-
sent in the German version (1800) as well. For example, the passage beginning “Marriage, as at
present constituted, she considered as leading to immorality” and ending with “as it roused bitter
reflections on the situation of women in society” (193–194) has been deleted. Wollstonecraft’s
drastic “a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass” (158) is neutralized in the
French version (“à la vérité, une femme est la propriété de son mari” [to be honest, a wife is
the property of her husband]) and further watered down in the German by the hedging modal
particle “gleichsam” [quasi, so to speak] “eine Frau ist wahrhaftig gleichsam das Eigenthum des
Mannes” [a wife is truly almost like the property of her husband] (161). A passage that reminds
readers of the abuse she suffered in her marriage (“Various are the cases, in which a woman
ought to separate herself from her husband; and mine, I may be allowed emphatically to insist,
comes under the description of the most aggravated” (195–196) is distorted to a cheerful “Es
giebt verschiedne Umstände, die einer Frau erlauben, sich von ihrem Manne trennen zu dürfen.
Ich ergriff dieses Mittel, und fühlte mich dadurch weit glücklicher, als vorher” (237–238) [There
are various circumstances that justify a woman’s separation from her husband. I made use of this
means and became far happier for it (my translation)].
While these translations exist, and were completed almost immediately upon the publication
of the original English texts, it seems that the paratexts had a greater influence on the reception
of Wollstonecraft’s work.
The paratexts
Dedication, prefaces, footnotes and titles

The second edition of Rights of Woman includes a Dedication as well as the preface and footnotes
that were part of the first edition. The translations added further footnotes and editor’s prefaces.
The Dedication was only translated in the French edition, however, and was reflected upon in
Spain and Italy (see “Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman in Other Countries” section). It
is missing in the German translation (which translated the first edition) and, consequently, also
in the Dutch and Danish versions (which used the German text).
176
The Dedication addresses the French education minister Talleyrand and received much cov-
erage in reviews. It not only positions Wollstonecraft on an equal footing with other thinkers
in political debates but also reiterates two of her main tenets: women’s independence and the
validity of their life experience.
Wollstonecraft’s preface survives in both translations. The German editor Salzmann, however,
placed it after his own 18-page foreword. In addition, Salzmann included 37 footnotes of his
own that comment upon and often undermine the text. When Wollstonecraft refuses submis-
sion to male authority (“I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real, or usurped, extends not
to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is
to reason, and not to man.” (107); or “The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings,
may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger” (112)), Salzmann
contradicts her (Wollstonecraft 1793, 121) or states flatly that the author does not mean what
she says. For the passage “but attacking the boasted prerogative of man – the prerogative that may
emphatically be called the iron sceptre of tyranny, the original sin of tyrants, I declare against all
power built on prejudices” (225), the footnote thus begins reassuringly: “Man stoße sich nicht
an diese starken Ausdrücke! Wenn man weiter lieset: so wird man finden, daß es die Verfasserin
nicht so böse meynt, als es das Ansehn hat. [One should not mind these harsh expressions. If
you continue reading, you will find that the author does not mean it as drastically as it sounds.]
(Wollstonecraft 1794, 31).
In contrast to the editor Salzmann, the translator Weissenborn seeks to accentuate the text’s
political agenda, and he adds a footnote to explain that “the abominable traffick” (329) refers to
the slave trade (Wollstonecraft 1794, 203).
The French translation also contains footnotes. These, however, support or even radicalize
Wollstonecraft’s views, especially when referring to the church. Moreover, there are 14 long
notes in the chapter on national education (five in all of the other 11 chapters), which underline
how seriously Wollstonecraft is taken as a partner in this debate (Bour 2004).
Wrongs of Woman contains two paratexts that suggest that Wollstonecraft intended this book
to be seen in connection with Rights of Woman. Firstly, the parallelism of the title establishes an
immediate link to Rights of Woman and, second, the “Author’s Preface” establishes her wish to
use women’s individual suffering and oppression to show social ills. This strategy suffers, how-
ever, as Wollstonecraft’s husband, the radical philosopher William Godwin, who published the
book posthumously together with Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1798), places his own preface before hers. In France, the “Author’s preface” was not translated,
and the title became Le Malheur d’être femme [the misfortune of being a woman], which does
not resemble the French title used for Rights of Woman, Défense des droits des femmes, and thus
elides the parallelism. The German title follows the French but burdens it with two further
novel titles: the popular story of a virtuous young woman, Elisa, and the translator’s own novel
about a “black-brown girl” (Maria oder das Unglück Weib zu seyn: ein Gegenstück zur Elisa u.s.w./
Nach dem Englischen der Miß Wollstonecraft aus dem Französischen übersetzt vom Verfasser des schwarz-
braunen Mädchen von Schreckhorn [Maria or the misfortune of being a woman: a counterpart to
the novel Elisa and others/translated from the French after the English of Miss Wollstonecraft by
the author of the Black Brown girl of Schreckhorn]).
Reviews of Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman

First, let us look at the reviews for Rights of Woman in England, France, and Germany. The
reviews present a diverse picture. In England, the Analytical Review listed Rights of Woman under
‘political economy,’ while the Monthly Review praised its intellectual force but voiced vehement
177
Elisabeth Gibbels
opposition to women’s participation in civil government. The Critical Review ridiculed women
embracing “the severity of reason” altogether (Bour 2013). German reviews reacted favourably
to Salzmann’s interventions. The Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen, for example, attested Wollstone-
craft “deep thoughts on [the] important issue [of education]” and praised Salzmann for correct-
ing “the author’s exaggerated principles” (Gibbels 2004). The reviews in France were substantial
and fair. The Almanach littéraire ou Etrennes d’Apollon and the Chronique de Paris provided exten-
sive summaries. The Journal Encyclopédique’s review spans two successive issues and discusses the
book in detail; the reviewer even quotes from the Dedication and includes Wollstonecraft’s criti-
cism of de Genlis. Where German reviews seemed relieved by Salzmann’s mitigations, French
reviews did Wollstonecraft justice as a political thinker (Bour 2013).
In contrast, Wrongs of Woman was received as a scandalous book in England. The Anti-Jacobin
Review attacked Wollstonecraft viciously, calling her a prostitute and a whore, and Hannah
More referred to it as a “vindication of adultery” (Taylor 2003, 246). This reception contrasts
with that in France, where the reviewer for the Journal de Paris, the prominent political author
Pierre-Louis Roederer, disregarding the misleading French title, discussed it in terms of politi-
cal economy, philosophy, and natural sciences. Isabelle Bour (2013) characterizes this reception
as “much more favourable . . . and much more insightful” and “much less moralistic [than in
England].” The German reviews are divided. Whereas one reviewer doubted that the book
can have been written by “witty, lively and intelligent Wollstonecraft” (Neue allgemeine deutsche
Bibliothek), another recommended it as a Christmas present for daughters (Intelligenzblatt der
Allgemeinen Literaturzeitung). One assessment that resembles the careful review in France came
from Weissenborn, the translator of Rights of Woman. Although only in a metatext and buried
in the translator’s footnotes to Godwin’s Memoirs, he points out the parallelism in the titles of
the two books and the political intention of Wrongs of Woman (see Wollstonecraft’s life story as
a paratext and its influence on the reception).
In sum, the decisions on the part of the French and German editors of Wrongs of Woman
to delete the “Author’s preface” and to tone down the title destroyed the connection to Rights
of Woman; Wrongs of Woman thus failed to have the same impact as a political book. A more
recent indicator of this is that only in 1993 did a German retranslation refer back to the original
English text and even then the edition chose to obliterate the reference in the title (Erinnerun-
gen an Mary Wollstonecraft [memories of Mary Wollstonecraft]).
Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman in other countries

The German and French translations informed the reception in other countries. In the Nether-
lands, Ysbrand van Hamelsveld’s Dutch version appeared in 1796, containing Salzmann’s preface
according to a 1797 review (Kirkley 2009a). The Danish edition of 1801/1802 by Jørgen Borch
also followed the German text. The book appeared in octavo with ribbons attached, addressing a
conventional female audience, which undermined Wollstonecraft’s political agenda. The trans-
lator’s preface, too, suggested a conventional treatise on education and urged women “to defend
the respectable place which has been determined for them by the Creator, to be their husbands’
girlfriends, advisors, clever hostesses in their homes, their children’s teacher and model” (Woll-
stonecraft 1801, vii, cited in Gold 1996, 45). In Spain, the reception was informed by the French
translation. The Diario de Madrid published a four-part review which included partial transla-
tions into Spanish and chapter summaries (1792). The reviewer, Julián de Velasco, translated the
first and last paragraphs of each chapter, however omitting those that attacked aristocracy, army,
and church or advocate co-education. Velasco carefully placed religious markers by mention-
ing Talleyrand as Bishop of Autun in the title and adding “despues de estarlo en la religion”
178
[enshrined in religion] to a translated quote at the end of the review. Moreover, Wollstonecraft
is referred to with only male or neutral appellations (“nuestro autor” [our author], “el autor”
[the author], “Wollstonecraft,” “M.W.,” “nuestro filósofo” [our philosopher] (Kitt 1994). In Italy,
the French version circulated among progressive women and led to enthusiastic reviews with
partial translation by Elisabetta Caminer Turra in 1792 and 1793 (in D’Ezio 2013, 115–116) as
well as a pamphlet Breve difesa dei diritti delle donne [short defence of the rights of women], which
references the English title, by Rosa Califronia in 1794 (112, 118–119). For Eastern Europe,
there is only a translation into Czech (Anna Holmová 1906, in Botting 2013, 523–524). The
only other Scandinavian translation is a Swedish one of Wrongs of Woman (Maria, eller Missödet
at vara qvinna, 1799).
Wollstonecraft’s life story as a paratext and

its influence on the reception
Besides the translations and reviews, Godwin’s Memoirs, his account of her unconventional life,
shaped the reception of Wollstonecraft’s work. This text, too, was immediately translated into
French and German. The French version included Wollstonecraft’s full name and listed other
works (Vie et mémoires de Marie Wollstonecraft Godwin: auteur de La défense des droits de la femme,
d’une résponse à Edmond Burck, des Pensées sur l’éducation des filles [life and memoirs of Mary Woll-
stonecraft Godwin: author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a response to Edmund Burke,
thoughts on the education of girls]. The preface gave a detailed overview of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre
and philosophical standing. The German translation (1799) by Weissenborn included a transla-
tor’s preface in which he voiced his expectation that readers would be open-minded, fair, and
neutral in their assessment [ein unbefangenes, parteyloses und gerechtes Urtheil] of Wollstone-
craft’s capability, legacy, and character [die Talente, das Verdienst und den Charakter], and he
added translator’s footnotes that supported Wollstonecraft’s cause.
The effect of these Memoirs was disastrous in England and affected the reception of Wrongs of
Woman as an autobiographical novel. Mary Hays, a close friend and disciple, for example, wrote a
glowing obituary for Wollstonecraft in 1797, but omitted her from her Female Biography of 1803.
Everywhere, Wollstonecraft’s writing faded from public discourse, while the scandal around her
person persisted. It was “Mary’s personality that has kept her memory alive” and more readers
“thrilled to her history” or were “fired by her example” than read their way through the Rights
of Woman, says a biography (Wardle 1951, 341). French feminist Flora Tristan in 1840 struggled
to find a copy of the book and recalled how even progressive women reacted negatively (Tristan
1982, 320). George Eliot entreated people to read the book: “There is [. . .] a vague prejudice
against the Rights of Woman as [. . .] a reprehensible book, but readers [. . .] will be surprised to
find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy” ([1855] 1963, 201). At the
same time, Wollstonecraft’s name did not, however, lose its evocative power. In 1858, Bessie
Parkes, editor of the English Women’s Journal, referred to Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft, wife of
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, simply as “Mary’s daughter, his wife” (Caine 1997, 261).
English 19th-century Wollstonecraft reception was characterized by this contrast between
the omnipresence of her name and the absence of her texts. In France and Germany, both her
name and her work disappeared. This was less due to moral outrage than to the backlash against
the French Revolution which turned Wollstonecraft into a pariah in public discourse. Indeed,
she was absent to such an extent that a book on French feminism in the 19th century does
not even mention her name (Moses Goldberg 1984) and a German treatise on women’s rights
by Amalia Holst (1802) reads like a direct translation of her work but contains no reference to
Wollstonecraft. The only new translation in that period was published in the USA in 1852 by
179
Elisabeth Gibbels
a German exile: Mathilde Anneke translated excerpts for her Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung [German
women’s paper] (Gibbels 2018).
Phantom translations and misattributions: indicators

of Wollstonecraft’s rise to a meme
Misattributions are indicators of Wollstonecraft’s nonetheless growing iconic status. Sources,
for example, persistently mention German writer Henriette Herz as the author of an 1832
translation of Rights of Woman (van Dijk, database Women Writers), but scholars declare it a
phantom (Gibbels 2018). A supposed Portuguese translation of 1800 is ascribed to Henrique
Xavier Baeta (van Dijk, database Women Writers), but the only documented translation by
him consists of excerpts from Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden. In France, Wrongs of Woman
was attributed to Madame de Staël (Bour 2013, 582). The most telling instance of misattribu-
tion is the story of Rights of Woman in Latin America. It started with a translation and culmi-
nated in the circulation of another text for nearly two hundred years (Botting and Hammond
Matthews 2014). The starting point was the English text Woman not Inferior to Man: or A Short
and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity
and Esteem, with the Men (1739). This anonymous text, signed “Sophia, a person of quality,” was
translated into French in 1750. In 1826, a Paris publisher issued it as Les Droits des Femmes, et
l’Injustice des Hommes; par Mistriss Godwin, traduit librement de l’Anglais [the rights of woman and
the injustice of men, by Mistress Godwin, freely translated from English]. In 1832, this title was
mistaken for Rights of Woman and translated into Brazilian Portuguese as Direitos das Mulheres
e Injustiça dos Homens, por Mistriss Godwin. Tradusido livremente do Francez para Portuguez, e offer-
ecido às Brasileiras e Academicos Brasileiros por Nisia Floresta Brasileira Augusta [rights of women
and injustice of men by Mistress Godwin, translated freely from French into Portuguese, and
offered to the women and academics of Brazil by Nisia Floresta Brasileira Augusta]. This trans-
lation made Floresta famous as a feminist in her own right. The mistake remained unnoticed
until the 1990s, when a copy of Floresta’s translation was found and finally compared with
Wollstonecraft’s English text. It took another 20 years to establish the identity of the English
original and accept the fact that Wollstonecraft had nothing to do with Floresta’s version at
all. Such misattributions and phantom translations testify to the symbolic currency of Woll-
stonecraft as a meme and her status as a discourse founder: it did not matter “who is speaking”
(Foucault 1977) as her name had replaced the content, and feminist discourse was produced
without reference to her actual text.
Transmitting Wollstonecraft’s feminism by proxy:

current instances
Even where audiences may not read her texts, her name is being referenced. Whether a
church in Newington Green, England, frequented by Wollstonecraft, mounted a plaque in
2009 to commemorate it as the “birthplace of feminism” or Muslim cross-national activist
Ayaan Hirsi Ali invoked her as an inspiration in her 2006 autobiography, her name creates a
bond and evokes a body of shared feminist knowledge. She is present in feminist publications
in South Africa (Thorpe 2018), at conferences on her contribution to contemporary philoso-
phy in Turkey (2017) and in investigations on working conditions in South Korea ( Joohee
Lee 2017). Such metatexts are not bound to translation anymore to transmit feminism in
Wollstonecraft’s name.
180
Conclusion
This chapter has investigated phenomena in the appropriation and transfer of Wollstonecraft’s
feminism through translation. Even though Wollstonecraft designed Rights of Woman and Wrongs
of Woman as volume one and volume two, only Rights of Woman became the founding text of
international feminism, while Wrongs of Woman was largely ignored. This was caused mainly
by paratextual decisions in the English-speaking world but also in the translations. Both texts
were immediately translated into French and German, but the paratextual settings in the French
and German translations more than the translations themselves set the tone for the reception.
In addition, the publication of biographical details in the Memoirs proved detrimental to 19th-
century reception and raised insurmountable obstacles for Wrongs of Woman to be perceived as
a book of feminist political philosophy.
Secondly, even though Wollstonecraft was ignored for most of the 19th century, and the
reception of Rights of Woman was marked by misattributions and mistranslations, Wollstonecraft
became the universal symbol of international feminism. This was due to her construction as a
feminist meme in the reception of her work, which occurred independently of actual access to
her writings.
Thirdly, Wollstonecraft’s name is present in international feminist discourse irrespective of
the availability and number of translations of her work. This testifies to the power of her name
as a discourse founder.
Further directions
Future research could explore the use that feminist movements have made and now make of Woll-
stonecraft in African, Asian, and Eastern European contexts, especially in languages that did not
translate her work. How does Wollstonecraft’s status survive and how can it serve feminist causes?
Another line of investigation could address paratextual framings of authors. How do the life
stories of women authors affect the reception of their works? How does an author’s reputa-
tion and biographical circumstance distort, overwrite, or dilute their words? What paratextual
mechanisms effect this, what strategies could prevent or counteract this?
Finally, retranslations of authors of iconic status need to be assessed. What impact can such
retranslations have? What paratextual strategies should accompany them? This may also include
further study of how memes work for and against feminist agendas and how paratextual settings
and mechanisms operate in the case of translation projects.
Related topics
Transfer of ideas, evolution of feminism, production of cultural memory, women’s discourse found-
ers, public and private sphere
Suggested readings
Craciun, Adriana. 2002. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Sourcebook. London:
Routledge.
This is a concise collection of major paratexts around Rights of Woman and its reception. It serves as a
good introduction to the debates and includes a wide variety of English sources.
Botting, Eileen H., Christine C. Wilkerson, and Elizabeth Kozlow. 2014. Wollstonecraft as an International
Feminist Meme. Journal of Women’s History, 26(2), 13–38.
181
Elisabeth Gibbels
This article analyzes how Wollstonecraft was employed as a meme by four leaders of women’s move-
ments at the turn of the 20th century to build their own movements and create authority.
Bergès, Sandrine and Alan Coffee. 2016. The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Oxford:
This collection delivers in-depth analyses of Wollstonecraft as a theorist and explores the range and
depth of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy beyond feminist core themes.
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Botting, Eileen H. 2016. Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Botting, Eileen H. and Charlotte Hammond Matthews. 2014. Overthrowing the Floresta-Wollstonecraft
Myth for Latin American Feminism. Gender & History, 26(1), 64–83.
Bour, Isabelle. 2004. The Boundaries of Sensibility: French Translations of Mary Wollstonecraft. Women’s
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183
14
An Indian woman’s room
of one’s own
A reflection on Hindi translations of
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
Garima Sharma
Introduction
I wish to open this chapter with Virginia Woolf ’s statement in A Room of One’s Own, in which
she says: “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual
freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the
beginning of time” (Woolf [1929] 2011, 102). In 1928, when she was invited to speak on the
topic Women and Fiction at the only two women’s colleges in England at the time, Newnham
and Girton College at Cambridge University, she started her lectures with her famous asser-
tion: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (2). The
lack of a room of one’s own and financial freedom is deeply connected with women’s (in)
ability to produce literature. In the course of her lectures, Woolf uncovers various other lacks
that women have lived with, fought with, made peace with, and conquered throughout history
and the effect of those lacks on their mental freedom and capacities: from the lack of an actual
room where women possess a physical space of their own to the lack of financial independ-
ence that can provide them with greater access to personal and professional freedom; from
the lack of a place in the history of literature to the lack of a language, a writing tradition, “a
common sentence” that could make them literary geniuses, like their male counterparts. The
question of women’s language-less-ness and their history-less-ness forms the deepest core of
Woolf ’s essay A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of those two lectures and was published
in 1929 by Woolf ’s own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The essay, which is one of the
most admired and influential feminist texts of the 20th century (Lee 2001, vii), is written in a
unique and unconventional style, in which Woolf uses her signature stream of consciousness
writing technique.
Recent years have not only witnessed a large number of translations of Woolf ’s seminal essay
into numerous languages but also an engagement with the politics and poetics of translation that
steer the traveling process of this important contribution to feminist literature across nations and
cultures. The recent engagements with the translations of Woolf ’s essay can be placed within
an interdisciplinary discourse emerging out of a network of theoretical and practical exchanges
between the fields of translation studies, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies. In
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Hindi translations of A Room of One’s Own
times of prevailing interdisciplinary approaches in universities throughout the world, transla-

tion has emerged as a field of inquiry that is positioned at the crossroads of various disciplines
intertwined by the common objective of exploring the trajectories of transformation that socio-
political experiences undergo as they move “into a variety of artistic and cultural forms” (Bose
2002, x). The interaction between Translation Studies and Feminist Studies strives towards an
engagement with the translations of literary works within a framework of ever-dynamic femi-
nist aspirations and methodologies, and the development of feminist theories of translation and
feminist translation studies.
Most of the scholarship on the translations of Woolf ’s essay into different languages is based
on research that examines the role played by the translator’s political ideology and approach
towards gender constructs and feminist ideas present in Woolf ’s essay. This area of research,
which goes beyond a mere analysis of the ‘innocent’ process of linguistic transformation of a
literary work from one language into another, deals with the way the political ideas of a transla-
tor and the society within which the translator is located intervene in the strategies chosen for
the translation.
This chapter studies the two translations of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own into an Indian
language, Hindi, and demonstrates how both (male) translators neglect to take into account
Woolf ’s feminist intention and objective present in the essay, and translate the essay by not only
consciously choosing “masculine” forms for neutral nouns, but also distorting the meaning and
writing style present in the original essay. The chapter addresses the following questions: what
insights into the nature of language and into the processes of translation can be acquired from
the interaction of Translation Studies with various gender and feminist theories? How can
the Hindi translations of Woolf ’s essay be located within the traditions of translation studies,
feminist literary studies, and their interactions in India? In an attempt to find answers to these
questions, the chapter places and examines the translation strategies adopted by the two Hindi
translators of Woolf ’s work within a new dynamism that the “happy merger of two academic
disciplines – feminism and translation studies” (Kamala 2009, xv) has attained in the last few
decades.
The Hindi translation of the term ‘translation’ ‘anuvad’ अनुवाद which “stands for the “subse-
quent” or “following” discourse (anu=following, vad=discourse)” (Singh 2017, 101) rightly
points to a subsequent discourse that the translation of a work initiates within the milieu
of an existing discourse brought about by an “original” literary work – a continued life, an
“afterlife”/“Nachleben” in Benjamin’s terms, that a work of art participates in through its trans-
lation (Benjamin [1923] 2000, 17). Recent work in translation studies has called into question
the so-called transparent role of literary translators and has fostered new insights into the way
translations take part in or renounce long-standing schools of knowledge. Translation is recog-
nized as “a mode of engagement with literature, as a kind of literary activism” (Simon 1996, ix),
“the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak 1992, 398), especially after the onset of the “cultural
turn” in Translation Studies in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. After the emergence of the
cultural turn, the category gender, with both biological and sociopolitical implications, has been
placed at the heart of the translation process by feminist theories of translation. Feminist trans-
lators not only strove towards carrying across implicit and explicit feminist connotations and
experimentations present in the “feminist” source text but aimed at making themselves visible
in the translations through strategies like supplementing, prefacing and footnoting (Flotow 1991, 74),
which they called womanhandling the texts (Godard 1989, 50).
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Garima Sharma
Feminist translation in India

In the Indian context, Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak have examined translation theo-
ries within the postcolonial context, and discussed how translation has been used to reproduce
hegemonic versions of the colonized, of the “non-Western other” through ethnographic pro-
jects (Niranjana 1992), (Spivak 1992). In the introduction to Translating Women. Indian Interven-
tions (2009), her volume of collected essays on translations of Indian women’s works, N. Kamala
points to the specificities of caste, class, gender, and religion that play an important role when
works by Indian women writers are translated into other Indian and Western languages (xiv).
Kamala briefly summarizes the way various anthologies like Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s Women
Writing in India – Vol 1 (1991) and 2 (1993) have brought to light women’s writings from over
2000 years ago to the present for English-language readers in India and around the world, and
have initiated a discourse on the translation of works by women writers in India. The two vol-
umes contain English translations of women’s works from a variety of Indian languages.
In an essay in Kamala’s volume, Meena Pillai discusses the great reluctance among Malayalam
translators in Kerala, India to translate ‘Western’ feminist theories and highlights the way the
Malayalam translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and Mahasweta
Devi’s Draupadi completely hijack the feminist voices present in original texts. Other essays in
the volume also explore the way certain genres/themes/authors are chosen for translation and
look at the politics that govern the theoretical and practical underpinnings of translating works
by women writers written in Indian languages.
While most of the discussions on literary translation (and feminist translation) in India
revolve around the representation of postcolonial and subaltern subjects and cultures, recent
years have witnessed an engagement with questions of gender and sexual identity within the
translation discourse and as Niranjana points out, one can learn from recent scenes of transla-
tion in India, “how the (feminist) subject of politics is being shaped by the process of moving
between languages” (Niranjana 1998, 143). Publishing houses like Stree and Kali for Women
have played a major role in making translations of works by women writers in Indian regional
languages accessible to a large readership (Kothari 2003, 43). One example of feminist transla-
tions in India is the English translation (2000) of Geetanjali Shree’s Mai (1993), in which the
translator, Nita Kumar, explicitly identifies her translation as “feminist” in the afterword. Spi-
vak’s English translations of works of Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi have also caused quite a
debate regarding the way the translator “re-wrote” Devi’s works in order to enhance the already
present emancipatory gender and marxist politics in the original works through the translation.
Pillai describes Spivak’s translations as having a “feminist” punch, as being carried out in a way
that the translator’s own critique of colonialism and masculinism (that is central to the story)
becomes apparent in the way words are chosen, thereby intensifying the author’s intentions
(Pillai 2009, 12).
Translation analysis
This section deals with a specific case of translation of Virginia Woolf ’s famous feminist essay A
Room of One’s Own into an Indian language, Hindi. Drawing upon feminist theory and practices
of translation, this section analyzes the two Hindi translations of Woolf ’s text, firstly, within the
framework of specific strategies acknowledged as “feminist” translation strategies within transla-
tion theory, and secondly, along the lines of the translation methodology used to render Woolf ’s
stylistic experimentation and feminist ideas in Hindi. Given that this particular work by Woolf
186
has witnessed a series of distorted translations in the past, Borges’ Spanish translation of the work
being one (Bengoechea 2011), it becomes interesting as well as important to examine the way
the work reaches Hindi-language readers in India.
Since both Hindi versions of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own were translated by male trans-
lators, speculations exist around the way the explicit “female” voice present in Woolf ’s text is
carried across in Hindi. Lori Chamberlain argues that it is important to move beyond the ques-
tions of the sex of the author and the translator when it comes to measuring the sincerity of
the translator towards the writing project (Chamberlain [1988] 2002, 327), but when one looks
at the large number of cases where male translators of women-centric or feminist texts have
undermined and hijacked the feminist project through their male-centric translation strategies,
it becomes important to observe the translations through the lens of conflictual effects caused
by gender difference.
The first Hindi translation of Woolf ’s essay, Apna Kamra (अपना कमरा), appeared in 2002
and was published by Samvad Publication, Mumbai. The translator, Gopalji Pradhan, an associate
professor of Hindi at Ambedkar University Delhi, has not only translated a number of theoreti-
cal books on history and sociology, On History by Eric Hobsbawm being one of them, but has
written and published extensively on Hindi literature. The second Hindi translation of Woolf ’s
essay was published in 2011 as Apna Ek Kamra (अपना एक कमरा) by the academic publishing
house Vani Prakashan, which has published Hindi translations of important works from non-
Indian languages like English, French, German, Russian, and also Latin American and African
languages (Singh 2017, 118). The translator of this second translation, Mozez Michel, has trans-
lated over 100 works from English into Hindi and vice versa and has also authored several stories
and poems in Hindi.
Title and cover page

While both translators use the gender-neutral reflexive possessive “Apna” “अपना” to denote the
gender-free “One’s” in Woolf ’s title, this term “अपना” fails to carry across the accentuated idea
of one’s “own” room present in the original title. The expression “खुद का” “one’s own” perhaps
could highlight the notion of a specific room of “one’s own” in the Hindi title. Moreover, a
reflection on the Hindi word “कमरा” “room” raises questions about the implications that come
with Woolf ’s idea of a “room.” Apart from the “room” as a personal physical space, there is a
scope within Woolf ’s title to grasp this “room” as a place in the literary history, a “place,” a
“voice” in the society that, according to Woolf, women have lacked throughout history. This
“place” does not get reproduced with the Hindi word “कमरा,” which only stands for a physical
room. The word “जगह,” which means “space” as well as “room,” however, would allow the other
connotations present in Woolf ’s idea of a room to be present in the Hindi title as well.
Additionally, the cover pages of both the Hindi translations do not necessarily depict a “room
of one’s own” an Indian woman could relate to. While the cover page of the first translation has
a full-page portrait of Virginia Woolf, the second translation has Vincent Van Gogh’s painting
The Bedroom at Arles (1888) on its cover. Van Gogh’s painting of the bedroom does depict a
personal space that according to Woolf women must possess in order to be able to produce lit-
erature, but this painting of a clearly “European” room with its sturdy wooden furniture and Van
Gogh’s self-portrait on the wall fails to come across as an Indian woman’s room, as a room found
in Indian households, as a room that Indian women, especially in the rural areas or/and in large
and joint families may dream of having. This takes us to the very important point pertaining
to the complexities involved in the process of transformation of experiences and perspectives
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Garima Sharma
from Western cultural spaces to diverse, multifaceted, and multicultural spaces in India, with
its regional, religious, caste, and class specificities, wherein the Western philosophies have been
thought to ‘enrich’ the non-Western schools of thought.
Nevertheless, in spite of the asymmetrical relations of power brought about by the colonial
enterprise, which the postcolonial translation theorists like Niranjana and Spivak draw attention
to in their works and translation practice, the translation of Woolf ’s seminal text on feminism
into Hindi does not cease to give birth to possibilities of enriching existing dialogues and initiat-
ing new ones within the feminist discourse in India.
Prefacing
In the preface to the first Hindi translation (2002), translator Pradhan refers to the details of
Woolf ’s life derived from the biography written by her nephew, Quentin Bell, a biography
that has been criticized by Roger Poole for its consistent usage of the term ‘mad’ to describe
Woolf and for other distortions (Poole 1995, 1). The translator’s choice of biography reflects
how he chooses to carry forward the myths created about Woolf ’s life in various biographies,
for as Hermione Lee points out in her biography of Woolf: “there is no such thing as an objec-
tive biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made”
(Lee 1997, 3). Indeed, biographies play an important role in creating certain images of authors
that often reflect the interpretations and judgments of the biographers. For instance, there is
no information on Woolf ’s homosexual relationships in the little biographical sketch that is
provided in the preface.
The second translation (2011) is accompanied by a preface written by the Bangladeshi-
Indian feminist writer Taslima Nasrin, who was exiled from Bangladesh and India a decade ago
because of her powerful writings on women’s oppression and her criticism of religion. Nasrin’s
preface adds a woman’s voice to the Hindi translation, as along with outlining Woolf ’s main
feminist ideas, Nasrin shares her own experience of how difficult it was for her to rent a room in
1990 as a single woman because of the patriarchal mindset of the society that just cannot accept
an independent single woman living alone, without a “man” or family.
Regardless of the fact, that Woolf ’s feminism is highlighted by the translator in the preface
to the first translation and by Nasrin in her preface to the second translation, neither translator
includes a discussion on the challenges and choices made in translating Woolf ’s text into Hindi
nor is any effort made to provide extra information in the translation itself using footnotes
or supplementing. The fact that neither translator mentions two of the most important themes
in Woolf ’s work – androgyny and homosexuality – in their discussions of her writing (for
instance, in the translator’s note on the flap covers in the second translation) – underlines their
reluctance to admit how important these issues are for contemporary debates on sexuality and
gender.
Translation of gender constructs

One of the most important aims of feminist approaches to translation studies is to examine the way
translators consciously or unconsciously let their own ideological positions take over the ‘women’s’
voice that is present in the original. In the Hindi translations, this can be observed in the way the
translators deal with the gender constructs and assign gender to nouns and pronouns that are
neutral in the original. Despite the fact that the Hindi translators acknowledge Woolf ’s work as
a seminal feminist work, they often choose ‘masculine’ nouns for neutral words. Cf. Example 1:
188
Example 1:
I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen and I remembered how if one whistled
one of them ran . . . thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty
and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon
the mind of a writer.
(1929, 2011, 22)
In the preceding lines, Woolf thinks about the consequences of poverty and the lack of tradi-
tion on the mind of a writer; this is connected to Woolf ’s main argument that a woman needs
financial freedom in order to produce literature. The gender-neutral term “writer” in English
has been translated in both Hindi translations as “लेखक,” which stands for a male writer in
Hindi. Hindi, being a gendered language, has both masculine and feminine nouns and the Hindi
word for a female writer is “लेखिका.” The use of the masculine noun in Hindi for the neutral
word “writer” only highlights how the translators silence and devalue the “feminine” present
in the original text. Moreover, by using the Hindi noun for male writer, both translators have
taken the life out of Woolf ’s central idea, and that is how ‘female’ writers have been deprived of
experience and tradition. Here is what happens:
Example 2:
What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!
(Ibid., 12)
Similarly, in both Hindi translations of the preceding lines, the masculine word “कवि” is used
for “poet” while the word “कवयित्री” would denote a female poet. In the example, Woolf is talk-
ing about poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson und Christina Rossetti; in both the translations the
reference to a female poet is completely lost. In fact, the second translator translates the sentence
literally into Hindi as “कैसे कवि, मैं ज़ोर से चिल्लाई,” which is a word for word translation of Woolf ’s
sentence and could have been translated using a figure of speech in Hindi. The phrase “what
poets” in English expresses admiration, while “कैसे कवि” in Hindi makes it a question “what kind
of poets?” Further, there are many neutral words in the English text like “novelist,” “playwright,”
“reformer,” “author” etc. that are explicitly used in the context of women and have all been
translated into Hindi as masculine nouns.
Thematic translations
On women’s lives
Another example:
Example 3:
There would have been that assertion – you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing
that – to protest against, to overcome.
(Ibid., 52)
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Garima Sharma
In this example, Woolf writes about the way women in a patriarchal society have always
been discouraged from becoming artists and writers. In the first translation (2002), the transla-
tor changes the meaning of Woolf ’s sentence as follows: “उस पर विजय हासिल करने के लिए कहा
जाता रहा होगा,” which means women are “asked” to protest against such demotivating assertions,
while Woolf clearly states here that a woman writer must face assertions like “you cannot do
this, you are incapable of doing that,” which she constantly has to protest against and overcome.
Women are not “asked or motivated” in a patriarchal society to overcome them; they have to
do so themselves. The patriarchal society in fact establishes these assertions in the first place.
The Hindi translation, however, states that women are asked to protest against such assertions,
which changes the meaning of what Woolf writes. The second translator translates this phrase
as “they have been under pressure to protest against these assertions,” which is quite close to the
meaning in Woolf ’s text but because the translator translates it quite literally, the meaning is not
only distorted but is not clear at all in the translation. Further example:
Example 4:
[I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists] when they came to set
their thoughts on paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short
and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are
women.
(Ibid., 72)
In these lines, Woolf reflects on how the lack of a writing tradition, the lack of access to
experiences of life, the lack of a language, which has not been tainted by patriarchal connota-
tions and structures, impact women’s writing. These lacks are reflected in the works of women
when they attempt to write, in spite of heavy criticism and discouragement. This is one of the
most important concerns that Woolf raises when she tries to find writings by women in the
history of literature. In the first Hindi translation (2002), the meaning behind the phrase “had no
tradition behind them” disappears completely as the translator translates it literally as “they had
no tradition behind their back (body part)” (पीठ पर परं परा). The line “we think back through our
mothers if we are women,” points to the fact that just like the mothers of the women writers,
who had little access to reading and writing and who did not develop a command over a lan-
guage that would be suitable for women to express themselves, women writers themselves also
lack that tradition when they begin writing. “Thinking back through mothers” is an important
phrase that Woolf uses to not only highlight how the situation of women has not changed from
generation to generation, but to also show the relationship that women share with their mothers
due to a common lineage of suppression. In the first translation, this line is literally translated as
“we look at the past through our mothers” (पीछे की तरफ हम अपनी माताओं के ज़रिये दे खते हैं ), which
does not carry across Woolf ’s intended meaning and the word “दे खते” denotes a group of people
which are not necessarily all women, while Woolf is clearly talking about women. In the second
translation (2011), this line is translated as “we think through our mothers,” which carries across
the meaning to some extent but does not reproduce in Hindi the effect Woolf creates in her
text. Moreover, in the second translation,“novelists” is translated again as male novelists in Hindi,
whereas Woolf is clearly referring to 19th-century female writers.
Homosexuality
Let us look at the following example:
190
Example 5:
Chloe liked Olivia. . . . Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own
society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. . . . Chloe
liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.
(Ibid., 77)
Woolf writes about how the story of a lesbian love described in a novel by a fictional
twentieth century writer completely startles her, as it appears unthinkable that women, who
could not even consider writing for many centuries, have now not only started writing but
are able to write about their sexual desires and their homosexual tendencies. According to
Woolf, it is a breakthrough for women to write on homosexuality as throughout centuries,
they have only been “shown in their relation to men” (78) in literature. In the first transla-
tion (2002), the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” is translated as “क्लो ओलिविआ को चाहती थी,” while
in the second translation (2002), it is translated as “क्लो को ओलिविआ पसं द थी.” While the use
of the word “चाहती” in the first translation conveys the idea that Chloe liked Olivia in a
homosexual way, in the second translation, the meaning is completely lost due to the use of
the word “पसं द,” which just means “to like someone as a person.” For “sometimes women
do like women,” even in the first translation, the Hindi word for “like” “पसं द” is used, which
changes the meaning to represent a general liking between women, but not explicitly in a
homosexual way.
The translators here have chosen words that not only provide a reductive reading of Woolf ’s
exploration of the theme of homosexuality but also fail to create that “same-sex love” space that
Woolf reads in a literary work by a woman writer and recreates for her readers. In this context,
the translators could draw inspiration from many women writers writing in Hindi who have
explored the theme of lesbian love and relationships in their works, have unabashedly spoken
about women’s sexuality, and desire and have unsettled the reigning heteronormative narratives
in Hindi literature. Set in a semi-rural setting in India, Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tirohit (2001) is
one such work, which revolves around a relationship between a married woman and her maid
and uncovers “the complicated layers of patriarchal oppression regarding lesbian invisibility,
compulsive heterosexuality, lesbian motherhood, sexual oppression within marriage and class
dynamics in homoerotic passion” (Chanana 2010, 192).
Translation of Woolf’s stylistic devices

Another example:
Example 6:
what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashion-
ing of a scene. Listen to her running on:
“After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr B. com’s in question and then I am gon . . .
I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young
wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them
and compare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read
of and finde a vaste difference there . . . most commonly when we are in the middest
of our discourse one looks aboute” (60).
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Garima Sharma
In these lines, Woolf writes about a woman, Dorothy, who wrote letters in the 17th century,
but did not have a proper education and was restricted to household work, but still had the
makings of a writer in her. Woolf gives an example from these letters. In spite of the grammati-
cal errors and the misspellings, this writer, according to Woolf, had a flair for writing. In both
the Hindi translations, the complete part in quotes appears as normal, well-structured Hindi
sentences, which changes Woolf ’s intention of showing how women write because of the lack
of proper training in language. Woolf ’s engagement with various writings by women over the
centuries forms the core of the essay and therefore, it becomes important to carry across the
exact way Woolf cites these cases in order to re-create her original impressions in Hindi. The
translation of Woolf ’s original stylistic experimentation requires experimentation in Hindi,
which could carry across the same message that Woolf is trying to convey in the original. In yet
another example (Example 7), Woolf creates a poem in the essay which was written by a cer-
tain (fictional) Lady Winchilsea in the 17th century, in which she is “bursting out in indignation
against the position of women” (55):
Example 7:
How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,
And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;
And if someone would soar above the rest,

With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,
So strong the opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.
In the second translation (2011), the poem is translated quite literally, where “fallen” becomes
“गिरना,” which means “we have come down to this” “कितनी गिर गई हैं हम!” and changes the origi-
nal meaning of how we are fallen or broken because of the several rules put on us. The literal
translation erases the poetic effect created in the original as the poem in translation looks just like
a paragraph, that literally translates the poem. While in the first translation (2002), the translator
has tried to recreate the poem in Hindi, the meaning of the poem gets distorted as the “we,”
which refers to women who wish to write, is changed to a neutral “हम” (we) in Hindi, which
refers to a general group of men and women or to a society in general. The line “and to be dull,
expected and designed” completely loses its meaning as it is translated as “आलस, आशा और अपेक्षा
यही रहा वरदान नियति से,” which means “we have been granted dullness and hope by destiny.”
Conclusion
It can be observed that the two Hindi translations of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own fail to repro-
duce the intention and effect of Woolf ’s original ideas as presented in the essay. Both translations
leave out important stylistic features, feminist experimentation with language, meandering writ-
ing style, poetic devices, etc. present in the original text. In many places, the second translator
(2011) translates Woolf ’s metaphors quite literally, whereby not only the beauty of Woolf ’s
expressions is lost, but a confusion crops up in the Hindi text. For example, the rendering of
“a thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky” as “आसमान के नीले कबाड़ों में,”
which means “in the blue junk or dumps of the sky,” the bird in “dined alone off a bird and a
192
bottle of wine” becomes “sparrow”; “it was a thousand pities” becomes “यह हज़ार दये का विषय था”
(“it was a matter that needed thousand pities”). All these examples demonstrate how instead
of choosing equivalent metaphors and figures of speech in Hindi, the translator opts for literal
translations. The first translator (2002), on the other hand, chooses to translate Woolf ’s expres-
sions into equivalent Hindi expressions, but fails to reproduce Woolf ’s writing style.
Moreover, both translators consistently opt to use masculine noun and pronoun forms for
the neutral nouns present in English, thereby imposing their own assumptions about masculine
nouns as a ‘standard.’ Woolf ’s essay is clearly written in a feminist voice. In the essay, she herself
critiques the way the language is structured through a patriarchal perspective. Throughout the
text, she emphasizes the lack of a specific language for women, and women’s lack of access to the
existing language. To reproduce Woolf ’s arguments in a language that clearly gives prominence
to masculine noun forms does a serious injustice to Woolf ’s feminist project. While feminist
translators explicitly subvert hegemonic forms of language in their translations to make the
“feminine” visible, the Hindi translators of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own once again impose
the masculine, sexist language as the universal code.
In the Hindi translation of works by women writers, especially if the intentions are clearly
feminist, there appears then an imperative need to highlight a “woman’s voice” throughout the
text, to implement experimentation within the boundaries of the Hindi language, to make the
Hindi language articulate women’s agency, the way many women writers writing in Hindi
such as Krishna Sobti, Manu Bhandari, Mridula Garg, Manjul Bhagat, and Mahadevi Varma
have done. While there has been a certain absence of a feminist reading strategy and approach
in Hindi literary criticism (Chandra Nisha Singh 2007, 6), since only a small number of critical
works on women writers writing in Hindi have been published to date, it is true that over the
past few decades of the 20th century an increased number of women have begun writing in an
unmasked and uninhibited language about issues that lie at the heart of the feminist movement.
Challenging the traditional understanding of gender roles in society and norms of writing, many
women writers have carved out a separate space for themselves within Hindi literature, thereby
introducing new, heretofore unimaginable experimentations with the language and sociopo-
litical themes. Hindi has been equipped by a number of women writers to translate women’s
agency and experiences, desire and sexuality, suppression and revolution into words. A transla-
tion of a feminist text into Hindi should therefore be able to contribute to or even enhance the
existing attempts to shake up the base of hegemonic patriarchal language and social structures. It
should not need to re-impose traditions or sociocultural as well as linguistic conventions.
According to Meena T. Pillai, “a translation becomes feminist only when the translator con-
sciously seeks to transform dominant modes of gender representations by choosing what to
translate and how to translate” (Pillai 2009, 9). She asserts that when the text is not reduced to
the dominant ruling patriarchies in the target culture and the spirit and tone of the woman’s
voice is not hijacked in the translation, the source text can initiate a destabilizing discourse, a
radical change in the target culture.
Future directions
This analysis of the Hindi translations of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own has revealed not
only a lack of engagement with the feminist practice of reading and translating on the part of
the Hindi translators of her work but also a general lack of engagement with feminism within
Hindi literary and translation theory. Feminist translation, as Kamala points out, still remains an
“unexplored ground” in India (Kamala 2009, xii). There appears then a need to translate more
feminist and/or women-centric works from and into Indian languages, a need to bring about
193
Garima Sharma
more discussions on how feminist works are translated and finally, on how feminist ways of
translation could be conceived within the Indian literary context. There are abundant literary
works in many of the Indian languages that inspire feminist thought within the Indian context,
but there definitely exists a lack of engagement with the translation of such works. Moreover, in
reflecting on the question of how feminist approaches to translation could be applied while trans-
lating works into and from Indian languages, inspirations could be drawn from such existing texts.
Related topics
Feminism, feminist translation, Indian feminism, Indian feminist literature, Hindi literature,
women’s writing, Virginia Woolf
Further reading
Bose, Brinda, ed. 2002. Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India. New Delhi: Katha.
Published right at the beginning of the 21st century, the essays in this book shed light on various ques-
tions about gender and sexuality in both academic and popular discourses in contemporary India. The
essays are divided into six categories placed within the Indian context: “Myths, Archetypes, Stereo-
types,” “Masculinities/Femininities,” “The Female Body,” “Same Sex love,” “Rape and Violence,” and
“Translation.”
Flotow, Luise von and Farzaneh Farahzad. 2017. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. New
York and London: Routledge.
For the purpose of internationalizing feminist translation studies, editors Luise von Flotow and Far-
zaneh Farahzad bring together essays in this volume that take the discussion on the politics of feminist
translation beyond the European and Anglo-American world. The essays provide detailed discussions
on not only how feminism gets translated into and from many diverse ‘non-Western’ cultures but also
on the role played by women translators and feminist projects in countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Colombia, etc.
This volume brings together essays on political underpinnings of the process of translation of literary
works by women writers from Indian languages into Western languages.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Considered one of the most important interventions in the field of postcolonial translation studies, this
work by Niranjana deals with how “translation” becomes a practice that shapes the process of how the
“colonized subject” is created and represented for the perpetuation of the colonial enterprise.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1991. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present. Volume 1: 600 B.C to
the Early Twentieth Century. New York: The Feminist Press.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1993. Women Writing in India: The Twentieth Century, vol. 2. New York:
The Feminist Press.
This pioneering work brings together an anthology of translated works by Indian women writers from
various Indian languages into English in two volumes – Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early
Twentieth Century and Women Writing in India: The Twentieth Century. The work contains not only a
detailed introduction on women’s writing in India from 600 BC to contemporary times but also an
introduction to every work in the anthology by the editors.
References
Bengoechea, Mercedes. 2011. Who Are You, Who Are We in a Room of One’s Own? The Difference
That Sexual Difference Makes in Borges’ and Rivera-Garretas’s Translations of Virginia Woolf ’s Essay.
European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4), 409–423.
Benjamin, Walter. 1923/2000. The Task of the Translator, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies
Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 15–25.
194
Chamberlain, Lori. 1988/2004. Gender and The Metaphorics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The
Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 314–329.
Chanana, Kuhu. 2010. Plurality of Lesbian Existence in Modern Indian Writers: Manju Kapur, Rajkamal
Chaudhary and Geetanjali Shree. Indian Literature, 54(3) (May–June), 257, 190–219.
Flotow, Luise von. 1991. Feminist Translation: Context, Practices and Theories. TTR: traduction, terminolo-
Godard, Barbara. 1989. Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation. Tessera, 6 (Spring–Printemps), 42–53.
Kothari, Rita. 2003. Translating India. The Cultural Politics of English. London and New York: Routledge.
Lee, Hermione. 1997. Part: 1882–1904: 1. Biography, in Hermione Lee, ed., Virginia Woolf. London: Vin-
tage Books, 3–20.
Lee, Hermione. 2001. Introduction, in Virginia Woolf, ed., A Room of One’s Own: Three Guineas. London:
Vintage, vi–xiii.
ics, 10(2), 133–146.
Pillai, Meena T. 2009. Gendering Translation, Translating Gender: A Case Study of Kerala, in N. Kamala,
ed., Translating Women: Indian Interventions. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1–15.
Poole, Roger. 1995. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shree, Geetanjali. 1993. Mai. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
Shree, Geetanjali. 2000. Mai. Translated by Nita Kumar. New Delhi: Zubaan.
York: Routledge.
Singh, Chandra Nisha. 2007. Radical Feminism and Women’s Writing: Only So Far and No Further. New
Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd.
Singh, Avadhesh Kumar. 2017. Translation in/and Hindi Literature, in Tariq Khan, ed., History of Transla-
tion in India. Mysuru: National Translation Mission Central Institute of Indian Languages, 101–121.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1992/2000. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies
Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 397–416.
Woolf, Virginia. 1929/2011. A Room of One’s Own. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors (UBSPD).
Woolf, Virginia. 2002. अपना कमरा. Translated by Gopalji Pradhan. Mumbai: Samvad Publication.
Woolf, Virginia. 2011. अपना एक कमरा. Translated by Mozez Michel. Patna: Vani Prakashan.
195
15
A tale of two translations
(Re)interpreting Beauvoir
in Japan, 1953–1997
Julia Bullock
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949] is a monumental work of 20th
century philosophy that profoundly influenced subsequent generations of feminist scholars and
activists. Her unique fusion of existentialist philosophy with methods derived from phenom-
enology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, biology, literary studies, and many other disciplines is
understood today to have forged a compelling argument for women’s freedom and a stunning
indictment of women’s second-class status as man’s “Other” in a patriarchal system that deval-
ues femininity.1 However, because of the complexity of this text, its full significance for femi-
nism was not widely understood in the early years after its appearance in French. Furthermore,
many of its initial translations – particularly the English version by Howard Madison Parshley,
the source text for translations into many other languages – have been criticized for abridging
and misrepresenting Beauvoir’s arguments, creating further confusion as to what precisely she
meant to say.2
While both Japanese versions of The Second Sex were translated from the original French
text, rather than Parshley’s problematic English version, understanding of the significance of
Beauvoir’s work has followed a similarly confused trajectory in Japan. The essay made its debut
in Japanese as Daini no sei in April 1953, just four years after its French-language publication
(de Beauvoir 1953/1955). While it proved phenomenally popular with readers at the time, it
was later criticized for taking liberties with the original text and distorting Beauvoir’s feminist
message. This translation was eventually found to be so problematic that by the late 1980s, a
collective of Japanese feminist scholars formed to re-read The Second Sex in the original French,
eventually producing what they called a “definitive” translation of Beauvoir’s famous tome. This
chapter will explore the differences between the 1953 and 1997 Japanese versions noting the
way changes in historical context in between shaped understanding of Beauvoir’s conceptual
apparatus, as well as the role a new generation of feminist academics played in reinterpreting
Beauvoir at the turn of the last century.
As we will see, gender, language, and historical context all played a role in shaping both Japa-
nese translations of The Second Sex. The first translator, Ikushima Ryōichi, was a male academic
with training in French language and literature but with little understanding of Beauvoir’s
philosophical vocabulary or conceptual traditions. He was also working at a time when the sig-
nificance of Beauvoir’s contribution to feminist philosophy was not widely understood either in
196
Japan or in her home country. By contrast, the 1997 translation team was composed of a dozen
women from varying academic backgrounds, ranging from teachers of French language to pro-
fessional scholars of philosophy and gender theory. They benefitted both from a significant
body of scholarship on Beauvoir’s work that was published in French and other languages sub-
sequent to the Ikushima translation, and also from the emergence of academic disciplines such
as women’s studies that supported this scholarship. So while their retranslation of Beauvoir was
framed as an effort to reclaim her work from the misunderstandings that Ikushima’s first version
invited, it should also be noted that the deficiencies with this first translation were not solely the
product of the biases “of a contemporary Japanese male,”3 but may also be attributed to the state
of scholarship on women and philosophy that framed this first translation. Furthermore, as we
will see later, the complexities of the Japanese language posed an additional set of challenges, for
Ikushima and for the 1997 translation team, in rendering Beauvoir’s essay into Japanese.
Problems with the Ikushima translation

While Beauvoir’s intellectual work had garnered some attention from Japanese scholars prior to
1953 due to her connections with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work was all the rage in Japan dur-
ing the early post-war years, the appearance of The Second Sex in Japanese made her philosophy
available to a much wider audience. Daini no sei was published in five installments from 1953 to
1955, and many of these volumes made the top ten bestsellers’ list for the years in which they
were published.4 The timing of publication was likely responsible for much of its appeal. In
1952, Japan had finally regained its sovereignty after defeat in World War II and a seven-year
occupation by Allied forces that rewrote its constitution and legal system so as to ‘democratize’5
and pacify the country. Elevation of women’s status through equality of opportunity in educa-
tion was an important component of this program of reform, and though this allowed more
women to achieve higher levels of education over the following decades, it also created contro-
versy over the purpose of such education.6 Should women compete with men for prestigious
university placements and professional positions? Or should they continue to support men
through more conventional roles as “good wives and wise mothers,” as they were exhorted to do
prior to defeat in 1945?7 Beauvoir’s feminist treatise appeared just as the first post-war genera-
tion of young Japanese women was struggling with this dilemma. Her arguments for women’s
freedom through greater roles in society found a ready audience among such readers, in spite of
the considerable problems with the first Japanese translation.
Daini no sei was initially marketed to a general readership, and in order to make Beauvoir’s
vast and complex tome accessible to those without a strong background in French philoso-
phy, Ikushima made a number of changes to the text that unfortunately distorted its message.
These included restructuring of the source text, misattribution of material quoted by Beauvoir
as Beauvoir’s own thoughts, and mistranslations of philosophical terms that bred confusion as
to what Beauvoir actually said and obscured her contributions to feminist philosophy.8 As we
will see in the following paragraphs, these misunderstandings gave many Japanese readers the
impression that Beauvoir believed women could only be ‘free’ by denying female corporeality
and refusing motherhood entirely.
Part of the confusion regarding Beauvoir’s arguments stemmed from the fact that Ikushima
rearranged the sequence of chapters to place the sections of the text dealing with women’s lived
experience first, on the understanding that these would be most relatable for the general reader.9
Volumes I through III of the Ikushima translation correspond to Part II of Beauvoir’s original
text, and include those chapters dealing with women’s maturation from girlhood to old age,
concluding with the chapter on women’s freedom at the end of Volume III. Volumes IV and V
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Julia Bullock
of the Ikushima translation correspond to Part I of Beauvoir’s original. These volumes contain
the chapters devoted to discussion of the “facts and myths” that historically framed women’s
roles and position in society. This means that the portions of the text where Beauvoir explained
her theoretical framework were buried in the middle of the Ikushima translation, rather than at
the beginning as in the source text, where they were meant to clarify these concepts in advance
of her specific arguments about contemporary women’s lives. As a result, the philosophical
nuances of much of her existentialist phenomenological terminology were effectively “lost in
translation.”
But the problems with Ikushima’s translation were not limited to his restructuring of the
source material. He has also been taken to task by Japanese feminist scholars for misleading or
inconsistent translations that have given Japanese readers the impression that Beauvoir deni-
grates femininity and motherhood. To some degree these linguistic choices were shaped by the
target language itself; Japanese feminists have long struggled with the fact that much of their
language’s terminology for female sexual and reproductive functions carries a strongly negative
connotation.10 But in this case, Ikushima’s tendency to use derogatory expressions for women’s
bodies at crucial points in the text, even when these linguistic choices were avoidable, unfortu-
nately heightened the pervasive impression of Beauvoir as “male-identified.”
For example, Japanese readers of The Second Sex opened the first volume to find the follow-
ing discussion of children’s psycho-sexual development on the very first page:
The drama of birth and weaning takes place in the same way for infants of both sexes; they
have the same interests and pleasures; sucking is the first source of their most pleasurable
sensations; they then go through an anal phase in which they get their greatest satisfac-
tions from excretory functions common to both; their genital development is similar; they
explore their bodies with the same curiosity and the same indifference; they derive the
same uncertain pleasure from the clitoris and the penis.
(Beauvoir 2011, 283)
With this explanation, Beauvoir wants to demonstrate that boys and girls start off with
the same relationship to their own bodies, which are experienced without shame or taboo
until society intervenes to code masculine anatomy, particularly the penis, as ‘superior’ to its
feminine counterpart. Yet in Ikushima’s translation, this final phrase is rendered as: クリト
リス（陰核）とペニス（男性器）とからおなじ漠然とした快感をひきだす (Beauvoir
1953 I:9). Here he presents the anatomical terms “clitoris” (クリトリス) and “penis” (ペニス)
first in direct transliteration from the French, and then parenthetically defines these terms
for his readers. However, whereas his equivalent for “penis” is the rather neutral phrase “male
organ” [danseiki], for “clitoris” he chooses a term with a decidedly negative connotation:
陰核 [inkaku]. The first character of this word means yin, as in the female pole of the opposi-
tion between the male and female principles in Chinese philosophy (yin/yang), and it carries
all of the negative connotations traditionally associated with this term: darkness, secretiveness,
passivity, shame, etc.
There is an analogous term for the male anatomy, 陰茎 [inkei], that Ikushima might have
used to establish a parallel between the two body parts. Or he might simply have used the term
“female organ” as a counterpart to “male organ.” But instead he chose a term for the female
body part that has a negative and shameful connotation, while rendering the male organ in more
neutral terms. In the process, he wound up thoroughly undermining Beauvoir’s basic point that
children’s bodies signify neutrally for them until society intervenes to valorize the male organ
while coding female genitals as “taboo” and shameful (Beauvoir 2011, 287–289). So Japanese
198
readers of the Ikushima translation might be forgiven for assuming that Beauvoir denigrated
femininity.
Early Japanese feminist responses to The Second Sex

Many of Beauvoir’s earliest readers in Japanese were young women who encountered her work
as they were attempting to decide whether or to what extent to “liberate” themselves from tradi-
tionally feminine roles. In addition to The Second Sex, Japanese translation of the first volume of
Beauvoir’s memoirs as Musume Jidai (1961) provided these young women with an inspirational,
if perhaps also impractical, example of such female liberation. In a sense, this generation of young
Japanese women – the first to benefit from post-war educational reforms that granted them
access to elite universities – formed an ideal readership for Beauvoir’s call to liberation. Refer-
ences to Beauvoir’s famous line that one is not born, but becomes, a woman stud these women’s
recollections of their youth like precious jewels. Clearly, contemporary readers of the Ikushima
translation understood this much of her argument, even if they understood nothing else.
Thus, in its first two decades of publication, Daini no sei managed to inspire many Japanese
women in spite of the problems with the Ikushima translation noted earlier. We see this for
example in the case of writer Okabe Itsuko (1923–2008). Okabe recalls being an obedient
housewife who followed the Confucian dictum to submit to her husband’s will in everything –
that is, until she read The Second Sex in 1953 and had something of a conversion experience. She
credits Beauvoir with “opening the eyes of her heart” to all the ways she had suppressed her own
feelings throughout her marriage, and realized for the first time that she had a right to express
her own opinion, whether or not her husband agreed with it (Okabe 1966). She immediately
divorced him and embarked on a career as a successful essayist, producing 134 books over a liter-
ary career that spanned half a century.
But Japanese feminists also grappled seriously with the theoretical claims made by Beauvoir
in The Second Sex. To cite just one important example, Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005), a cer-
ebral novelist who made her literary debut in 1960, wrote philosophy in fictional form that was
heavily influenced by Beauvoir’s brand of existentialist feminism. For example, the theoretical
framework that she devised to explain her own literary methodology, the notion of literature
as an “anti-world,” is in fact a term that appears in the Ikushima translation of The Second Sex.11
Her groundbreaking essay “Watashi no ‘Daisan no sei’ ” (“My ‘Third Sex,’ ” 1960) may be read
as an attempt to leverage Beauvoir’s notion of women as the “second sex” towards constructing
a subject position for women within male-dominated society that subverts the very structure
of patriarchy from within.12 Her controversial first novel, Kurai Tabi (Blue Journey), can also be
read in part as an homage to (or parody of ) the open relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir.
Kurahashi is just one example of Japanese female intellectuals in the early post-war decades who
were inspired by Ikushima’s version of The Second Sex – however problematic that translation
might have been – and interpreted it in ways that enhanced their own creative work.
Rejection of Beauvoir in the 1970s

In the late 1960s, Japan, like many other advanced industrialized countries, experienced a surge
of ‘second-wave’ radical feminism. Many of the Japanese women at the forefront of this move-
ment had gained leadership experience in the left-wing student protests of the 1960s, but were
alienated from the movement by the violent turn these protests took. They also resented the
fact that women members were typically treated as second-class citizens within the movement,
subject not just to less inspiring tasks such as kitchen duty or mimeographing pamphlets written
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Julia Bullock
by male members, but also often to the violence (including sexual assault) of male members of
their own and other groups. The ‘women’s lib’ thought that evolved in Japan from the late 1960s
to the early 1970s was founded on a rejection of masculinist logic that denigrated or subordi-
nated women to the interests of men.13 It promoted a thorough critique of the societal ‘com-
mon sense’ that assumed a straightforward connection between women’s biology and norms of
femininity that had historically justified women’s subordination to men.
This goal would seem to suggest common cause with Beauvoir, who had implicitly argued
for the notion of femininity as a social construct with her famous declaration that one is not
born, but becomes, a woman. However, after reading the Ikushima translation of The Second Sex,
many of these activists erroneously assumed that Beauvoir’s philosophy was “male-identified”
and out of step with the current age, even as they worked towards a theoretical basis for the same
notion of ‘gender’ as a social construct that she posited in her famous essay. As a result, Beauvoir’s
work was increasingly pigeonholed as an example of masculinist philosophy that advocated that
women should live as men do, by renouncing female experiences such as motherhood in order
to pursue “projects” in a society still dominated by masculine logic (Kanai 2002). Unfortunately,
this meant that although translation of feminist discourse from abroad was an important source
of inspiration for the Japanese ‘women’s lib’ movement in the 1970s, Beauvoir’s influence on
Japanese feminism at this stage of its development was relatively muted, in comparison with that
of other theorists such as Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Juliette Mitchell
(Ehara 2009, 30).
A 1969 essay by Takai Kuniko provides a quintessential example of this turn away from
Beauvoir. In the section of her essay devoted to The Second Sex, Takai characterizes Beauvoir’s
thought as follows:
[For Beauvoir] corporeal conditions are not [a matter of] immovable fate, but simply one
[kind of] situation [jōkyō], and humans exist by continually creating themselves through
choosing freely. According to existentialist philosophy, it is impossible for anything to sur-
pass human beings. Even nature is beneath them.
(Takai 1969, 133)
According to this understanding of Beauvoir, then, failure to transcend one’s biological limi-
tations through denial of motherhood or other feminine experiences meant one’s choices were
in “bad faith.” Takai also claims that Beauvoir “not only does not value the maintenance of
human life (childbirth) but says that this is a humiliation [kutsujoku] and reduces people to ani-
mals.” This seems to form the basis for her conclusion that Beauvoir “denies” motherhood and
argues that women resign themselves to immanence and Otherness when they become mothers
(Takai 1969, 134).
While Takai’s footnotes list only the French-language versions of Beauvoir’s published
works, her discussion of Beauvoir’s philosophy hints that she also consulted Ikushima’s transla-
tion, and that his linguistic choices may have colored her reading of Beauvoir’s attitude towards
motherhood. One indication of this is her assertion that the philosopher considers motherhood
as a ‘humiliation,’ a word that appears frequently in the Ikushima translation in contexts where
he conveys Beauvoir’s attitude towards female corporeality. Where Beauvoir speaks of women’s
‘servitude’ to biological conditions such as menstruation and childbirth, Ikushima translates this
term as ‘humiliation’ [kutsujoku], thus giving the reader the impression that she is contemptuous
of such experiences. Unfortunately, this perception of Beauvoir as “male-identified” persisted
into the mid-1990s (Saegusa 1995; Shimada 1996), even after much scholarly work by Japanese
feminists had been devoted to debunking this interpretation of Beauvoir.
200
Reassessment of Beauvoir in the late 20th century

Beauvoir’s death in 1986 prompted a re-examination of her legacy for feminism worldwide. In
Japan, this also resulted in the discovery of serious problems with the Ikushima translation of The
Second Sex. By 1997, a dozen female scholars14 had collectively produced a second, “definitive”
Japanese translation of this massive tome. This version of The Second Sex preserved the sequenc-
ing of material in the source text, adopted more neutral terminology for female biological
processes, and employed clearer and more consistent translations for philosophical terms, thus
clarifying Beauvoir’s claims about femininity and motherhood. This retranslation of Beauvoir
was imbricated with, and motivated by, shifts in Japanese feminist theoretical discourse such
as the rise of women’s studies as an academic discipline in the 1980s and the introduction of
queer theory in the 1990s. With the publication of this second translation, a new generation of
Japanese feminists (re-)discovered Beauvoir’s thought, finding renewed relevance in her insights
even for 21st-century readers.
Members of the retranslation committee fostered this new appreciation of Beauvoir’s argu-
ments not merely through their translation work, but also through the publication of scholarly
and popular articles written to debunk prevalent misunderstandings of Beauvoir by Japanese
readers of Ikushima’s Daini no sei. For example, in an essay published the same year as the
retranslation in the intellectual journal Risō, lead translator Inoue Takako went to some trouble
to clarify that Beauvoir does not deny the “importance of women’s biological condition, but
she firmly refuses the idea that this determines women’s destiny” (Inoue 1997, 45). These efforts
to reclaim The Second Sex for 21st-century readers seem to have borne fruit, given that more
recent scholarship on Beauvoir reflects the influence of both the ‘definitive’ translation and the
success of its translators’ efforts to promote the text. Kanai, who wrote disparagingly of Beau-
voir’s ‘male-identified’ strand of philosophy in her book Postmodern Feminism (Kanai 1989), later
retracted these claims in a 2002 article that profiled The Second Sex as one of 50 ‘feminist classics’
(Kanai 2002). Likewise, in a 2005 essay on Beauvoir’s stance towards motherhood published in
the proceedings of a women’s university journal, Satō Hiroko notes Beauvoir’s understanding of
the difficulties of balancing motherhood with projects outside the home:
Beauvoir did not become a mother. However, she understood the situation [jōkyō] in which
mothers are placed and the difficulties [they experience], and thought about ways they
could extract themselves [from these difficulties]. . . . From that point, becoming a mother
was no longer women’s destiny, and it became possible for the first time for them to choose
a number of lifestyles at various stages of their lives.
(Satō 2005, 44)
Significantly, Satō’s Works Cited section lists many articles penned by members of the retrans-
lation committee in order to reclaim Beauvoir’s significance for contemporary feminism, indi-
cating the impact of the translators’ efforts in shaping Japanese readers’ impression of her work.
On the other hand, the translators’ activist zeal in ‘reclaiming’ Beauvoir’s thought for Japanese
feminism raises important questions about how this goal may have shaped their own interpreta-
tion of The Second Sex in ways that Beauvoir might not have envisioned or intended. For exam-
ple, in their Afterword to the 1997 translation, Inoue Takako and Kimura Nobuko note that the
Ikushima translation frequently creates the false impression that Beauvoir is criticizing women
in a categorical sense by failing to distinguish between Beauvoir’s use of the term ‘femininity’ to
describe actual women and her use of this term to reference the stereotype of the ‘eternal femi-
nine.’ They argue that her intention is to criticize such stereotypes, not actual women; thus, they
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Julia Bullock
chose to differentiate between these two cases in their translation of The Second Sex, referring to
the feminine stereotype with the term onnarashisa (being like a woman) and to actual feminine
experience as onna de aru koto (the fact of being a woman).
However, as the translators themselves note, Beauvoir’s text itself fails to distinguish between
these two concepts (Inoue and Kimura 1997, 372). While linguistic distinctions between bio-
logical sex and cultural constructions of gender had become de rigueur by the turn of the mil-
lennium, they were not widely understood or denoted linguistically at the time Beauvoir wrote
her foundational feminist treatise. Furthermore, in some cases – such as the first few pages of her
Introduction to Volume I of The Second Sex – Beauvoir seems to want to highlight the societal
conflation between the stereotype and the reality of ‘femininity.’ In fact, she begins her lengthy
dissertation on femininity by asking seriously “What is a woman?” so as to underscore the very
instability of the category itself. So while perhaps well-intended, the translators’ attempts to
make distinctions between these two meanings of ‘femininity’ in some cases may actually cut
against the intention of Beauvoir’s phenomenological inquiry.
Furthermore, the way they denote these distinctions in their translation may further obfuscate,
rather than clarify, the degree to which Beauvoir articulated conceptual distinctions between
sex and gender in her own writing. It is certainly true that The Second Sex helped to lay the
theoretical groundwork for later linguistic distinctions between these two notions, a legacy that
the translators highlight as follows: “[Beauvoir’s notion of] sex [sei] as societally and culturally
constructed is to be distinguished from biological sex [seibutsugakuteki na sei (sekkusu)], and
today is expressed with the term ‘gender’ [jendaa]” (Inoue and Kimura 1997, 371). This remark
seems to explain the translators’ tendency to gloss the character 性 (sei) – which in Japanese may
connote either ‘sex’ as a biological fact or ‘gender’ as a cultural construction – with the term
sekkusu (セックス, or “sex”) when they understand it as signifying biological sex.
But as noted previously, this ‘clarification’ may actually have created artificial distinctions
where Beauvoir might have intended to preserve a kind of productive ambiguity between ‘sex’
as a biological fact and a cultural construct. This also highlights inherent aspects of the Japanese
language that pose challenges for the translator in rendering terms related to sex and gender.
The term sekkusu, which the translators have chosen as a gloss meaning biological sex, exists
in Japanese only as a counterpart to jendaa [ジェンダー, or ‘gender’]. Both of these terms are
very recent loanwords derived from English, rather than the French language in which Beauvoir
wrote her original text. Not only is this distinction anachronistic, but it also has the unfortunate
and no doubt unintended consequence of reasserting the linguistic supremacy of English over
French (among other languages) – a historical legacy of the post-World War II Allied Occu-
pation that has more to do with the politics of language in Japan than it does with feminism
generally speaking, or with Beauvoir’s specific contributions to feminist theory.
Conclusion
Although the first Japanese translation of The Second Sex by Ikushima Ryōichi inspired many
young women with its suggestion of femininity as a social construct rather than a biological
given, problems with this translation also gave readers the erroneous impression that Beauvoir
denigrated femininity and motherhood. While in some ways the deficiencies of this translation
mirrored those of translations into other languages such as English – namely, structural changes
and mistranslations that created confusion as to the significance of Beauvoir’s arguments – these
problems were also exacerbated by linguistic features of the Japanese language and writing
system. In particular, the negative associations inherent in many Chinese compounds used by
Ikushima to represent words for women’s sexual and reproductive functions compounded the
202
prevalent assumption of Beauvoir’s thought as “male-identified.” But while the 1997 retransla-
tion improved on the Ikushima version in many respects, the translators’ activist impulse to
“clarify” Beauvoir’s thought may have had unintended consequences, creating artificial distinc-
tions where Beauvoir may have preferred to remain ambiguous and thus flattening out some of
the philosophical complexity of the original text.
Notes
1 For a brief overview of Beauvoir’s importance to feminism, see Andrew 2003.
2 For an overview of these criticisms of the Parshley translation, see Simons 1999 (1983), 62–69.
3 This is how the 1997 translation team describes the Ikushima translation in their Afterword to Volume
I. See Inoue and Kimura 1997, 371.
4 For details of the work’s initial reception and publication in Japanese, see Bullock 2018.
5 I place this term in scare quotes because while this is how the Occupiers understood their mission in
Japan after the country’s defeat in World War II, the phrasing implies that Japan had no prior experi-
ence with democracy. In fact, Japan had a parliamentary system that was created in the late 1880s and
remained in power until the rise of military dictatorship in the 1930s.
6 On the controversy over the post-war educational reforms as seen through a discussion of debates over
coeducation, see Bullock 2019.
7 On “good wife, wise mother” discourse, see for example Koyama 2013 and Uno 2005.
8 For a fuller discussion of these points, see Inoue and Kimura 1997.
9 Ikushima explains the rationale behind these changes in the explanatory commentary (kaisetsu)
appended to the first volume of his translation. See Ikushima 1953.
10 This was a particularly thorny problem for ‘women’s lib’ activists in the 1970s who attempted to trans-
late the iconic feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves into Japanese. For discussion of this point, see for
example Buckley 1997.
11 Scholars differ on the question of whether Kurahashi also read Beauvoir in the original French, in
addition to the Ikushima translation with which she was obviously familiar. But given that she was a
French literature major who wrote her graduation thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it
is certain that she at least had a thorough grasp of the existentialist philosophical terminology employed
by Beauvoir throughout The Second Sex.
12 For an analysis of this essay as an adaptation of Beauvoir’s thought to the Japanese feminist context, see
Bullock 2018.
13 For more on the ‘women’s lib’ movement in Japan, see Shigematsu 2012.
14 This group formed exclusively for the purpose of re-reading Beauvoir in the original French, as sug-
gested by their adoption of the name Daini no Sei Genbun de Yominaosu Kai [Committee to Re-read
The Second Sex in the Original]. Ten members of this committee collaborated to translate volume one
of the original text; 11 of its members produced volume two. This resulted in publication of Daini no
sei: Ketteiban (The Second Sex: Definitive Edition), referenced earlier.
References
Andrew, Barbara S. 2003. Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought, in Claudia Card, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24–44.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1953/1955. Daini no sei (5v.). Translated by Ikushima Ryōichi. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1961. Musume jidai. Translated by Asabuki Tomiko. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
New York: Vintage Books.
Buckley, Sandra. 1997. Interview with Nakanishi Toyoko, in Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 185–225.
Bullock, Julia C. 2018. From ‘Dutiful Daughters’ to ‘Coeds Ruining the Nation’: Reception of Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in Early Postwar Japan. Gender and History, 30(1), 271–285.
Bullock, Julia C. 2019. Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese
Media. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
203
Julia Bullock
Ehara, Yumiko. 2009. Gendai Nihon ni okeru joseigaku, jendā kenkyū no rironteki tenkai – 1970 nendai
kara kyō made. Josei kūkan, 29–37.
Ikushima, Ryōichi. 1953. Kaisetsu, in Simone de Beauvoir, ed., Daini no sei v. 1: Onna wa kō shite tsukurareru.
Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 235–238.
Inoue, Takako. 1997. Daini no sei: Jiko no tankyū to shite no feminizumu. Risō, 659, 43–52.
Inoue, Takako and Kimura Nobuko. 1997. Yakusha atogaki, in Ketteiban Daini no sei I: Jijitsu to shinwa.
Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 371–374.
Kanai, Yoshiko. 1989. Posutomodan Feminizumu. Tokyo: Keisō shobō.
Kanai, Yoshiko. 2002. Simone de Beauvoir: Daini no sei, in Ehara Yumiko and Kanai Yoshiko, eds., Femi-
nizumu no meicho 50. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 60–69.
Koyama, Shizuko. 2013. Ryōsai Kenbo and the Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan.
Translated by Stephen Filler. Boston: Brill.
Okabe, Itsuko. 1966. Beauvoir kaikenki. Fujin Kōron, 51(12), 53–54.
Saegusa, Kazuko. 1995. Ika ni shite josei no tetsugaku wa kanō ka 4: Bōvowāru dansei shikō no wana.
Yuriika, 27(9), 17–25.
Satō, Hiroko. 2005. Bōvowāru Daini no sei to <bosei>. Kawamura Gakuen Joshi Daigaku joseigaku nenpō, 3,
43–50.
Shigematsu, Setsu. 2012. Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Shimada, Akiko. 1996. Nihon no feminizumu: Genryū to shite no Akiko, Raichō, Kikue, Kanoko. Tokyo: Hokuju
shuppan.
Simons, Margaret A. 1983/1999. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The
Second Sex, in Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 61–71.
Takai, Kuniko. 1969. Beauvoir ni okeru tashasei no mondai. Meiji Gakuin Ronsō, 146, 127–156.
Uno, Kathleen. 2005. Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’
Before 1931, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 493–519.
204
16
Bridging the cultural gap
The translation of Simone de
Beauvoir into Arabic
Hala G. Sami
Introduction
Simone de Beauvoir comes to mind whenever research in women’s studies, gender studies,
or feminism is mentioned. A prominent figure for second-wave feminism, she introduced
groundbreaking views regarding women’s status, whether in her autobiographical works, her
novels or her essays. She is particularly known for her magnum opus Le deuxième sexe (origi-
nally published in 1949), which has been translated and critically examined in many languages
of the world. Influenced by her existentialist philosophical stance, the book was considered
controversial when it first appeared, and caused a row as it particularly outraged the Vatican.
It is interesting, however, that despite the fact that the Arab world is principally conservative,
and a large part of its population is very much observant of religious teachings, particularly
Islam, many of Beauvoir’s major works have been rendered in Arabic. Her seminal essay was
translated into Arabic for the first time in 1969, a fact that has escaped general notice in aca-
demic circles.
Egypt and Lebanon, in particular, have proven to be pioneers in the field of translation in the
Arab world (Consulting and Meiering 2004, 16). In Lebanon, there emerged, for example, such
publishers as Dar al-Ādāb, which initiated a translation project to transfer the Western literary
and cultural canon to the Arab world. The project began in 1956 in Beirut, initiated by Suhayl
Idrīs, a Lebanese writer and translator, who is also famous for the 1953 launch of his literary
magazine al-Ādāb (Belles lettres). Both Idrīs and his wife, ‘Ā’ida Matarjī Idrīs, “undertook to sum-
marize, translate, and critique works by such existentialists as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus
[. . .] and above all Sartre” (Spanos 2017, 110). Although the publisher translated the French exis-
tentialists, including Beauvoir, it did not translate her most famous book, Le deuxième sexe (see
Table 16.1). It was roughly during this same period, the golden age of translation, that Egypt also
translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whereas, Beauvoir, their existential-
ist peer, was predominantly translated in Lebanon. Indeed, almost all of Beauvoir’s works were
translated in Beirut. Occasionally, one can find one or two translations adopted by other Arab
countries, notably Syria and Jordan. Only two of her less well-known books were translated in
Cairo (see Table 16.1). None of the translators of Beauvoir’s work state whether they translated
directly from French or used the mediation of another language, possibly English, but since most
205
Hala G. Sami
of them were from the Levant, where French language proficiency is probable, we can assume
they worked from the original French.
Translation entails a cultural encounter, which accounts for the fact that “in the collective
memory of the Arab world,” it “is associated with cultural openness, social advancement and
political strength” (Consulting and Meiering 2004, 16). Nevertheless, it involves various chal-
lenges, which researchers in translation studies meet, when engaging in this field. Among the
challenges, which translations into Arabic particularly manifest are inaccuracy and inadequacy
of the translation, in addition to absence of required bibliographical data. However, there has
recently been more awareness of the importance of translated works, and the role they play “in
creating a different discourse in Arabic about translation as a means for negotiating ‘cultural
otherness’ ” (Hanna 2011, 27).
The present study examines the translation of Simone de Beauvoir into Arabic, while shed-
ding light on the cultural background against which French culture has generally been translated
into Arabic, as well as touching upon the reception of and resistance to feminist thought. It
will focus on translation from Egypt and the Levant, as they particularly dominate the field of
translation in the Arab world. This approach derives from the cultural turn of translation studies
where translation, as Lawrence Venuti notes, “forms particular cultural identities and maintains
them with a relative degree of coherence and homogeneity, but also [. . .] creates possibilities for
cultural resistance, innovation, and change at any historical moment” (1998, 68).

Translation projects are often challenged by state institutions, which can insist on censorship
and instill the state’s right-wing ideology. Such challenges have been studied in regard to Spain
(see Godayol, in this volume) and China, where a similar official stance, seriously challenging
the translation of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, for instance, existed in the 1980s. It was feared the
book would trigger and inspire women’s activism (Haiping 2016, 234–236). This draws atten-
tion to the fact that feminist theory, initially, and perhaps right up to the present, confronts the
rigidity of a patriarchal system, and that all manner of censorship is deployed to challenge the
communication of new ways of thinking about diverse sociocultural environments and contexts.
Early Arabic translations of Beauvoir suffered extensive abridgement, which was only par-
tially remedied in the most recent translations. Extensive adaptation has been very common
in the Arab world, starting in the mid-19th century with the initial transposition of European
works in modern Egypt ( Jacquemond 1992, 140–141). This, perhaps, accounts for the fact that
the translation of Beauvoir’s writings were mainly effected in the less conservative Lebanon.
Beauvoir, in fact, experienced considerable translational silence, if one may call it so, and Le deux-
ieme sexe only saw the light in Arabic 20 years after its original publication in France. However,
in the last decade, the translation movement from the West to the Arab world has resumed its
momentum, with various state and private projects contributing to the translation of Western
intellectuals.1 Nevertheless it is true that many of the key works of major feminist figures have
not been translated into Arabic, which points to a substantial gap in the acknowledgement of
feminist thought in the Arab world.
This brings us to the Arab world’s interest in Beauvoir’s writings, the dynamics involved in
the translation process, and the transfer of Western feminism to the Arab world. The research
available, so far, on Beauvoir’s work in Arabic translation has shown that early translations of
many of her texts were extensively abridged, while most recent translations are more adequate,
valid and comprehensive. In this respect, one has to bear in mind the cultural differences that
determine how feminist ideology and theory materialize in Arabic. Luise von Flotow observes:
206
“all translation is faced with negotiating cultural difference. And since feminism means some-
thing different in every culture, the issue is heightened in texts where gender is foregrounded”
(Flotow 1997, 92). This view also reflects Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of “horizon of expecta-
tions,” according to which he proposes that the reception of a work of art is determined by
the readers’ presuppositions: “for each work a pre-constituted horizon of expectations must
be ready at hand [. . .] to orient the reader’s (public’s) understanding and to enable a qualifying
reception” (1982, 79). In an analysis of and comment on Gérard Genette’s notion of paratexts,
that is, the various extra-textual elements, which make up a book, Kathryn Batchelor notes that
“the book, . . ., circulates in a context which also affects its reception” (2018, 8). Such views
bring to the fore the question of Simone de Beauvoir’s reception in the Arab world, as well as
the sociocultural environment which might engage with Beauvoirian existentialist and feminist
thought.
This is illustrated by one of the very few translations into Arabic produced and published
in Egypt and daringly attributed to Simone de Beauvoir. The book is entitled kayfā tufakkir al-
mar’ah [How Women Think], also referred to as gharāa’iz al-mar’ah [Women’s Instincts.] Beauvoir’s
French original title is not given and remains unknown, and the book is basically a patriarchal
interpolation on feminist discourse. In it, the publisher purports to present and discuss some of
Beauvoir’s views but does so in the light of “Muslim values,” quoting from the Koran on several
occasions. In an initial prefatory note, the publisher apologizes for the proposed ideas, pointing
out how they are at odds with the predominantly Muslim culture in Egypt, and not necessar-
ily suitable for Arab society, yet, given the author’s value and fame, he has made Beauvoir’s text
available to Arab readers. His initial note is worth quoting at length:
The standards of Western society, by which they measure a woman’s worth are different
from those to which we conform in our Muslim society. Undoubtedly, according to West-
ern standards, a woman’s position in the society and the adequacy of her financial means
are prioritized.
According to such Western standards, women, such as Marilyn Monroe, the well-
known American actress, and Dalida, the French singer, reached great fame. However, they
also reached the highest level of misery, which led them to commit suicide.
We, therefore, reject Western values, which totally venerate two suicidal women.2 This
leads us to further hold on to our beliefs and our valuable religion.
However, since it is imperative to open up to and interact with the world, we have
opened a window that would show us the Western perspective on women. Such an out-
look is presented in this book written by the most famous European woman writer in the
modern age (kayfā tufakkir al-mar’ah).
(my translation) (n.d.)
Such intervention reveals a conservative culture’s resistance to progressive ideas vis-à-vis gender,
whereby a sharply defined discourse pits “us” (“our Muslim society”) against “them” (“Western
society”). The main problem confronting the feminist movement in Egypt and in the Arab
world, for that matter, is that it is accused of subscribing to a Western ideology, which conflicts
with the sociocultural values of the Arab-Muslim norm.
It is noteworthy that other early Arabic translations of Beauvoir’s works, such as Le Deux-
ième Sexe and Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, also make major changes to the text. The trans-
lations are fragmented, which caused quite inaccurate versions of the target text to reach the
Arab reader, thus miscommunicating Beauvoir’s ideas. For example, Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième
Sexe has undergone frequent adaptations and abridgements to the extent of being published,
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Hala G. Sami
in one particular instance, as a 100-page booklet. This particular version (Al-Sahly 1967)
consists of excerpts from selected chapters supplemented with cartoon images of half-naked
women. Beauvoir’s most renowned essay is thereby misrepresented and reduced to a mere
manual on women’s sexuality. Such an outcome discloses a superficial, reductive and mis-
taken understanding of Beauvoir’s work. In the case of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, her
renowned autobiography was translated into Arabic in 1959 with several subsequent reprints
(see Table 16.1). With each reprint, the title of the work was modified. An examination of the
title’s nuances provides a cogent commentary on one of the Arab paratexts regarding Beauvoir
(see case study).
Another important issue is the lack of homogeneity among Arab countries, which causes the
reception of feminism to vary from one country to another. Alanoud Alsharekh, who is special-
ized in researching women’s rights in the Arab Gulf region, highlights this diversity of the Arab
countries, which complicates the process of translating new modes of thinking: “the twenty-one
countries of the Arab world” boast “many Arab identities,” whose lack of homogeneity became
more accentuated “after the post-liberation statehood projects” (2016, 2). This has meant “that
the legal and social position of women progressed at widely differing rates in the various Arab
countries, and thus produced a varying range of engagements with feminist thought, texts and
translations” (2016, 2). The differences in women’s status in Arab countries have implications
vis-à-vis the translation and reception of feminist texts, making certain translations possible and
prohibiting others. For instance, one can speculate that radical feminist thought might be trans-
lated in Lebanon and Tunisia, which are more liberal and progressive sociocultural contexts, but
not necessarily in Egypt, which is characterized by a more conservative vein.

A more general issue underlying Beauvoir translations into Arabic is the question of whether
the translation of feminist theory is even possible. Recently, Hala Kamal (2015) engaged in such
a process of translation, and presented readers with a substantial volume containing a wide range
of important articles (2016, 66–67), in order to fill a considerable gap in the feminist critical
arena in the Arab world (66). She also attempted a feminist translation of the critical writ-
ings in question. The very fact of translating such significant material, while incorporating a
deliberately feminist aspect, is a political act, as Kamal observes: it is “an assertion of the activist
dimension in feminist translation, viewing it as an expression of feminist agency and a political
act” (60). Alsharekh corroborates the fact that translating feminism in the Arab world is a social
activist stance (2): “the feminist translator is not only instigating social change but uncovering
the traditional reasons behind the status quo” (3).
Currently, in the Arab world, there is a renewed interest in translating Beauvoir’s works, as
two of her major works, Les mandarins, and Le Deuxième Sexe now exist in more comprehensive
translations, while Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée was reprinted twice. It is also noteworthy that
a large number of Beauvoir’s recent translators into Arabic are women,3 (e.g. Lina Badr, Dan-
iel [sic] Saleh, Sahar Said, and Marie Tawq) and mainly from the Levant region. To take the
translation of Beauvoir into Arabic a step further is to require a feminist and more professional
translation of her works.
The following analyses study several different moments of Beauvoir translation, which put
the translators to the test as they seek to remain coherent with the source text and its gendered
feminist framework. The passages were selected from three different genres, namely a treatise
about women (Le Deuxième sexe), two novels (Les mandarins and Les belles images) and a memoir
(Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée).
208
Case study I: the clash of grammatical gender in two 2015

Arabic translations of Le Deuxième Sexe
This case study focuses on the translation of Volume I, Part III of Le Deuxième Sexe, entitled
Mythes [Myths], which Borde and Malovany-Chevalier, the book’s most recent English transla-
tors, accurately describe as a study of “myths about women” (2009b, 438). Beauvoir here dem-
onstrates how myths corroborate woman’s ambiguous status, and present her as both saviour
and destroyer. She proposes that woman, just like a myth, is contradictory, ambivalent, and resists
definition (Le Deuxième Sexe, Tome I, 242).
Early translations of the book into Arabic were mere adaptations, where the translators
almost entirely omitted the third part of the original French text. There is no literature to
account for these cuts,4 but one can propose two reasons: first, this section is replete with the
names of Western mythological figures and supplemented with Beauvoir’s generous footnotes
elaborating on the mostly Greco-Roman references. These are not necessarily familiar to the
Arab reader. Further, these mythological references require a large number of footnotes in Ara-
bic to explain, for instance, the Eve–Virgin Mary/Delilah–Judith dichotomy (Beauvoir 1976,
242), which, otherwise, would be lost upon the reader. Second, this section also closely examines
literary works abounding in cultural references, which are equally foreign to the Arab reader.
The two most recent translations of Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe into Arabic were published
in 2015, by Sahar Said, an independent Syrian woman translator and localization professional,
and by Rehab Akkawy and Joseph Kaloustian, two Lebanese translators, both men, who have
translated many works of world literature. Unlike previous translators, both Said and Akkawy-
Kaloustian are aware of potential cultural discrepancies and attempt to bridge the gap by further
clarifying language nuances. A comparison of the two translations5 sheds some light on their
rendition of mythological figures, as well as masculine and feminine nouns, which differ sharply
between French and Arabic. The translations reveal how the dialectic relationship that Beau-
voir observes between man’s “transcendence” and woman’s “immanence” is confused, and even
deconstructed.
For example,
[L]e Soleil est l’époux de la Mer; Soleil, feu sont des divinités mâles; et la Mer est un des
symboles maternels qu’on retrouve le plus universellement. Inerte, l’eau subit l’action des
rayons flamboyants, qui la fertilisent.
(Beauvoir 1976, 244)
‫ الماء‬.‫الشمس زوجة البحر؛ الشمس والنار آلهةٌ مذكرة ٌ؛ والبحر هو أحد أكثر رموز األمومة شيوعا ً فى العالم‬
.‫ التى تخصبه‬،‫ يخضع لتأثير األشعة الملتهبة‬،‫ساكن‬
ٌ .
(Said 2015b, 190)
Back-translation: [The sun is the wife of the sea; sun and fire are masculine divinities; and
the sea is one of the most prevalent maternity symbols in the world. The calm water sub-
mits to the scorching effect of the sun’s rays, which fertilise him.]
(my emphasis)
Said provides a footnote, though inadequate, to account for the French-Arabic discordance in
masculine and feminine nouns. She notes: “In French, the sun is masculine and the sea is feminine
(the translator)” (Said, 190) (my translation). In Arabic, both “water” and “sea” are masculine nouns,
hence, the pronoun “him,” which defeats the purpose of Beauvoir’s intention to demonstrate the
209
Hala G. Sami
male’s power over the female. In Arabic, the translation backfires as the feminine sun overcomes
the masculine sea.
Akkawy-Kaloustian render the same passage as follows:
‫ الشمس والنار إلهان ذكران فى حين أن البحر‬،)‫والشمس (مذكر فى اللغة الفرنسية) زوج البحر (مؤنث فى اللغة ذاتها‬
۰‫ يتأثر الماء الهامد بفعل األشعة المتوهجة التى تخصبه‬.ً ‫هو أحد رموز األمومة التى نجدها أكثر شيوعا‬.
(Akkawy-Kaloustian 2015a, 99–100)
Back-translation: [and the sun (masculine in the French language) the husband of the sea
(feminine in the same language). Sun and fire are two masculine divinities, while the sea
is one of the most prevalent maternity symbols. The still water is affected by the blazing
rays which fertilise him.]
(my emphasis)
Whereas Said provides a footnote to account for the gender discrepancy, Akkawy-Kaloustian
use explicitation, and interpolate the flow of the text in order to explain such a language/culture
gap. However, the translators overlook the fact that in French, the noun ‘water’ is feminine, while
it is masculine in Arabic, which should be explained. Without an explanation, the final personal
pronoun (‘him’) makes the sentence very awkward. The Arabic translation, thus produces a
reverse effect, whereby the natural element (the sun), which is feminine in Arabic, overrides the
masculine elements (the sea and the water).
This problem of grammatical gender not coinciding between French and Arabic continues.
Further on in the passage, Beauvoir observes:
De même la glèbe entaillée par le travail du laboureur reçoit, immobile, les grains dans les
sillons. Cependant son rôle est nécessaire: c’est elle qui nourrit le germe, qui l’abrite et lui
fournit sa substance.
(Beauvoir, 244)
l’homme a continué à rendre un culte aux déesses de la fécondité; il doit à Cybèle ses récol-
tes, ses troupeaux, sa prospérité.
(Beauvoir, 244)
،‫ هو الذى يغذى البذرة‬:‫ مع ذلك فدوره ضرورى‬.ً ‫وكذلك الحقل الذى ينبشه الحارث يتلقى البذور فى أخاديده ساكنا‬
‫ يدين بمحاصيله وقطعانه وازدهاره لـ سيبل‬.‫ استمرالرجل فى عبادة آلهة الخصب‬. . . ‫ويحميها ويعطيها مادتها‬
Cybèle.
(Said, 190)
Back-translation: [The field, which is unearthed by the ploughman, receives, motionless,

the seeds in its furrows. Nevertheless, his role is necessary: he is the one who feeds, protects
and gives substance to the seed. As such, . . ., man continued to worship the goddess of
fertility. He is indebted for his crops, herds and prosperity to Cybele]
(my emphasis)
Said translates the French feminine noun “la glèbe” into the masculine Arabic noun “al-haql”
˙
(the field), which defeats the purpose of highlighting the masculine-feminine binary opposition. In
addition, the passage becomes ambiguous, as it is not clear, in this context, whether the masculine
pronoun “huwa” (he) refers to al-haql (the field) or al-harith (the ploughman). The rest of the reference
˙ ˙
210
to the field in the passage proves to be odd because it is associated with a masculine entity: “The field
(masculine) is unearthed and receives the seeds of the ploughman (masculine)” (my addition). Said
includes the mythological name Cybele in Latin letters, as well as highlights the Arabic word in bold
font. She, then, supplements the proper noun with a footnote to inform the reader who Cybèle is:
.(‘‫اإللهة األم لدى اإلغريق و الرومان (المترجمة‬

(Said, 190)
Back-translation: [The mother goddess, according to Greek and Roman mythology. (The
translator)]
In comparison, Akkawi-Kaloustian translate the passage as follows:
‫ فهى‬،‫ مع ذلك فإن دورها ضرورى‬.‫كذلك تتقبل التلعة المحزوزة بجهد الحارث حبات القمح فى أثالمها بال حراك‬
‫ فهو مدين لـ‬:‫ على تقديم العبادة آللهات الخصب‬. . . ،‫ لهذا السبب ثابر الرجل‬.‫ تؤويه وتوفر له مادته‬،‫التى تغذى البذر‬
‫سيبال بمحاصيله وقطعانه وازدهاره‬.
(Akkawi-Kaloustian, 100)
Akkawi-Kaloustian manage to maintain the feminine noun to preserve the feminine-mas-

culine structure by using a rather archaic Arabic word al-tal’ā (a furrowed hill or mound),
which, some Arab readers might not understand. The mythological name Cybèle is only
included between quotation marks, without further explanation.
In another passage, Beauvoir notes:
Pour le marin, la mer est une femme dangereuse, perfide, difficile à conquérir, mais qu’il
chérit à travers son effort pour la dompter. Orgueilleuse, rebelle, virginale et méchante, la
montagne est femme pour l’alpiniste qui veut, au péril de sa vie, la violer.
(Beauvoir, 262)
،‫ و الجبل‬.‫ لكنه يحبها من خالل الجهد الذى يبذله لقمعها‬،‫ صعبة المنال‬،‫ خبيثة‬،‫البحر بالنسبة للبحار إمرأة خطيرة‬
. . . ، ‫ هو إمرأة بالنسبة للمتسلق الذى يريد أن يغتصبه‬،ً ‫ بريئا ً و شريرا‬،ً ‫ متمردا‬،ً ‫فخورا‬
(Said, 203)
Back-translation: [To the sailor, the sea is a dangerous woman . . . and the mountain,
proud, rebellious, innocent and wicked, is a woman for the mountain climber, who, risking
his life, wants to rape ‘him’.]
(my emphasis)
،‫ والجبل المتكبر‬.‫ لكنه يحبها عبر جهده إلخضاعها‬،‫ صعبة القياد‬،‫ غادرة‬،‫ إمرأة خطرة‬،‫ بالنسبة إلى البحار‬،‫والمرأة‬
. ‫ أن ينتهك حرمتها‬،‫ معرضا ً حياته للخطر‬،‫ هو امرأة فى نظر متسلق الجبال الذى يريد‬،‫ المشاكس‬،‫ النقى‬،‫المتمرد‬
(Akkawy-Kaloustian, 115)
Back-translation: [The woman [sic], to the sailor, is a dangerous woman. She is deceptive
and difficult to control, but he loves her through his effort to submit her to his will. And the
proud, rebellious, pure and quarrelsome mountain is a woman to the mountain climber,
who, risking his life, seeks to rape her.]
(my emphasis)
211
Hala G. Sami
In the Arabic language, both the sea and the mountain are masculine nouns. The translation,
which again does nothing to adjust the problem of grammatical gender, appears awkward and
requires further explanation, which neither translator attempts to do. In French, the language
nuance highlights Beauvoir’s view of man’s supposed transcendence and woman’s supposed
immanence, but this is not echoed in Arabic. Ironically, the transcendence-immanence binarism
that Beauvoir takes pains to point out and discuss, where woman’s alterity becomes the embodi-
ment of man’s “contradictory projections” (Lecarme-Tabone 2008, 91), is completely disman-
tled here. In a detailed footnote, the translators could have addressed this paradox by further
elaborating on the French-Arabic discrepancy with reference to masculine and feminine nouns
so as to underline Beauvoir’s intended meaning of masculine supremacy over the feminine in a
patriarchal context.
Case study II: the translation of a woman’s consciousness

in Les mandarins
Simone de Beauvoir’s Les mandarins (1954) is a roman-à-clef, for which she was awarded the
prestigious French Goncourt prize. It addresses and discusses the political inclinations of French
intellectuals during the post-World War II period, as they are torn between the two emerg-
ing political ideologies, capitalism, and particularly, communism, to which they question their
allegiance. It also engages with the dynamics of marital and extra-marital relationships, with the
two main characters, Anne Dubreuilh, a psychiatrist (Simone de Beauvoir) and Henri Perron, a
newspaper editor (Albert Camus), acting as alternate narrators.
The novel was translated twice into Arabic, in 1962 by Georges Tarabichi and in 2009a by
Marie Tawq. Both translate the novel as Al-mothaqqafūun (The Intellectuals). Georges Tarabichi
was a Syrian writer, critic, and translator (1939–2016), who translated over two hundred books
into Arabic, among them works of the French Existentialists, including Beauvoir. He is also
known for a critique of Nawal al-Saadawi’s work, entitled Woman Against Her Sex (2001).
Marie Tawq (1963–) is a Lebanese university professor of French language and literature,
who has translated several works of world literature. In an interview addressing her translation
activities, she points out that she tries, as much as possible, to observe fidelity to the source text
(Al-hajiri 2013).
Tarabichi’s version, translated at the age of 23, consists of one volume, divided into two parts
and is devoid of any introduction or preface. Tawq’s two-volume version has two introductory
sections in the first volume: one presents the novel as a roman-à-clef and sets the historical back-
ground, the literary aspects and technique of the novel. It is followed by a brief biographical note
on Simone de Beauvoir. Within the translated text, the translator provides consistent footnotes
to explain words that carry cultural markers and which are most probably foreign to the Arab
reader. However, she does not provide a “Translator’s Note” to elaborate on possible challenges
or potential discrepancies she met in the course of translating the work, or the strategies she
adopted to translate this hefty roman-à-clef.
The present case study will shed light on the main character, Anne Dubreuilh, and her intro-
spection about her life. The discrepancies between both translators will indicate how success-
fully they render the heroine’s predicament vis-à-vis her love affair. The heroine is torn between
her physical need and her awareness that she needs to tame her desire. When the two translations
are compared, Marie Tawq’s translation renders a woman’s consciousness much more vividly, as
she highlights what she reads between the lines. Conversely, Tarabichi’s translation tends to be
more literal:
212
mon tort, c’était de prendre mon corps tellement au sérieux: j’avais besoin d’une analyse
qui m’enseignerait la désinvolture.
(Les mandarins Tome II, 117)
‫ كنت بحاجة إلى تحليل يعلمنى السيرة الطليقة‬:‫لقد كانت غلطتى هى أننى ابالغ فى الجدية التى أنظر بها إلى جسدى‬
(Tarabichi 1962, 347–348)
Back-translation: [My fault had lain in the seriousness with which I perceived my body:
I needed an analysis to teach me a free narrative].
.‫ أنا بحاجة إلى تحليل نفسى يعلمنى أن أكون أكثر جسارة مع جسدى‬:‫خطئى يكمن فى أنى بالغت كثيرا ً فى الرهان على جسدى‬
(Tawq 2009a, 473)
Back-translation: [My fault lies in the fact that I was at the disposal of my body: I needed
psychotherapy to teach me to be more courageous with my body].
In the preceding passage, Tarabichi’s translation misses the whole message. The final phrase “a
free narrative” (al-sīra al-t alīqa) is incomprehensible, and does not describe Anne Dubreuilh’s
˙
reflection that she needs to ignore her physical desire, or be more casual about it. Tawq’s rendi-
tion of the protagonist’s thoughts is closer to the meaning and unravels the woman’s dilemma.
Non; je refusai la prudente réflexion, la fausse solitude et ses consolations sordides. Et j’ai
compris que ce refus était encore une feinte: en vérité je ne disposais pas de mon coeur; . . .
mes sages discours ne combleraient pas ce vide au-dedans de moi. J’étais sans recours.
(117)
‫ فأنا فى‬:ً ‫ وفهمت أن هذا الرفض لهو مداجاة أيضا‬.‫ الوحدة الكاذبة وتعازيها الشحيحة‬،‫ إننى أرفض التفكير الحذر‬.‫كال‬
۰‫ كنت بدون ملجأ‬.‫ وما كانت خطاباتى الحكيمة لتردم هذا الفراغ فى داخلى‬. . . .‫الحقيقة ال أسيطر على قلبى‬.
(Tarabichi 1962, 348)
Back-translation: [No. I refuse the cautious reflection, the false loneliness and its scarce con-
solations. I also understood that this refusal is equally hypocritical: I, in fact, cannot control
my heart. . . . My wise speeches could not bury this void within me. I was without resort].
‫ ال يسعنى‬،‫ ففى الحقيقة‬:‫ وأعرف أن هذا الرفض هو أيضا كذبة‬.‫ أرفض الحذر والوحدة الزائفة وتعزياتها البغيضة‬،‫ال‬
.‫ لقد وصلت إلى حائط مسدود‬.‫ وأفكارى المتعقلة ال تمأل هذا الفراغ داخلى‬. . . ‫التصرف بقلبى‬
(Tawq 2009a, 473)
Back-translation: [No, I refuse caution and fake loneliness, as well as its repulsive consola-
tions. I also know that this refusal is a lie: in reality, I am unable to cope with my heart . . .
and my rational thoughts do not fill this void within me. I have reached a cul-de-sac].
Once again, the heroine’s pretense that she can live without her lover, Lewis Brogan, is vividly
translated by Tawq as “a lie,” as she renders the gist of Dubreuilh’s introspection; Tarabichi on
the other hand, uses an archaic word (mudājāa), which might not be grasped by the Arab reader.
He also literally translates the word “discours” as “khit ābāt” (speeches or letters), which does not
˙
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Hala G. Sami
exactly reflect the female protagonist’s inner dialogue, while, conversely, it is translated by Tawq
as “afkāri al-muta’aqqila” (“my rational thoughts”). This process of literal translation also appears
in the final words “kuntū dūnā malja’ ” (“I was without resort”), which is more accurately ren-
dered by Tawq’s translation as “laqad wassaltu ilā hā’it sad” (“I have reached a cul-de-sac”), thus,
˙
underlining her predicament.
Case study III: the rendition of female subjectivity in Les belles images
Beauvoir’s novel, Les belles images, was published in 1966. The main character, Laurence, is mar-
ried and a mother of two daughters. She is torn between the “beautiful pictures” of a happily
married woman with a stable conjugal household, in which she is expected to fit, and her resist-
ant inner self, which rebels against false social values of hypocrisy, deceit, and the veneration
of mere appearance. She is concerned about her daughter Catherine, whom she attempts to
protect from such a society. Accordingly, the narrative manifests the tension between what the
heroine is expected to be, on one hand, and her stream-of-consciousness, on the other, which
reveals a woman in torment. The following lines, quoted from the novel, shed light on the ten-
sion between the heroine’s two states of mind, as she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The novel was translated into Arabic in 1967 by ‘Ā’ida Mat arjī Idrīs in Beirut. Idrīs was a
˙
well-known translator, who translated several of Beauvoir’s works (see Table 16.1) among a
number of other books. As is the case with almost all of the translations of Beauvoir into Ara-
bic, Idrīs’s rendition of the novel has no prefatory note to account for the translation process;
her remarks are limited to a very few footnotes to explain to the Arab readers some unfamiliar
proper nouns. The following lines are drawn from chapter four and the last chapter in the novel
which portrays Laurence’s vigorous resistance and final break-out from the “beautiful pictures,”
or false values, to which a hypocritical French bourgeois society insists on clinging.
Maintenant qu’elle a vomi, elle se sent bien. Il fait nuit en elle; elle s’abandonne à la nuit.
Elle pense á une histoire qu’elle a lue: une taupe tâtonne à travers des galleries souterraines,
elle en sort et sent la fraîcheur de l’air; mais elle ne sait pas inventer d’ouvrir les yeux. Elle
se la raconte autrement: la taupe dans son souterrain invente d’ouvrir les yeux, et elle voit
que tout est noir. Ça n’a aucun sens.
(Les belles images 1966, 131) (my emphasis)
‫ قصة ُخ ْلد‬:‫ وفكرت بقصة قرأتها‬.[sic.]‫ فاستسلمت لليل‬،‫ وهبط الظالم فى نفسها‬.‫ فإنها تشعر بالراحة‬،‫أما وقد قاءت اآلن‬
.‫ حتى يخرج منها ويحس رطوبة الهواء؛ و لكنه ال يحسن أن يخترع فتح عينيه‬،‫يتلمس طريقه عبر الممرات األرضية‬
‫ ولكنه يرى أن كل شىء مظلم‬،‫ إن ال ُخ ْلد فى جحره األرضى يخترع فتح عينيه‬:‫وروت لنفسها الحكاية على نح ٍو آخر‬
.‫ ليس لهذا أى معنى‬.‫أسود‬
(Idrīs 1967, 173)
Back-translation: [Now, that she has vomited, she feels good. It is dark within her; so, she
surrenders to the night. And she thought of a story she read: the story of a mole that gropes
its way through earthly paths, to get out of the earth so as to feel the humidity of the air.
But, he’s not good at inventing opening his eyes. She tells herself the story differently: the
mole, in his earth hole, invents opening his eyes, but he sees that everything is stark black.
This doesn’t mean anything].
Idrīs’s translation lacks a certain accuracy, providing an inadequate depiction of Laurence’s

inner mind. The heroine’s act of vomiting enacts her rejection of the fake social values in which
214
she finds herself entangled. Instead, she conjures up an alternative image of a mole, which func-
tions as an objective correlative of her psychological condition. Laurence feels that “Il fait nuit
en elle; elle s’abandonne à la nuit.” Her inner sadness is emphasized by the overwhelming effect
of her “inner darkness,” which is rendered by the repetition of the word “nuit” (night or dark-
ness). Idrīss’s translation overlooks this matter as she does not maintain the reification of the
word “night.” She translates it in the following manner: “It is dark within her; so, she surrenders
to the night.”
Laurence’s predicament and sense of oppression is further supported by the image of the
mole, which Idriss translates into Arabic as “al-khuld,” a word that is hardly familiar to the reader
of Arabic. The choice of lexis would have required a footnote to explain the type of animal in
question, so as to elaborate on its natural underground habitat and its option to emerge above
the surface of the earth for a different life. Such a note would have highlighted Laurence’s pro-
jection of her inner self on the analogous plight of the mole.
Further, Idrīss depicts the creature as living in an “earthly hole” instead of “subterranean”/
“underground” tunnels. The mole attempts to rise to the surface of the earth and “feel a breath
of fresh air” or “the freshness of the air,” which Idrīss clumsily translates as “to feel the humid-
ity of the air.” Her rendition, therefore, falls short of delineating the principal female character’s
struggle to resist the stifling social oppression she endures at the hands of her immediate family
circle and her endeavour to break free from her imprisonment.
Case study IV: Arabic title variations of Beauvoir’s

Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
This text is the first in a series of autobiographical works by Beauvoir, and one of her most
famous. It covers the early stage of her life, from her childhood until the early phases of her matu-
rity. She vividly delineates her impressions and feelings during adolescence as she rebelled against
the conventions of the bourgeoisie. She also evokes family relationships, friendships, and her aspi-
rations for learning as well as early engagements with her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre.
In the present context, I am interested in examining the autobiography’s translated title, a
paratextual element worth studying, given the nuances of the translations, which lend them-
selves to sociocultural interpretations. According to Gérard Genette, the function of the paratext
is “to present” a text (1997, 1), to foreground its existence (1). He distinguishes between two cat-
egories of paratextual elements, the first of which, the peritext (5), is relevant here, as it includes
the title, the preface, as well as various other details found in the text itself (5).
The title of the book yields three possible translations. The first Arabic translation of Beau-
voir’s memoir appeared in 1959, as Mudhakkarāt fatāh rasina (Memoirs of a Composed Young Girl)
˙
by an anonymous translator. This version describes the book as a novel, and it was the basis for
subsequent reprints (in 2012 and 20156), accompanied by some revisions and editing. Many of
the Arabic translations of Beauvoir, the Mémoirs among them, are increasingly superficial and
inaccurate. The translation omits large segments of the French original, and such omissions are
surprisingly maintained in the subsequent versions. However, one of the aspects, which changed
throughout the revisions, is the title of the book. The title’s last word “rangée” proves to be
problematic yielding several translations in Arabic: “rasina” (composed), “’āqela” (sensible) and
˙
“multazima” (conforming) (see Table 16.1). According to the Petit Robert, the adjective “rangée”
means someone “who leads a regular and regulated type of life, without excess” (1978, 1603); a
person who adopts “good conduct”; a person who is “serious” (1603).
Initially, one wonders at Beauvoir’s choice of adjective for her title and ventures to suggest
that she used it in a tongue-in-cheek manner to evoke the young woman who manifests early
215
Hala G. Sami
signs of rebellion and digression from the mores of the Catholic bourgeoisie. In his book on
paratexts, Genette observes that an author may deliberately use an “antiphrastic” effect in the
title to produce irony (1997, 83). The ambiguity of the adjective, thus, accounts for the Arabic
variations of the translated title. According to the preceding lexical definitions, I see “serious”
as the adjective closest to the young woman delineated by Beauvoir in her memoir. The Arabic
translation of the title using the term “multazima” (conforming), adopted by Akkawy in his
2012 revision of the translation, by no means reflects Beauvoir’s demeanor. It would make the
book appear as a primer for young women. “Rasina” (composed), on the other hand, refers to
˙
“good conduct” (used in the first translation and the 2015 reprint). Therefore, I suggest that
“’āqela” (sensible), though not exactly the equivalent of “rangée,” might be more compatible
with the overall character of the young Beauvoir.
Currently, Arab translators of Beauvoir produce much more accurate translations. Yet, the
translations still illustrate some archaic, and hence, non-transparent language, as well as occa-
sional inaccurate renditions of the source texts. The major aspect, which such translations lack,
is a prefatory note as well as footnotes that an Arab translator might provide to elaborate on and
account for the challenges and language discrepancies s/he meets during the translation process.
This lack, in itself, points to one of the hurdles which the translation studies researcher faces.
Given the fact that Beauvoir is a major feminist figure, and a major contributor to the modern
intellectual arena, a fresh look at and more professional translations of her works are in order.
Future directions
A large amount of material has been produced, published in Europe and the USA,7 about Arab
women’s achievements, that is, the extent to which they mobilize, the amount of activism in
which they are involved, the challenges they meet in their confrontation with the patriarchal
state, and the awareness that exists about the urgency of women’s empowerment. On the other
hand, in the field of feminism, gender and translation, the amount of translated material from
the West to the Arab world is inadequate. Major works, by such thinkers, theorists, and critics
as Luce Irigaray, Toril Moi, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler,
have not been translated into Arabic. It is important to note, however, that Virginia Woolf, for
instance, was initially translated in Egypt in the 1960s. On the other hand, Mary Eagleton’s
Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique were both
translated into Arabic in Syria in 2016 and 2018, respectively.8 What is, mainly, available in
Arabic, for example, are books of literary criticism addressing women and gender, such as Pam
Morris’ Literature and Feminism: An Introduction (1993), Sarah Gamble’s The Routledge Compan-
ion of Feminism and Postfeminism (2001), and Alanoud Alsharekh’s Angry Words Softly Spoken:
A Comparative Study of English and Arabic Women Writers (2006). The publisher of these transla-
tions is the Egyptian National Centre for Translation, and the translations were undertaken as
part of the project funded by the state institution to introduce the reader to Western feminism
and women’s literature.
It is, therefore, suggested that Arab feminist circles need to address the threefold gap that
exists in the field of translation, gender and feminism. On the one hand, major contemporary
feminist thinkers have not been taken into account, and so the compilation and translation of
additional feminist readers into Arabic would be a substantial contribution. Furthermore, a large
amount of translation literature, related to the intersection of feminism, gender and translation
requires translation into Arabic. Last, but not least, an awareness of and engagement with a femi-
nist approach to translation into Arabic is equally required.
216
Related topics
Translation of feminist theory and criticism into Arabic, feminism in the Arab world, feminist
translation, translation and postcolonialism
Further reading
Kamal, Hala. 2008. Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating the Encyclopedia of
Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3–4) (Fall–Winter), 254–268.
The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures originally came to light in 2003 in English. The article
investigates the implications of translating this seminal work, a project that sheds light on the translation
of women and gender studies, as well as Islamic cultures into Arabic.
Mehrez, Samia. 2007. Translating Gender. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 3(1), 106–127.
This article is concerned with the intersection of translation and gender studies. It discusses the prob-
lematics of translating terms related to gender studies, particularly the term ‘gender’ itself, into Arabic.
It sheds light on the contestations, which confront translators of gender studies within the conservative
Arab context. It also emphasizes the activist dimension of translating gender in the Arab world.
Palmary, Ingrid. 2014. A Politics of Feminist Translation: Using Translation to Understand Gendered
Meaning-Making in Research. Signs, 39(3) (Spring), 576–580.
The article primarily focuses on the power relations and the politics of research involved in the transla-
tion process. It highlights the fact that translation entails research across languages, and not the domi-
nation of one language, such as English. This requires paying attention to “the politics of translation”
without which “the non-English speaking world” will appear “as an infantilized other.”
217
APPENDIX I
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S WORKS TRANSLATED INTO ARABIC
Table 16.1 illustrates the titles of Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic. One can notice that
the translations started as far back as 1955 with a rendition of the author’s sole play Les bouches
inutiles. In addition, most of the translations were first initiated in the 1950s and 1960s, which
reflects the apogee of an Arab intellectual and translation momentum in newly emerging inde-
pendent Arab nation-states. In the 1950s and 1960s, apart from Aida Matarji Idrīs, and one trans-
lation by Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, Beauvoir was mainly translated by men; whereas women
take over the translation of her books starting from the new millennium. Many of Beauvoir’s
major works were translated several times, as well as followed by several reprints. It is also note-
worthy that most of her work was translated in Beirut. Her works, translated in Cairo, are mainly
in a more political vein.
218
Table 16.1 Simone de Beauvoir’s works translated into Arabic
Title and year of publication Title of Arabic translation Date of Translator Publisher and place of publication
publication of
translated work
L’Invitée (1943) (She Came To ¯ wah (The Female Invitee)

al-mad’uu 1999 Daniel Saleh Al-intishār al ‘arabı¯-Beirut
Stay)
Les Bouches Inutiles (1945) (The Al-afwwa¯h al-lamujdiah (The Useless 1955 Suhayl Idrı¯s Dar al-’ilm lil-malayyı¯n-Beirut
Useless Mouths) Mouths) 1976 Abdel Moneim El Hefny Matba’et al-dar al-misriya-Cairo
Pour une morale de l’ambiguité Nahwa akhla¯aq wudju ¯ diyah (Towards 1965 Georges Tarābı¯chı¯ Dar Al-A¯ dāb-Beirut
˙
(1947) (The Ethics of Existentialist Ethics)
Ambiguity)
Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) Al-djins al-a¯khari (The Other Sex) 1969ii Translated by a group of al-maktabah al-ahlı¯yah-Beirut
university professors –
anonymous
Le Deuxième Sexe Al-djins al-tha¯nı̄ (The Second Sex) 1979 Mohammad Ali Sharafeddin al-maktabah al-hadı¯thah lil-tiba¯’a
˙
wal-nashr-Beirut
Le Deuxième Sexe Al-djins al-a¯khar (The Other Sex) 1997 A reprint of the 1969 Dar usa¯ma¯ lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’-
translation Damascus and Beirut
Le Deuxième Sexe Al-djins al-ākhar (The Other Sex) 2008 Nada Haddadiii (a reprint of Al-ahleya lil-nashr wal-tawzı¯’-
the 1969 translation) Amman, Jordan
Le Deuxième Sexe Al-djins al-ākhar (The Other Sex) 2015 Rehab Akkawy and Joseph Dar al-harf al-’arabi lil-teba¯’a wal-
˙
Kaloustian nashr wal-tawzı̄ ’-Beirut
Le Deuxième Sexe Al-djins al-ākhar (The Other Sex) 2015 Sahar Said Dar al-rahbah lil-nashr wal-tawzı̄ ’-
˙
Damascus
Les mandarins (1954) (The al-mothaqqafu ¯ un 1962 Georges Tara¯bı¯chı̄ Manshurāt dar al-A¯ dāb-Beirut
˙
Mandarins) Vols. I & II (The Intellectuals) 2009 Marie Tawq Dar Al-A¯ da¯b-Beirut, and Kalima-
Abu Dhabi, U. A. E.
La Pensée de droite aujourd’hui Wāqi’ al-fikr al-yamı¯ni (The Status of 1963 Georges Tara¯bı¯chı¯ Dar al-talı¯’ah lil-teba¯’ah wal-nashr-
˙
(1955) Right Wing Ideology Today) Beirut
Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée Mudhakkara¯t fata¯h rasina (Memoirs 1959 Translator unknown Dar al-’ilm lil-malayyı¯n-Beirut
˙
(1958) (Mémoirs of a Dutiful of a Composed Young Girl)
Daughter) Mudhakkara¯t fata¯ h ‘a¯ qelah (Memoirs 1959 Ibrahim al-maghrabi Dar ghawth-Beirut
219
of a Sensible Young Girl)
(Continued )
220
Title and year of publication Title of Arabic translation Date of Translator Publisher and place of publication
publication of
Hala G. Sami
translated work
Mudhakkara¯t fatāh multazima 2012 A reprint of the 1959 Dar al-harf al-arabi lil-nashr wal-
(Memoirs of a Conforming translation, introduced by tawzi’-Beirut
Young Girl) Rehab Akkawy
Mudhakkara¯t fata¯h rasina (Memoirs 2015 A reprint of the 1959 Al-ahleya lil-nashr wal-tawzı̄ ’-
of a Composed Young ˙ Girl) translation, revised by Amman, Jordan
Iman Zakareya
La Force de l’âge (1960) (The ana wa sartr wal-haya¯ h (Life: Sartre 1964 Aida Matarji Idris Dar Al-a¯da¯b-Beirut
˙
Prime of Life) and I)
Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Ma’sāt ta’dhı¯ b Djamı¯ la Būbacha 1962 Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud Al-dar al-qawmiyah lil-tiba’a¯h wal-
Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (The Tragedy of Torturing Djamila nashr-Cairo
(1962) Boupacha)
La Force des choses (1963) (Force Qu¯ wat al-ashia¯a’ (The Force of 1964 Aida Matarji Idris Dar Al-adab-Beirut
of Circumstance) Things)
Les Belles Images (1966) Al-Suwar al-djamı¯la (The Beautiful 1967 ‘A¯ ’ida Matarj¯ı Idrı¯s Dar Al-adab-Beirut
˙ ˙
Pictures )
Malentendu à Moscou from Sū’ tafa¯ hom fi mosko 2015 Lina Badr Dar al-huwwar lil-nashr wal-tawzi-
La femme rompue (1968) (Misunderstanding in Moscow) Latakia, Syria.
(Misunderstanding in Moscow
from The Woman Destroyed)
i Almost all translations of Le deuxième sex into Arabic translate the title as “The Other Sex,” an issue that deserves further investigation, but is not the focus of the present research.
ii The year of publication does not appear in the book itself. The bibliographical data is provided by Neel wa furat, the largest Arabic online bookstore.
iii The title page states that Nada Haddad is the translator of the book. However, her version of Le deuxième sexe is a mere copy of the first translation published in 1969, translated by a
group of university professors.
Notes
1 The Egyptian National Centre for Translation, the Women and Memory Forum (Egypt) and the
Kalima Project for Translation (UAE) are among such institutions.
2 Islam strongly condemns suicide.
3 Aida Matarji Idris, wife of Suhail Idris, the founder of al-ādāb magazine, is also a writer and translator.
She translated several of Beauvoir’s works in the 1960s (see Table 16.1).
4 The cultural discrepancies between French and Arabic are not reflected in earlier translations of Beau-
voir’s works, which are devoid of additional notes or a glossary to account for the meaning of foreign
words. This is, for instance, also illustrated in the Arabic translation of such works as La force des choses
(Qūwat al-ashiāa’) and L’invitée (al-mad’uūwah)
5 It would have been worthwhile to examine the selected passages in the three main Arabic translations of
Le deuxième sexe. However, the 1979 translation (see Table 16.1) is out of print and unavailable in major
public libraries in Egypt, such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dar al-kutub wal-watha’iq al misriya (The
Egyptian National Library and Archives), Cairo University Central Library and the AUC (American
University in Cairo) library. This translation is also unavailable at neel wa furat, which is the biggest Arabic
online bookstore. For more information, visit their website at: www.neelwafurat.com/
6 There are two translations of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée published in 1959. An anonymous translator
produced the title as Mudhakkarāt fatāh rasina (Memoirs of a Composed Young Girl). Ibrahim al-maghrabi
˙
translates the book as Mudhakkarāt fatāh`āqelah (Memoirs of a Sensible Young Girl). This last version is avail-
able at the Iraqi National Library and is out of print.
7 See, for example, Kandiyoti (1996), Al-Ali (2000) and El Said et al. (2015).
8 Al-rahba Publishing House in Damascus, Syria, has recently translated a number of key texts related
to feminism. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (al-mar’ah al-makhşiyah) (2014) and Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique (al-loghz al-onthawi) (2018) are among their translations, by Abdallah Badie Fadel.
For more information about their publications, visit their website at the non-profit Women’s Studies
organization musāwā (Equality): http://musawasyr.org/?p=15943
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17
Translating French feminist
philosophers into English
The case of Simone de Beauvoir
Marlène Bichet
Introduction
This chapter explores how feminist philosophy is dealt with in translation, with particular
reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe and its latest English translation (2009).
Philosophy is a genre that challenges translation due to its abstraction, which makes it prone
to misunderstanding, and due to its particular use of language. Philosophical language often
develops its own terminology by coining new phrases or resorting to semantic shifts, and it can
even be said that “one of the indispensable conditions for philosophy is a capacity for linguistic
insecurity – for taking a certain distance from one’s customary everyday words” (Rée 2001,
246). Jonathan Rée explains how philosophy and language are entwined, arguing that one can-
not “do philosophy” without creating distance from the usual, and without analyzing what is
customary in order to question it. Acts of linguistic subversion can therefore be closely linked
to the philosophical theory developed by their authors, and this is part of the evolution of the
theory.
If subverting language may indeed lead to philosophy, the term also brings to mind feminist
translation, which often relies on subverted language and innovative writing practices (Flotow
1991, 74). Sherry Simon, for instance, encourages translators to modify texts in order to fulfil
their feminist agenda, because “they can use language as cultural intervention, as part of an effort
to alter expressions of domination” (Simon 2005 [1996], 8). This prompts us to wonder what
kinds of translation strategies are the most relevant to render philosophy, and in particular, femi-
nist philosophy. Although Simone de Beauvoir’s work is central to this chapter as her contribu-
tion to the field cannot be underestimated, English translations of work by Hélène Cixous and
Monique Wittig, two other feminist philosophers, are referred to as well.
This chapter presents a brief discussion of feminist philosophy, and in regard to Beauvoir,
how existentialism and phenomenology have been reclaimed for feminist philosophy. The sec-
ond section analyzes how feminist philosophy is translated, examining translation strategies as
they are used to render English versions of Vivre l’orange (1979) by Hélène Cixous as well as
L’Opoponax (1964) and Les Guérillères (1969) by Monique Wittig. The final section focuses on
Le Deuxième Sexe and its most recent English translation, and illustrates the relevance of using
the interpretive theory of translation to translate feminist philosophy.
224
Translating French feminist philosophers
Context and historical perspectives
An introduction to feminist philosophy

Just as there are many different branches of feminism, there are differences in perspective in
feminist philosophy. According to some scholars, such as Nancy Bauer, feminist philosophy
should be a way to revolutionize philosophy itself, whose history largely shows a neglect of
the question of what it means to be a woman, which would help redefine what it means to be
a sexed and thinking human being (Bauer 2001, 21), thus going beyond feminist activism and
contributing to the whole of philosophy.
Beauvoir’s work illustrates that point and is pioneering in many ways, because of the meth-
odology she uses, but also the theories she develops on women and on existentialism. The
fact that Beauvoir opted for existentialism as a framework to draw on (and to elaborate her
own thoughts) is groundbreaking, because existentialist theory is not the most encouraging for
women. Indeed, it has been described as dismissive of women, for, as Michèle Le Dœuff puts
it, “there is no place for a woman in such a system, and even less for a woman who produces
philosophy” (Le Dœuff 2007, 165). This point is reinforced by Jeffner Allen who coined the
phrase “patriarchal existentialism” and explained that, as this theory does not speak to women,
they cannot identify with it (Allen in Allen and Young 1989, 72). Yet, Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième
Sexe challenged this situation, incorporating women’s experience in existentialism. The meth-
odology she deployed was phenomenology, which refers to the study of phenomena, and relates
precisely to our experience and perception of the world.
By following such logic throughout her book, Beauvoir opened the way for feminist philoso-
phers to use phenomenology in their analyses, as did Iris Marion Young in her influential essay
Throwing Like A Girl, which examines the way young girls are said to throw balls differently than
boys of the same age, and explores other “feminine” behaviours to then discuss girls and boys’
socialization (Young 2005, 32). Young draws substantially on Beauvoir and on her notion of femi-
nine and masculine behaviours being socially constructed; she also references existential phenom-
enology, thus reaffirming Beauvoir’s feminist philosophical impact. Indeed, it needs to be stated that
Beauvoir’s magnum opus has been acknowledged as a model of feminist philosophy which widely
influenced the field (Bauer 2001; Young 2005), so that a reliable English translation of her work is
critical. This point compels us to explore the issues around the translation of feminist philosophy.
Translating feminist philosophy
Beyond foreignization and domestication

My contention is that foreignization, often presented in the literature as a more ethical approach
to translation (see Venuti 1995, for instance), is not necessarily the most adequate translation
strategy to render texts of philosophy. Foreignization is a strategy which breaches the target
language’s linguistic rules, and this can be prejudicial to philosophical texts, precisely because
philosophy itself often disrupts linguistic rules. The foreignization of an already foreignizing
strategy in the source language can thus become even more challenging to read in a target lan-
guage. Foreignizing philosophical translations adds a further layer of foreignness.
In Venuti’s view, a foreignizing translation can help establish a foreign text in the target
literature and tackle the use of domesticated English, thereby working to curb anglophone
hegemony. His analysis of the general trends in English translation shows that most foreign texts
currently translated into English are domesticated, thus maintaining the impression that they are
225
Marlène Bichet
written in English. The Second Sex, however, a French text rendered into ‘foreignized’ English in
its latest version, can hardly be seen to undermine this aspect of English hegemony. Instead, it
has been criticized for misrepresenting Beauvoir’s magnum opus.
I suggest that the interpretive theory of translation (ITT) might be an apt translation strategy
for philosophical discourse, which is often seen as cryptic by non-specialists and relies on the
reader understanding theoretical insights, which require interpretation. The ITT originated in
interpreter training and states that translating is an act of communication; it asserts that there
cannot be effective translation without interpretation. This strategy focuses on sense, which,
according to Marianne Lederer, arises as a matter of course, especially in consecutive interpreta-
tion where sense is not only what interpreters understand and express but also the only thing to
mark memory as the words themselves vanish. Sense is also the central issue in translation even
though the circumstances of production and reception differ (Lederer 2014, 12).
Interpretation according to Lederer proceeds as follows: interpreters understand the sense of
a foreign language (FL) utterance and deverbalize it before reformulating it in their own native
words and phrases (2010, 174–177). The ITT can serve to curtail polysemy and ambiguity in
translation, as it insists on the context of the source text as well as the necessity of having extra-
linguistic knowledge to render sense. It seems particularly suited for the translation of philoso-
phy since despite using technical and specific vocabulary, philosophy requires interpretation.
Focusing on the “sense” or meaning of a text is a position which is supported by philosophy
too, as the following quotation by Jean-Paul Sartre illustrates: “sense is not contained by the
words (of a text) since it is sense itself which allows each word’s meaning to be understood [. . .]
sense is not the sum of the words, it is their organic whole” (Sartre 1985, 50–51, in Lederer 2014,
13–14). That definition of sense relates to the main tenet of existentialism, namely the rejection
of “essence.” It implies that the words themselves do not have an essence which encloses mean-
ing, but only the interconnection between words creates sense.
Philosophy often subverts language and creates coinages, which presents translators with par-
ticular problems and requires a thorough specialized knowledge of the field. Since philosophy
is a plurilingual discipline, this can add further translation issues when phrases are borrowed and
used from one language to another. Barbara Cassin, editor of the Vocabulaire européen des philoso-
phies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004), even refers to “philosophizing in languages” (quoted
in Apter 2012, 173) because languages (and therefore translation) and philosophy have always
been closely related. In her Vocabulaire, Cassin’s aim is to explore the “Untranslatables,” those
philosophical concepts that need constant retranslation because they are equivocal. This idea is
reminiscent of Marcel Govaert’s contention that “bien souvent l’intraduisible est ce qui n’a pas
encore été traduit correctement” (what is untranslatable is often enough what has not yet been
correctly translated.) (Govaert 1971, 39–62, my translation, emphasis in original), which implies
that untranslatability is not absolute; the translator simply needs to tenaciously seek ever better
renderings. Ronald Landheer is even more severe when he states that:
les traducteurs [. . .] ne sont que trop portés en général à [. . .] invoquer le postulat de
l’‘intraduisibilité’, toutes les fois qu’ils n’ont pas pris le temps ou la peine de chercher un
énoncé équivalent dans le texte cible.
(translators are just too keen to invoke the ‘untranslatability’ hypothesis every time they
have not taken the time, nor made the effort, to look for an equivalent in the target text.)
(Landheer 2000, 216, my translation)
I contend that the preceding comments can apply to the translation of philosophy, although
they should not preclude the fact that the neologisms often found in philosophical discourse
226
cannot always have equivalents in another language. As Cassin explains, the Untranslatable is
“that which one never ceases (not) to translate. But it highlights the fact that its translation, into
one language or another, causes a problem to the point of sometimes producing a neologism”
(Cassin, Introduction to Vocabulaire européen des philosophies 2004, my translation, XVII–XVIII).
Philosophy translation strategies

And so, what translation strategies can be used to render philosophy? One of those strategies is
“non-translation,” when a translator simply borrows foreign terms (as illustrated with the Ger-
man word Dasein, central to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy). However, that strategy would seem
to confirm the notion that philosophy is untranslatable and perhaps to lead to the avoidance of
translation, an approach that is not always desirable or possible. Translation thus sometimes has
to depart from the source-text, which is when shifts occur.
Because there are often no formal correspondents available in the target-language, transla-
tors of philosophy resort to shifts and other strategies, such as inventing new words, altering the
syntax, or using different tenses than those used in the source texts. For example, the French
conditional tense is often used to convey doubt, which needs to be rendered differently in
English, with such phrases as “supposedly,” or “according to” (Rée 2001, 228; Moi 2010). That
seemingly trivial example shows how crucial it is to shift from the source text’s linguistic norms,
but this requires a thorough knowledge of both linguistic norms of the target language and
the philosopher’s theory. The translator needs to recognize when style and content are linked
in order to then find the most adequate way to render the same meaning in the target text, as
advocated by the interpretive theory of translation. Such an approach seems most appropriate
for translating philosophy, because, as Jonathan Rée puts it, “[philosophy’s] special ways of think-
ing, reading, writing, and translating cannot be foreignized, for the simple reason that they were
never “naturalized” in the first place” (Rée 2001, 252–253). Bearing this in mind, I argue that
shifts can be seen as part of a translation strategy to translate feminist philosophy and ultimately
help convey the author’s feminist and philosophical message.
The translation of feminist philosophy

When it comes to translating feminist philosophy, it seems that translators face two difficulties in
one: namely translating philosophical ideas and terminology, while at the same time conveying
the feminist stance. Translating feminism and philosophy is a case of highly specialized transla-
tion that faces serious challenges, among these the ongoing debates about what feminist philos-
ophy actually entails. Further, and more crucially, the combination of feminism and philosophy
has not yet been widely studied in translation studies. One notable exception is, however, femi-
nist existentialism, a field of study triggered by Beauvoir’s treatment of existentialism and phe-
nomenology, approaches that underpin Beauvoir’s ideas, making Le Deuxième Sexe a cornerstone
of the developing links between feminism and philosophy. Due to its significance and influence,
Le Deuxième Sexe has been analyzed from various points of view, and yet, despite this fame and
authority, the book was not (re)translated into English by translators specialized in philosophy.
We can ask, as Sherry Simon does, who translates French feminist philosophers? Simon points
out that “there have been few translations by the theorists who have acted as cultural interme-
diaries: Alice Jardine, Toril Moi, Jane Gallop, Elizabeth Grosz, etc.” (Simon 2005 [1996], 86). If
that is the case, then the gap between feminist and philosophy theorists and translation studies
has yet to be bridged. Nevertheless, English translations of certain feminist philosophical texts
do exist, and the following discusses aspects of the work of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig
227
Marlène Bichet
in English, to then move on to Beauvoir. The purpose is to compare the translation techniques
used to translate their work into English, and more crucially, to assess what the outcome has
been. How did the translations promote, or perhaps impede, the reception of their theories?
Strongly associated with the theory of écriture féminine, Hélène Cixous is the award-winning
author of novels and plays, but also works of philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. Out of
the three “French feminists” recognized as such in Anglo-American feminist circles–Luce Iriga-
ray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous–I chose to analyze Cixous because, as Nicole Ward Jouve
puts it, “she is the most misrepresented of the ‘Trinity’ ” (Ward-Jouve 1991, 49). The translation
issues which have been recorded by scholars and critics will provide some understanding of how
Cixous’s work may have been misrepresented. Monique Wittig, for her part, was a radical femi-
nist philosopher, a lesbian theorist, and the acclaimed author of avant-garde fiction. Even though
both writers have different views on feminism, notably on political commitment, essentialism,
and materialism, they have had a significant impact on feminist philosophy and literary theory.
Hélène Cixous, whose style presents her translators with many traps and difficulties as she ties
images, languages, and concepts together, challenges her translators with unconventional stylistic
choices that entwine philosophy and poetry. In The Hélène Cixous Reader (1994), which presents
translations of Cixous’s work by different translators, Susan Sellers contends that the difficulties of
translating a writer like Hélène Cixous are immense as she “actively incorporates the possibilities
generated by language into her text” (Sellers 1994, 3). She illustrates this problem with the French
words délire, délier, and déliter, which produce an alliterative effect difficult to convey through a lit-
eral English translation. In this example, the translator had to give up on the poetic alliteration of
the French, staying close to the meaning instead: “Delirium or unbind or split the ash” (Sellers, 8).
In regard to Vivre l’orange (1979), a bilingual text, which Cixous edited in both French and
English (based on an English version by Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell), Simon asserts that
“Cixous’ translation strategy is consistent and coherent: she provides in English a very close
echo of the French text” (Simon 2005 [1996], 91). Indeed, the translation techniques used for
philosophical texts are either a domesticated approach, which tends to produce a fluent text,
albeit less poetic, or a foreignized view, which “creates estrangement effects” (ibid.).
The problem I have noted in regard to the multilingual nature of philosophy, which leads
to translators’ borrowing foreign concepts and coinages, particularly relates to Cixous’s Vivre
l’orange, which not only comprises a French and an English version in the actual text, but
includes other languages, such as German, Portuguese, Italian, or Spanish. Sharon Willis right-
fully wonders how those foreign elements can be rendered in translation (Willis 1992). She says
the text “seems to be at work on relations of foreignness,” inviting the reader into this foreign-
ness (ibid., 115). In addition to intertwining different languages, the text also incorporates dif-
ferent texts, in particular La Passion selon G. H., by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, which
seems to have been translated by Cixous herself for her own text, as Lynn Kettler Penrod has
argued (Penrod 1993, 48). Sharon Willis further invites us to reflect on the enmeshing of lan-
guages and intertextuality in translation, as she reminds us that Lispector, “an Eastern European
refugee, [. . .] writes in her adopted Portuguese, which Cixous reads in a French translation”
(Willis 1992, 107). These issues would require a lengthy analysis as the issues of multilingualism
and intertextuality in feminist philosophy are a wide and fascinating subject.
A second instance of a French feminist philosopher is Monique Wittig, whose own bilin-
gualism and experience of translation provides insights into the translation of feminist theory.
According to Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Wittig was so disappointed by the translations of some
of her books that she decided to translate her Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976) into
English herself, with the help of her partner, Sande Zeig (Wenzel 1981, 265). Why were the
translations so disappointing? Let us see some examples from L’Opoponax (1964, translated into
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English in 1966 by Helen Weaver) and Les Guérillères (1969, translated into English in 1971 by
David Le Vay), in which Wittig experiments with pronouns in her native French.
In L’Opoponax the author extensively uses the genderless pronoun “on.” As Hélène Vivienne
Wenzel points out, this pronoun can become “they” or “we” in English, so that characters are
referred to indiscriminately, “any sense of rigid gender or number is thus eliminated, creating a
quasi-utopic “free zone” in which these young children1 may grow up outside the confines of
socialized, rigidified sexual difference” (Wenzel 1981, 276). The English translation, however,
does not render the ideology behind the use of the French “on,” and translates “on” as “you,”
thus losing the effect created in French. Indeed “you” gives a general sense, as does “one,”
whereas the pronoun “we” might be closer to the French “on” here, thus reinforcing the bond
of the characters, regardless of their gender.
Likewise, the plural French “elles” (feminine plural “they”) has been seen as mistranslated in
the English version of Les Guérillères. It is used throughout to refer to the collective female pro-
tagonist in order to describe women as a historical and social class, and not woman as a feminine
essence.2 Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli, in fact, claims that “the pronoun elles lies at the heart
of Wittig’s radical project to transform the social contract” (Zerilli 2005, 87). And Monique
Wittig explains that she tries
to universalize the point of view of elles. The goal of this approach is not to feminize the
world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language. [She], therefore, set up elles in
the text as the absolute subject of the world.
(Wittig 1986, 70)
Both the singular French noun “la femme” and its plural “les femmes” are thus almost entirely
absent from the French text. As Wittig points out,
in English the translator, lacking the lexical equivalent for elles, found himself compelled to
make a change, which for me destroys the effect of the attempt. When elles is turned into
the women the process of universalization is destroyed. All of a sudden, elles stopped being
mankind.
(Wittig 1986, 70)
Interestingly, the author herself offers a solution for the translation of the French “elles,” indi-
cating that “the question is a grammatical one, therefore a textual one” (1986, 71):
The solution for the English translation then is to reappropriate the collective pronoun they
which rightfully belongs to the feminine as well as to the masculine gender. They is not
only a collective pronoun but it also immediately develops a degree of universality which
is not immediate with elles. [. . .] They helps to go beyond the categories of sex. [. . .] Only
with the use of they will the text regain its strength and strangeness.
(Ibid.)
“Elles” refers to the feminine plural in French, so that the feminine aspect cannot be erased,
whereas the English “they” has the advantage of being used to refer to the feminine plural, the
masculine plural, or both, thus providing the universality Monique Wittig was looking for.
These examples taken from both Hélène Cixous’s and Monique Wittig’s English translations
warn us of the misrepresentation that translation can cause. For such specific and subtle feminist
philosophical work, in which language plays a subversive role, collaboration with the author, or
at least a very specialized knowledge of the author’s ideology, is essential.
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Studies of the translation of feminist philosophy still need to be developed as argued in an

insightful chapter on the subject by Carolyn Shread in the Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Philosophy (2018). Shread makes this point when she states that “[her] chapter sits like a bomb in a
book all of whose named philosophers are men” (Shread 2018, 324). She further observes that “in
this Handbook, quite typically, only one of the fourteen men is a feminist and the rest can be said
to be in the service of, and subject to, patriarchy” (ibid.). Despite those limitations, however, the
Handbook is a compelling and up-to-date work bringing together the disciplines of philosophy
and translation studies, while also being the first handbook to include reference to the specific
field of feminist philosophy within translation studies. As Shread points out such publication in
the field of translation studies “can help philosophy do its job better by allowing it to learn from
and engage with places beyond its borders” (ibid., 326) as well as consider who actually produces
such translations. Shread, for instance, mentions the fact that “questions [. . .] have been raised
about [. . .] the philosophical competency of Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
for the 2009 re-translation” of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (ibid., 333). These and
other issues in regard to Beauvoir translations are addressed in the next segment.
Translating Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir in English translation

Critiques of English translations of Beauvoir’s work started in the 1980s (Simons 1983), and
those translations are still much studied (Daigle 2013; Ruonakoski 2017). It seems that translat-
ing Beauvoir into English is a challenging task, whether it is her fiction, her autobiographies, or
her philosophical essays, as the following discussions reveal.
According to Ursula Tidd, Beauvoir’s “dense, lucid prose is the hallmark of an intellectual
trained in philosophy” (Tidd 2000, vol. 1, 120), and her literary precision, mingled with her
philosophical input, is complex to translate. Tidd writes that Yvonne Moyse and Roger Sen-
house’s translation of L’Invitée (She Came to Stay 1949) is one of the finest English translations
of Beauvoir’s fiction, despite some issues with the translation of philosophy, where the over-
translation and mistranslation of phenomenological lexis curtail the text’s philosophical consid-
erations (Tidd 2000, vol. 1, 120). She praises the same translators for their rendering of Le Sang
des autres (The Blood of Others, 1948), but remarks on similar difficulties in translating Beauvoir’s
philosophy. While Bernard Frechtman’s translation, The Ethics of Ambiguity, which also came
out in 1948, offers a “largely faithful rendition,” again, philosophical notions pertaining to both
existentialism and Heidegger are obscured or mistranslated (Tidd 2000, 121). Tidd notes similar
problems of over-translation and lexical errors (especially for existentialist terms) in regard to
the English translations of Beauvoir’s memoirs, such as Kirkup’s 1959 translation of Memoirs of
a Dutiful Daughter (Tidd 2000, 121). However, she considers the sophisticated novel, Les Belles
Images (1968) “a valiant rendition” (ibid.).
The Mandarins (1956), translated by Leonard Friedman, has been critiqued for its censoring
of the book’s sexual content. Barbara Klaw extensively studied how sexuality is portrayed in
Beauvoir’s novel and found that the English translation softens and censors sexual passages (Klaw
1995). It is interesting to note that Klaw has gone on to also translate works by Beauvoir, as did
Margaret Simons, whose study of the first English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe drew con-
siderable attention to the numerous cuts in the English rendition (Flotow 2009, 36). Finally, we
can conclude with a quote by Melanie Hawthorne who introduced her book Contingent Loves.
Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality by stating that “all quotations from Beauvoir’s work in this book
are given in both the original French and in English” (Hawthorne 2000, 8), as she deems most
230
translations of Beauvoir’s work unreliable. In the following section, I compare extracts from the
latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe in both French and English in order to examine
and discuss the translation strategies used to render this philosophical work.
The case of Le Deuxième Sexe

Much has been written about the first English translation of The Second Sex by Howard M.
Parshley (1953/1989). That first, abridged, rendering was critiqued by prominent Beauvoir
scholars, such as Margaret Simons (1983) and Toril Moi (2002), who both revealed the extent
of the cuts and addressed problematic translation issues. However, Parshley has been recently
rehabilitated, thanks to academics working on the relationship between the translator and the
publishing house Knopf, in particular in Anna Bogic’s investigation into the correspondence
between the translator and the publisher which revealed to what extent the publisher was
responsible for determining the outcome of the translation (Bogic 2009).
In terms of translation strategies, the first translation can be called a domesticated version,
with Parshley offering a fluid and fluent English version that could be easily accepted by the
target audience. The second English version (2009), on the other hand, has been criticized by
philosophy scholars such as Toril Moi and Nancy Bauer in regard to the overall feeling the text
leaves with English-speaking readers; they have also remarked on mistranslations that affect the
philosophical content of the book (Moi 2010; Bauer 2011). The insights of Finnish researcher
and Beauvoir translator Erika Ruonakoski, who produced the second Finnish version, are useful
here: she explains that her (and other translators’) translation choices seek to serve the commu-
nicative aspect of a philosophical text best by not making the language itself a source of constant
puzzlement. If readers find themselves repeatedly wondering what might have been the original
version of a given expression or sentence, the translation is hardly enabling an effortless commu-
nication between the author and the reader (Ruonakoski 2017). She thus aims to pursue fluency
and domesticate the translation, so as to provide the target readership with an accessible text.
Ruonakoski illustrates this point with examples of fluency in the translation, such as the fact that
Finnish translators “replaced the narrative first person plural (we, nous) by the first person singu-
lar, because the former is seldom used in Finnish” (ibid., 346, emphasis in original). Another strat-
egy that works in opposite ways to that adopted by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier concerns
Beauvoir’s frequent use of the semicolon; Ruonakoski writes, “neither did we save the innumer-
able semicolons; instead we mercilessly chopped the long phrases into shorter ones [. . .]” (ibid.,
346). The translators worked on rendering a text which would be better received in the target
culture by keeping a Finnish syntax in order to enhance the overall reception of the source text.
The following analysis of the latest English rendering of Le Deuxième Sexe, pays attention to
some key features of the text, such as its core existentialist terminology. This is the basis of Beauvoir’s
study about women, because she deploys both phenomenology and existentialism to thoroughly
examine what it means to be a woman and how one becomes a woman. For instance, Beauvoir
relies on the concepts of authenticité and immanence, which are the focus of the following section.
The latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe (2009)
The translation of “authenticité”

The main issue with authenticité is that it refers to different concepts, and that polysemy has to be
taken into account. In Le Deuxième Sexe, Beauvoir generally grants it a philosophical meaning.
The English equivalent, authenticity, shares the same connotations as its French equivalent, as its
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synonyms are genuineness or veracity (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)); it is interesting to note
that the OED makes a direct reference to its philosophical, and especially existentialist, meaning:
1953 H. M. Parshley tr. S. de Beauvoir Second Sex 675. Want of authenticity does not pay:
each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the tempta-
tions of the easy way.
(OED 2014)
As can be seen from the preceding quotation, The Second Sex is cited in the OED, which
acknowledges authenticity as a core philosophical concept in existentialism. When authenticité is
taken as a philosophical concept and translated as the English authenticity, its cognates authentic
or authentically would be the logical choice rather than synonyms such as genuine or true, which
do not carry the same philosophical implications. The question is how translators can know
whether or not any one case of authenticité conveys a philosophical connotation when they are
translating Le Deuxième Sexe? The context of specific passages, as well as a broad knowledge of
Beauvoir’s philosophy and terms collocating with authenticité are key.
Keeping close to the French syntax can be confusing (and misleading) when translating
adverbs, because French and English do not place adverbs in the same position in regard to the
verb they modify. In the following example, there are issues with the adverb authentically, which
gives the sentence a whole other meaning:
Car elle ne choisit pas [. . .] de refuser authentiquement son destin.

(Le Deuxième Sexe (LDS hereafter) 1949, tome II, 123; my emphasis)
Because, [. . .] she does not choose authentically to reject her destiny.
(The Second Sex (TSS hereafter), 2009: 378; my emphasis)
In the preceding French quotation, Beauvoir is stating that a girl’s rejection of her fate is done
in bad faith; she insists on the act of refusing authentiquement. However, Borde and Malovany-
Chevallier’s English rendering focuses on the girl’s choice, as the adverb authentically alters the
verb to choose: the girl does not “choose authentically.” The subtleties of the French source text
are distorted.
There are cases in the investigated corpus where authentic is used in English when it does not
appear in the French original. This would be harmless if the philosophical implication attached
to authentic were not so crucial to de Beauvoir’s argument. As Toril Moi claims in her review,
“Parshley mistook philosophical terms for ordinary words: Borde and Malovany-Chevallier treat
ordinary words as if they were philosophical terms” (Moi 2010). Let us analyze such an instance:
son coeur bat, elle connaît la douleur de l’absence, les affres de la présence, le dépit, l’espoir,
la rancune, l’enthousiasme, mais à blanc.
(LDS 1949, tome II, 113; my emphasis)
her heart beats, she feels the pain of absence, the pangs of presence, vexation, hope, bitter-
ness, enthusiasm, but not authentically.
(TSS 2009, 371; my emphasis)
The French expression “à blanc” here means “without consequences,” and it does not seem
that Beauvoir wanted to give a philosophical turn to the point she was making. The context
232
indicates that authentically is too strong a term. But more importantly, Beauvoir uses her philo-
sophical vocabulary with precision in Le Deuxième Sexe, so she would have opted for authentically
had she wanted it. Therefore, we can ask why the translators decided to render “à blanc” as “not
authentically,” instead of something more neutral, such as “without consequences” or “with no
effect.”
The translation of “immanence”

The next example to be analyzed – the translation of immanence into English – will show that
using equivalents is possible, and even compulsory in some cases, which does not, however, nec-
essarily imply using foreignization.
Beauvoir’s thesis strongly argues that women are more grounded in nature because of the
biological constraints they experience: hormonal cycles, menstruation, underdeveloped mus-
cles, which all contribute to lessen women’s “grasp of the world” (The Second Sex, 46). But the
most significant burden women have to endure is maternity because it enslaves them to the
species and considerably curtails their freedom (Beauvoir refers to “the servitude of maternity,”
The Second Sex, 35). Contingencies of place and time need, however, to be taken into account:
de Beauvoir’s particularly bleak depiction of maternity was relevant to the specific time when
her book was published, so she tries to show that, not only do women’s bodies doom them to
immanence, but, more crucially, society does not offer women any other choice besides mar-
riage and motherhood.
Let us analyze some examples from Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation, such as the
following quotation, in which de Beauvoir explains that women yearn for transcendence and,
therefore, rebel against the constraints of their situation:
Le même mouvement qui, dans les hordes primitives, soumet la femme à la suprématie
masculine, se traduit en chaque nouvelle initiée par un refus de son sort: en elle, la tran-
scendance condamne l’absurdité de l’immanence.
(LDS 1949, tome II, 49; my emphasis)
The same movement that in primitive hordes subjects woman to male supremacy is mani-
fested in each new ‘arrival’ by a refusal of her lot: in her, transcendence condemns the
absurdity of immanence.
(TSS 2009, 320; my emphasis)
Regarding the translation of the French noun immanence, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier
rendered it by the English equivalent immanence, departing from the French syntax by not using
a definite article before immanence (or before transcendence either), because they are general con-
cepts. The preceding quotation is a fruitful combination of foreignization as a literal linguistic
approach (because it uses a specialized term close to the French original: immanence) and of
domestication (because it discards French linguistic norms in terms of articles, and conforms
with English grammatical standards).
However, the extract also helps unpack other issues, especially in relation to the first clause.
Its syntax closely follows the French original, which shows that the chosen translation approach
is a calque (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995, 32). The result comes across as tedious and unnatural for
the English reader. Moreover, the translation of the French noun initiée is particularly puzzling
because Borde and Malovany-Chevallier use the English noun arrival to render it, and even add
inverted commas around it, perhaps implying that they are at a loss for a better phrase. However,
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Marlène Bichet
arrival does not render the French initiée so the reader is left wondering what de Beauvoir
might mean. In French, de Beauvoir clearly explains that manhood and womanhood are akin
to castes, explaining that girls remain among themselves, distancing themselves from boys (“elles
font bande à part,” LDS 1949, tome II, 49), but that they actually would like to belong to the
privileged group, that of men (“Elle voudrait appartenir à la caste privilégiée.” LDS 1949, ibid.).
Members of those two castes become true insiders (“initiés”), notably through their education.
Using arrival to render initié(e) is therefore incoherent and confusing, and it distorts Beauvoir’s
smooth prose.
Another example of literal syntax can be found in the following quotation, with the same
shakiness in English:
Dans la “galanterie” proprement dite, aucun chemin ne s’ouvre à la transcendance. Ici

encore l’ennui accompagne le confinement de la femme dans l’immanence.
(LDS II, 447–448)
In ‘amorous adventures,’ properly speaking, no road opens onto transcendence. Here again,
ennui accompanies the confinement of woman in immanence.
(TSS, 630)
The use of the English word ennui here triggers comments on the (non)equivalence between
source language and target language terms. Indeed, ennui stems from French and has long been
naturalized in English, yet using it instead of a synonym such as boredom is not innocent, because
using Gallicisms such as ennui can be seen as elitist and pompous (Renouf 2004, 528). Therefore,
although Borde and Malovany-Chevallier claim that “the job of the translator is [. . .] to find the
true voice of the original work, as it was written for its time and with its original intent” (Transla-
tors’ Note, xxi, my emphasis), they are inadvertently aging the original. Indeed, when they use
ennui so as to keep close to de Beauvoir’s text, they seem to overlook the fact that the two words
do not share the same undertones in French and in English: ennui is a generic and neutral term
in French, whereas it can have a different connotation in English, so that not wanting to “mod-
ernize the language Beauvoir used” (ibid., xxii) can actually give younger readers the impression
that they are reading an archaic book, or that the author is extremely haughty. This choice is
even more puzzling when we notice that the French galanterie is made explicit and rendered
by amorous adventures, and not the closer English term gallantry. As the French galanterie refers
to (mostly) male seduction of women, amorous adventures seems to contradict the source text, as
it connotes a mutual connection, whereas de Beauvoir insists on the opposite, namely the way
galanterie traps women into immanence.
Finally, a further note can be added about the translation of philosophical terms. The French
adverb actuellement is a false friend and can be difficult to translate. The following example came
up while the data collection around immanence was proceeding. De Beauvoir explains how
women, while being the ‘Other’ for men, have rendered men dependent on them, but are also
dependent on men. This mutual dependence illustrates Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and de
Beauvoir aims to show that it has been a reality for women:
la réciprocité du rapport maître-esclave existait actuellement pour elle

(LDS I, 133, emphasis in the original)
the reciprocity of the master-slave relationship existed in the present for her
(TSS, 89)
234
Borde and Malovany-Chevallier cautiously translated “actuellement” by “in the present”

because the French adverb often means “currently,” but in this particular instance, the philo-
sophical meaning of “actuellement” (as used by Beauvoir here) is close to the English “actually”
and means “in acts.”
What conclusions can be drawn from this analysis regarding the translation of feminist phi-
losophy? It seems that a translation that strives for formal correspondence can be detrimental
to rendering philosophy, and that foreignization imparts awkward phrasing to translation, even
leading to mistranslation. As a result, I contend that domestication and a translation that respects
the norms of the target language, as promoted by the ITT, should be preferred for ease of under-
standing, and to make the target text clearer to follow.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how specialized philosophical vocabulary is troublesome for transla-
tion, because philosophical occurrences need to be recognized as such, which has not always been
the case in the latest English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s
general approach aims to be faithful to the source text by staying close to it and reducing the
influence of the translators. At times, however, their presence is made more obvious, which
results in an inconsistency of approaches and disorients the reader. By staying too close to the
source text and its syntax, the translators diverge from the sense of Beauvoir’s text (as in our last
example about the translation of actuellement), which emphasizes the relevance of using the ITT
to translate feminist philosophy.
The end result is a translation which appears unsteady and perplexing, and which pre-
sents the readers with a difficult rendering, thus not helping the promotion of de Beauvoir’s
book. I contend that working towards a favourable reception of de Beauvoir’s essay in the
English-speaking sphere and promoting her arguments through translation is a feminist stance.
A feminist translation agenda is not merely interested in altering the source text so as to chal-
lenge phallogocentrism; it also aims to enhance the readers’ experience, while disseminating the
author’s theories, and asserting her position in the feminist philosophical canon. Considering the
variety of feminisms, and how de Beauvoir has sometimes been misrepresented as a masculinist,
or as a foe to motherhood, the impact of English translations of Le Deuxième Sexe should not
be underestimated.
Future directions
The translation of feminist philosophy is gaining momentum, as conversations are developing
between feminist philosophers from different languages and cultures. International projects have
to be encouraged, such as the edited volume Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational
Perspectives (2017) or “Voices from the Therīgāthā: Framing Western Feminisms in Sinhala
Translation” (2017), in which Kanchuka Dharmasiri brings together the Therīgāthā and Western
magnum opuses, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and
Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). In addition, more collaboration and interdisci-
plinary work is needed between translation studies and feminist philosophers and scholars, so as
to improve translation quality and help disseminate feminist philosophy.
Related topics
Translation of philosophy, translation of feminist neologism
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Marlène Bichet
Further reading
Stone, Alison. 2007. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
This book offers a critical overview of feminist philosophy and discusses core issues in the field, while
providing accounts of influential feminist philosophers.
Borde, Constance and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 2011. Quelques réflexions sur la nouvelle traduction
anglaise du Deuxième Sexe. L’Harmattan: l’Homme et la société, 179–180(1), 273–277.
This article, written by the two translators of the latest English rendering of The Second Sex, gives an
account of the translators’ agenda and their views on translation. Along with the Translators’ Note, it
illustrates “the translators-in-terror” syndrome, as described by Jonathan Rée (see References).
Notes
1 Catherine Legrand, the main child protagonist, as well as Valérie Borge, or Denise Causse, all refer to
using the pronoun “on.”
2 This very dualism was first dealt with in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, and rendering the
French noun “la femme” led to the same translation issues (Bichet 2017).
References
Allen, Jeffner and Iris Marion Young. 1989. The Thinking Muse. Feminism and Modern French Philosophy.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2012. Philosophizing World Literature. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 16(2),
171–186.
Apter, Emily. 2014. Authenticity, in Oxford English Dictionary. The Definitive Record of the English Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: www.oed.com/view/Entry/13325?redirectedFrom=
authenticity#eid [Accessed 14 Nov. 2019].
Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bauer, Nancy. 2011. The Second Sex Review. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, np. Available at: https://
ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-second-sex/.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1943. L’invitée. Paris: Gallimard.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1947. Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté. Paris: Gallimard.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953/1989. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by Howard M. Parshley. New
York: Knopf.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1954. Les Mandarins. Paris: Gallimard.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2009. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
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Bichet, Marlene. 2017. The Treatment of Intertextuality in Translation Studies: A Case Study with the
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Bogic, Anna. 2009. Rehabilitating Howard M. Parshley: A Socio-historical Study of the English Transla-
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Frechtman, Bernard. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Philosophical Library.
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Hawthorne, Melanie C. 2000. Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality. Charlottesville and Lon-
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York: Routledge.
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18
On Borderlands and translation
The Spanish versions of Gloria
Anzaldúa’s seminal work
The long-awaited translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza
(henceforward: Borderlands) into Spanish finally made its appearance in the literary and academic
scenes through the work of two different translators. In 2015 and 28 years after its original pub-
lication, Borderlands was fully rendered into Spanish by prominent Chicana writer and scholar
Norma Elía Cantú in an edition that was commissioned and funded by the Programa Univer-
sitario de Estudios de Género (PUEG) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.1
A second, and practically simultaneous, translation was performed by Carmen Valle Simón and
published in Madrid in 2016 by Capitán Swing, a relatively young and innovative publishing
house. These translations, which are clearly aimed at different readerships, provide evidence of
varied re-inscription processes of Anzaldúa’s work. Faced with the aesthetic and intellectual
challenge of recreating a highly complex and polyphonic discourse, the translators also had to
re-situate Anzaldúa’s distinctive voice in a fresh space, infused with new power relationships,
social and cultural processes. New contexts of production and reception permeate the terrain
where meanings are negotiated for the construction of feminine subjectivities in the translated
discourse.
Borderlands is structured in two sections: the first contains seven chapters, which combine
prose with some poetry fragments, while the second consists of a set of poems and a few self-
translated poems.2 The first section has garnered the closest attention of critics. Anzaldúa’s
advocacy of a new mestiza consciousness is rooted in a critical vision of language/s, genders,
sexualities, races, and classes. Her radical discourse is sustained in the articulation of linguistic
and cultural practices which relate to physical, metaphorical and symbolic spaces built around
Spanish, English, Nahuatl and other language varieties (Mignolo 1996). Anzaldúa’s project (first
published in 1987), at once political, feminist, social and aesthetic, is among the first to make
room for the non-mediated presence of new voices in a space that had so far been governed by
the paradigm of hegemonic or white feminisms. Her work as author, editor and activist greatly
contributed to give visibility to the various experiences of women of color, Indian women and
poor women. The influence of Anzaldúa’s philosophy in the fields of feminism and gender and
queer studies is now undisputable and the study of the translations of her work into Spanish
239
allows us to assess the reception, resignification and transformation of her legacy outside English-
speaking discursivities and formations.
Latinx3 texts such as Borderlands may be conceived of as translated discourse in the sense that
they exhibit enunciative and discursive procedures that relate to the translator’s work as a media-
tor across languages and cultures (Rudin 1996; Tymoczko 1999). Also, the strong presence of
Spanish in Borderlands is a crucial aspect that contributes to the formation of a highly heteroglos-
sic discourse. Conflict and tension, but also the possibility of negotiation between Spanish and
English (and other languages and varieties), is made apparent in Anzaldúa’s work through the
use of effective writing strategies and methods. The complexity of translating this kind of text
is further increased when Spanish is the translating language, a language that is linguistically,
culturally, and symbolically significant to US Latinx literatures and authors and that pervades
their writings.4
This chapter has two main goals. First, it provides a general overview of Borderlands, placing
the text into the context from which it emerged while focusing on its relevance for (Chicanx)
feminisms and translation studies. The major contributions and impact of Anzaldúa’s work are
also reviewed in the first section. Second, it examines the translations done in Mexico and Spain
and investigates the linguistic, institutional, and sociocultural re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s path-
breaking work. Possible directions for future research are indicated at the end of the chapter.
The substantial impact of Borderlands has marked academic conversation and reflection across
disciplines in spaces as distant as Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Taiwan
(Prada 2014; Costa 2016; Cantú 2018; Pérez 2018). Anzaldúa’s work has been influential in
diverse fields and disciplines such as Chicanx studies, border theory, political science, spiritual-
ity, literary studies, translation studies, critical pedagogy, epistemology, feminism, gender and
queer studies. Her imposing presence is revealed in the proliferation of dissertations, academic
papers, journal special issues, edited monographs, readers and anthologies which resume, criti-
cize or re-elaborate her powerful legacy (Keating 2009; Cantú 2011, 2018; Oliver-Rotger 2011;
Pérez 2018). The repercussion of her work in the international scholarly community outside
the Americas demonstrates its wide and contemporary relevance (Cantú 2011, 2018). Notably,
Anzaldúa’s legacy has also inspired the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, a community
of artists, scholars and activists established at the Women’s Studies Institute of the University of
Texas in 2005.5
The interest in Anzaldúa’s work has been renewed and invigorated in the recent transla-
tions of Borderlands into Spanish.6 These translations certainly extend the conversations with
Anzaldúa’s classic text and fill a significant cultural and literary void in Spanish-speaking dis-
cursivities (Garcés 2016). However, these translations have not yet received due attention in
reviews, with critics usually taking the translation as an opportunity to revisit the ‘original’
work and scarcely commenting on the translator’s performance and/or the potential role of
the translations in literary and cultural landscapes (Garcés 2016; Martínez Llorca 2016; Miguel
Trula 2016; Sánchez 2016).

Part of the value of Anzaldúa’s project lies in the way it challenges certain long-established
notions. Borderlands is not easily classified into a genre or category, a condition which draws
attention to its genesis. The nature of the book, at once essay, narrative, autobiography, poetry,
240
corrido, testimony, and memoir, provides a theoretical statement concerning both creativity and
theory making. For Anzaldúa, the book may fall within the category of autohistoria-teoría: a
“genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of
fictionalized autobiography or memoir; an autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes”
(Anzaldúa 2002, 578). Epistemologically, this practice of self-knowledge is considered as valu-
able as or more valuable than other knowledge practices. Autohistoria-teoría, which distinguishes
the interventions of feminists of color, is typically characterized by a strong social and relational
import, productive and critical self-reflection, the interconnection of individual and collective
subjectivities, and a sensual perspective towards artistic and intellectual creativity (Keating 2009;
Pitt 2017).
Through a beautiful autohistoria-teoría, Anzaldúa establishes la conciencia de la mestiza or the
new mestiza consciousness; i.e. a transnational and feminist consciousness (Saldívar-Hull 1999)
which acknowledges the emergence of a critically claimed subjectivity (Alarcón 1989, 1990)
and a distinct sense of simultaneously belonging to different collectivities. The new mestiza
inhabits a border space, characterized by convergence, tension, and transformation. In effect, the
notion of Borderlands evokes a liminal transgressive territory, which is not restricted to a geo-
political area but defined by psychological, sexual, spiritual and often painful experiences. The
new mestiza consciousness is the consciousness of the Borderlands.7 Contradiction and ambigu-
ity mark her identity, which is signaled by “the transgression of rigid conceptual boundaries”
(Lugones 1992, 34). This new consciousness both suffers and resists oppression while fostering
the creation of a new “theoretical space for resistance” (31).
In her work, Anzaldúa critically contests the view that the experience of all women can
be approached in the same way, i.e. without recognizing their actual and potential differences
and singularities. The invisibilization of the individual and collective experiences of women of
color, Indian women and poor women that occurs through a universalist feminist discourse is
one of the strongest claims of her proposal (Belausteguigoitia Rius 2015). Certainly, the notion
of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1989), is already in the making in this
and in previous works by Anzaldúa.8 Intersectionality implies the joint consideration of the axes
which contribute to shaping subjectivities and identities: gender, ethnic origin, race, culture,
(dis)ability, sexual orientation, religion, age, and others. These identity axes do not only overlap
or intersect in the shaping of individual and collective subjectivities but they also interconnect
and are, therefore, inextricably linked to various systems of oppression, domination, and dis-
crimination. In Anzaldúa’s own words, women of color are faced with the task of “uncovering
the inter-faces, the very spaces and places where our multiple-surfaced, colored, racially gen-
dered bodies intersect and interconnect” (Anzaldúa 1990, xvi). In her view, identity formation is
never segmented but relational, thereby arguing for a politics of interconnectivity (Keating and
González-López 2011).
These complex and potent conceptualizations are inscribed in a borderlands discourse which,
complex and potent, celebrates diversity, heterogeneity and literary interlingualism through a
number of strategies. These strategies, which strongly question the normativity of language,
include the use of different language varieties and typographies, various types of code-switching,
translation methods and techniques (literal, juxtaposed, contextual, free, absence of translation),
and the creative use of metaenunciative and paratextual devices. Borderlands discourse enacts
a poetics of hybridization, articulating an interlingual dialogue which indexes “both the resist-
ance to colonialism and the propagation of cultural alternatives” (Arteaga 1997, 36). Thus, by
promoting heteroglossia, this manifestly political, multi-voiced discourse suppresses the Anglo-
American aspiration for an English-only ethos turning monologue into dialogue (73). Follow-
ing Schleiermacher’s proposal ([1813] 2012), Rudin (1996) examines the authority regulating
241
Chicanx novels. The methods adopted by authors in writing/translating, whether they make
concessions for linguistically and culturally unfamiliar readers or present them with a more
‘foreign’ discourse, affect the construction of authorial subjectivity and define a particular read-
ing experience. The linguistic, literary, social, cultural, ethnic, pedagogical, political and ethical
dimensions of bilingualism in Latinx literatures have been variously discussed (Castillo [1994]
2014; Pérez Firmat 2003; Esplin 2016, among many others).

Anzaldúa’s conceptualizations have inspired and continue to inspire a vast number of investi-
gations across disciplines. Research is currently being conducted in areas such as cultural and
literary studies, migration studies, activism, women studies, queer studies, sexual education,
and critical pedagogy (Cervantes-Soon and Carrillo 2016; Camacho and Lord 2017; Scott and
Tuana 2017; Cuevas 2018; Martínez 2018; Pérez 2018, among many others).
Of particular relevance to the analysis of the renditions of Borderlands into Spanish are the
following proposals. In the field of translation studies, Pilar Godayol (2005, 2013) uses the meta-
phor Frontera-Spaces to characterize the liminal experience of feminine subjects in translation
practices such as writing, translating or theorizing on translation. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s
notion of ‘Borderlands’ and the concept of ‘border dwellers’ or ‘world travellers’ (Lugones 2003,
166), Godayol argues that feminine subjectivity must not be seen as static, normative, and uni-
versal but, rather, as an open and dynamic category, just as that of ‘woman,’ ‘sex,’ ‘gender,’ ‘iden-
tity.’ In her view, “contingency can never be eliminated in the interweaving of gender and
translation” (12). Translating as/like a woman entails situating one’s discourse in an intermediate
space, questioning given categories and transforming and creating meanings.
The current call for decolonial feminist translation practices seems promising for the devel-
opment of new methodological and theoretical perspectives in the field of translation studies. In
the context of Latin American feminisms, Claudia de Lima Costa (2016) explores how transla-
tion together with the notion of equivocation9 may contribute to subvert the coloniality of
gender, i.e. Western patriarchal binary gender patterns and constructions deriving from colonial
power (Lugones 2010). Engaging in a productive discussion that questions equivocal categories
such as the division nature/culture, which does not belong in the world views of indigenous
peoples, may illuminate our thinking and knowledges. In this scenario, translation is a “key ele-
ment in forging political alliances and feminist epistemologies that are pro-social justice, anti-
racist, anti-imperialist and decolonial” (Costa 2016, 56).
Also within María Lugones’ analytical framework, Emek Ergun (2018) preliminarily argues
for a revision of translation as ‘a praxis of world traveling.’ In keeping with Anzaldúa’s legacy,
translation is reconceived as a border area, a site of powerful political and social transformation,
in which “asymmetrically situated subjects of difference engage in acts of mutual recognition,
confrontation, reconciliation, collaboration, and transformation” (Ergun 2018, n.p.). Decolonial
feminist ethics promotes the emergence of multiple and diverse intersubjectivities in the trans-
lated text, which, in turn, denaturalizes categories and practices of colonial modernity.
Focused on Anzaldúa’s text and more concerned with its interlingual nature, Marlene
Hansen Esplin (2016) sheds some new light on Borderlands from a perspective informed by
translation studies and literary and Latinx studies. Through the analysis of the use of strategies
of self-translation and accommodation, Esplin argues that the two sections of Borderlands display
quite different translation methods. The first seems to be more intelligible for a monolingual
reader than the second section of poems, in which adjustments are less frequent. For Esplin, as
an author-translator, Anzaldúa has a markedly pedagogical and ethnographic agenda, which
242
becomes palpable in the various conciliatory translation methods displayed in her text such as
literal and contextual translation and paratextual commentary.10 An openly interlingual praxis
and a transgressive use of language/s define a polemic authorial ethos, which, in my view, is not
only conciliatory but also strategic in commanding readers to meet the author halfway. As will
be seen in the next section, the re-creation of a new language,“the language of the Borderlands,”
a bastard, unauthorized discourse is, no doubt, one of the biggest challenges the translators of
Borderlands have to face.
Textual analysis
The two almost equally long sections of Borderlands are further subdivided into seven and six
subsections respectively. A fair number of authorial endnotes, which offer bibliographical refer-
ences and a series of historical, literary and cultural specifications, are included at the end of
the first section of essays. The poetry section contains very few notes.11 To date, there are four
editions of Borderlands, which keep Anzaldúa’s work intact and vary mainly in the paratextual
narratives produced by critics, artists and activists that introduce or comment on the text. All
editions of the book have been published by Aunt Lute Books (1987, [1987] 1999, [1987] 2007,
[1987] 2012). Through a qualitative comparative methodology, this analysis has focused on vari-
ous rhetorical, (para) textual and contextual aspects, which determine the translators’ interven-
tion and positioning in the translated discourse.
The word within the Borderlands

Paratextual enunciation remains one of the most effective devices to present the translator’s
subjectivity and agenda. At the centre of feminist translation practices (Flotow 1991; Godayol
2013), the analysis of paratexts reveals five key aspects in the translations examined: the chal-
lenge of translating Borderlands into Spanish without betraying its spirit, language, culture, and
argument; the assumption of a political position; the identification of writing and translation;
the concern to elaborate appropriate translation strategies and techniques; the need to recreate a
polyphonic and dialogic vision of language/s; and in this category, the translation of grammati-
cal gender as a central problem in the translation of a text, which challenges gender categories
and power relations.
The responsibility for the Mexican translation, which follows the first edition of Borderlands,
is generally attributed to Chicana writer Norma Cantú (2015). However, and much in keeping
with an academic ethos, it visibly acknowledges the fruitful collaboration of at least three other
people: Marisa Belausteguigoitia, the coordinator of the PUEG, Mexican poet Xanath Caraza,
who produced the first draft of chapters 1, 3, and 5 of the first section, and Mexican translator
and scholar Claire Joysmith, who translated the poetry in the second section. A high degree
of institutionalization determines the intended audience of this translation. Placed before the
translator’s preface, a lengthy introduction by Belausteguigoitia (2015) promotes the academic,
social, cultural, and pedagogical re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s text in Mexico and, more generally,
in Latin America. For Belausteguigoitia, this translation visibilizes Anzaldúa’s experience as a
lesbian woman of color while meaningfully connecting it with the experiences of indigenous
activists in Mexico.12 The pedagogical import of the translation of Borderlands is further under-
scored through a significant number of translator’s notes, which clarify terms, concepts, and
cultural references.
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The second translation was authored by translator Carmen Valle Simón and published in
Madrid in 2016 by Capitán Swing. One of the missions of this independent publishing house is
to critically broaden the knowledge available in Spanish, particularly in the fields of social studies
and philosophy. Based on the second edition of Borderlands, Valle’s version includes the trans-
lation of an introduction by Chicana critic Sonia Saldívar-Hull and of an interview between
Anzaldúa and Karin Ikas. Contrary to the Mexican translation, the Spanish version explicitly
addresses a general audience, since, for Valle, the multilingual nature of the source text should
offer no difficulties for an academic reader (Valle 2016). In keeping with her imagined reader-
ship, Valle’s translation is accompanied by a reduced number of notes, some of which provide or
update historical and terminological aspects. As stated in her introductory notes, this translation,
strongly concerned with the problem of gender and how this manifests in the use of Spanish,
is intended for each and every human being who finds the patriarchal uniform of gender too
tight or suffocating.13
Relocating the Borderlands

Relocation and displacement are in order in both translations. However, each translator engages
in a different literary and cultural praxis, making readers go through diverse reading experi-
ences. A strong political and cultural awareness is fostered in Cantú’s translation. The political
and cultural re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s work in a Mexican (academic) space, marked by old
and new border conflicts, is particularly evident in the addition of linguistic, cultural, histori-
cal, and geographical references in translator’s and editor’s footnotes as well as within the text.
For instance, the more general regional indication in the source text, “Other Spanish-speaking
groups are going through the same” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 80), becomes specifically limited in
the translation by shifting the focus towards the Spanish language (and not the speaking com-
munities) and by adding the prepositional phrase “en Estados Unidos”: “El español de otros
grupos de hispanohablantes (en Estados Unidos) va por el mismo camino” (Anzaldúa [Cantú]
2015, 118).14 The paratextual space is also abundant with linguistic and cultural specifications:
“Puesto que Anzaldúa usa the borderland(s) con un significado más complejo . . . hemos decidido
no traducirlo”15 (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 61, emphasis in the original).
In turn, Valle’s translation builds a more intuitive cross-cultural awareness, probably indicative
of a more distant perspective. While Cantú’s translation invariably reflects the awareness of an
insider, some of Valle’s choices demonstrate that she is an outsider to the Chicanx community.
This is exemplified by the translator’s use of Mexican Spanish in some passages and the some-
times unpredictable transgression of or adherence to the rules of Castilian Spanish. Such is the
case of the choice of the noun ‘chavos’ in “De los chavos y la gente de mi edad aprendí Pachuco”
(Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 107) to translate the quite neutral ‘kids’ in the source text: “From kids
and people my own age I picked up Pachuco” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 78). The decision here to
transgress the rule in Spanish to use initial small letters to name languages and linguistic varieties
such as ‘Pachuco,’ is contrasted by the highly normative plural ‘gais’ in the following fragment:
“Solo los hombres gais han tenido el coraje de exponerse a la mujer que tienen dentro y desafiar
la masculinidad actual” (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 142).16 Also, the chance to transform the poly-
semy in Anzaldúa’s anticipatory dictum, “The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual
tribe’s fear: being different” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 40), is missing in Valle’s confusing rendition,
in which the addition of the noun phrase ‘los homosexuales’ in apposition to ‘queers’ implies
an equivalence in meaning which does not, in fact, exist: “Los homosexuales, los queers son el
espejo que refleja el miedo de la tribu heterosexual: ser distinto” (Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 59,
emphasis in the original).17
244
Self-images and the Borderlands discourse

A knowledgeable, academic, speculative, but also intimate tone pervades Cantú’s paratextual
discourse. Translator’s notes serve as effective mechanisms of discursive control (Zoppi Fontana
2007) and as a vehicle to voice the translator’s own experiences and knowledges. For instance,
the fact that Anzaldúa menstruated at a very early age is often regarded as inseparable from her
work as poet and activist (Castillo [1994] 2014). Cantú offers this biographical information in
a note suggesting a personal relationship with the author by addressing Anzaldúa by her first
name: “Gloria comenzó a menstruar tempranamente debido a un desequilibrio hormonal”
(Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 103).18 In other passages, this intimacy is replaced by a more factual
tone: “Anzaldúa estudió en Edinburg, Texas, en la Pan American University, hoy día University
of Texas, Pan American” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 113).19 The translator’s rather lengthy notes
are also used to make (cultural, linguistic or other) corrections and indulge in speculation about
the text that is being translated:20
En esta sección Anzaldúa pretende describir los rasgos lingüísticos del habla del sur de Texas y
explicar su origen. Aun sin la herramienta académica para describir el fenómeno lingüístico. . . .
(Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 117)
De seguro Anzaldúa encontró la cita en donde Picaso alega que . . .

(Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 128)21
In the first of the quoted fragments, which belong to translator’s notes in chapters 3 and 4,
an evaluative tone pervades the translator’s intervention. This is evidenced by the use of the
verbal form ‘pretende’ and the concessive adverbial clause (“Aun sin la herramienta académica”),
which question the accuracy of some of the observations made in the source text and anticipate
the error readers may potentially spot. The image of the translator as a connoisseuse is also pat-
ent in the second fragment, in which the translator seems to draw conclusions from Anzaldúa’s
literary and cultural background.
While Valle’s intervention at the paratextual level is not too evident, her capable hand
is apparent in the re-creation of Anzaldúa’s borderlands discourse. As much as in the source
text, transgression and translation come forth as intrinsic modes of Valle’s translation practice
(Vazquez 2005). Heterogeneity is enhanced through a number of enunciative techniques: the
preservation of italics in the translation to signal the presence of Spanish in the source text; a
tendency to stick to the original’s word order and diction; the practice of different forms of
translation and of contra-traducción, i.e., the non-translation of certain terms and expressions in
English, which are assumed to be intelligible for a Spanish-speaking audience; and the use of
marked typographical conventions such as capitalizing terms indicating cultural origin. For
instance, in the following fragment, the strategic translation of the Spanish saying into English is
preserved making the heterogeneous nature of the source text visible in the target text as well:
En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth” era un dicho que oía mucho
cuando era niña. Ser habladora era ser chismosa y embustera, era hablar demasiado.
(Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 104, emphasis in the original)22
Establishing her position, Valle indicates that the use of strategies which can make the foreign
and the hybrid nature of the source text more visible has been one of the main points on her
agenda. Her discursively significant interventions facilitate a border reading/crossing dynamics.
245
In this respect, in Cantú’s otherwise vocal Mexican translation, a tendency towards discourse
homogenization is evident in the alteration of word order patterns, the elimination of italics as
an indication of Spanish in the source text, and the removal of juxtaposed translated fragments;
unlike the translation produced in Spain, the Mexican version of this segment reads, “De niña
escuchaba mucho el dicho “En boca cerrada no entran moscas”. Ser habladora era ser chismosa
y mentirosa, hablar de más” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 114).
Gender on the borderlands of translation

That Borderlands makes a strong claim against gender-biased language is unquestionable: “We
are robbed of our feminine being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse”
(Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 76). However, as noted by Valle (2016), at the time the book was
published the reflection on gender and language (and translation) was still incipient. In fact,
Anzaldúa’s text makes erratic generic use of the Spanish masculine plural as can be seen in the
following fragment in which a plural feminine noun (‘deslenguadas’) is mixed with a mascu-
line form in the same passage (‘somos huérfanos’) to refer to the same subjects: “Deslenguadas.
Somos los del español deficiente,” “Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos” (Anzaldúa
[1987] 1999, 80, emphasis in the original).
Ambivalence around the use of gender-marked terms is visible in both translations. While
singling out the problem of grammatical gender in her prefatory notes, Cantú’s musings seem to
fall into the trap of unwanted binarisms: “En algunos casos ha sido possible bifurcar los géneros
en la versión traducida, es decir, incluir tanto lo femenino como lo masculino” (Cantú 2015,
53).23 Aware of the limitations imposed by Spanish, the team of translators in Mexico trusts
readers will not attribute any sexist constructions in the translation to them. In the case of the
Spanish translation, allegedly guided by a “depatriarchalizing intent,” the generic use of the
Spanish plural masculine is employed to follow Anzaldúa’s literal diction: “En las partes en que
Gloria Anzaldúa se expresa en español utiliza a veces masculinos genéricos y los he respetado”
(Valle 2016, 29).24 While this decision may be said to present the reader with a reading experi-
ence potentially closer to that triggered by the source text, it seems to be inconsistent with the
general (non-academic) reader Valle has in mind, who may (or may not) interpret Anzaldúa’s
thinking and expression retrospectively.
The following fragments illustrate a few ambivalent moments in both translations, in which
gender-related terms are translated from English into Spanish through gender inclusive or exclu-
sive formulae and the introduction of binary oppositions. Faced with the fragment, “For some of
us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest – for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest
and the East” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 77), in Cantú’s version, the initial feminine plural form
(‘para algunas de nosotras’), and the determination of homeland as a feminine noun in Spanish
(‘una homeland’) eventually lead to a binary opposition, which singles out ‘chicanos’ and ‘chicanas’
but determines the compound noun phrase through a generic plural masculine forms (‘muchos’):
Para algunas de nosotras, la lengua es una homeland, nuestra tierra, que nos es más cercana que el
suroeste estadounidense, pues muchos chicanos y chicanas hoy en día viven en la parte central
y en el este del país.
(Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015: 115, emphasis in ‘homeland’ in the original)
In Valle’s translation of the same fragment, the masculine (plural) (‘para algunos de nosotros’)
is not only used to translate the gender neutral noun phrase in the source text (‘for some of
us’) but it is also implied in the notion of ‘patria’ through its Latin etymology (‘of/or pertaining
246
to the father’). The transformation of ‘Chicanos’ into ‘personas Chicanas,’ a more neutral form,
attests to the varied procedures employed in this translation:
Para algunos de nosotros, la lengua es una patria más cercana que el suroeste, pues muchas per-
sonas Chicanas viven actualmente en Medio Oeste y en el este.
(Anzaldúa [Valle] 2016, 106)
In spite of the fluctuations in both renditions, Cantú’s version seems more likely to produce
current feminist discourse. Confronted with the fragment, “we, the mestizas and the mestizos, will
remain” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 86, emphasis in the original), Cantú’s translation reads: “nosotras,
las mestizas, permaneceremos” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 124), in which all signs of binary and
masculine gender forms have been erased through the use of the Spanish feminine plural. Other
procedures used in Cantú’s version range from the creation of neologisms using rules which
transgress the normativity of Spanish to the introduction of unmarked gender nouns. An innova-
tive way to form compound words and plural forms challenges the rules of Spanish in her trans-
lation. For instance, the noun ‘Latinas’ is rendered as ‘latinaestadounidenses,’ thereby preserving
the feminine meaning and form in the first noun (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 118),25 and the plural
form of ‘gay’ becomes ‘gays,’ as is a common, albeit transgressive, use in Latin American varieties
of Spanish (“Solo los gays tienen el valor de reconocer a la mujer dentro de ellos y de confrontar
la masculinidad actual,” Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 144). A tendency to avoid the use of gender-
specific forms is observed in Cantú’s version, in which, for example, the noun ‘friends’ is rendered
as ‘amistades,’ a plural noun derived from the abstract noun ‘amistad’ (friendship) in Spanish; “ha
pedido prestado a sus amistades para poder pagarle al coyote . . .” (Anzaldúa [Cantú] 2015, 71).26
Conclusion and future directions

The analysis of the linguistic, cultural, and political re-inscription of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands
through the Spanish translations initiates new dialogues and grounds for inquiry. Even if both
translations are concerned with the problems of gender and discourse, they necessarily reflect
different (feminine) subjectivities and praxis. While Cantú’s collective translation explores the
creative and epistemological potentialities of autohistoria-teoría, showing the translators’ own
readings and positions, Valle is more concerned with the linguistic and literary challenges in
the re-creation of Anzaldúa’s borderlands discourse. A committed insider’s perspective, Cantú’s
version develops a mestiza translation consciousness, which contrasts with Valle’s individual and
distant presence. The actual impact of these translations and the repercussions they may have
for the strategic interaction of Latinx, Latin American and Iberian feminisms are yet to be seen.
Some directions for future research include work on the relationship between feminist trans-
lation praxis and autohistoria-teoría. Further critical insight into Anzaldúa’s work effected from
the perspective of translation, feminism and gender could further examine the complexity of her
legacy. Extensive rigorous research into the actual discursive materialization of feminine subjec-
tivities in (re) translation practices may provide key analytical elements to study the interactions
of feminisms across the globe. Finally, studies that aim to investigate the notion of decolonial
feminist translation praxis seem relevant both for translation studies and critical feminisms.
Further reading
Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2005. EntreMundos/ AmongWorlds. New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. New
York: Palgrave MacMillan.
247
This collective volume provides a programmatic and comprehensive overview of Anzaldúa’s theoretical,
aesthetic, political and epistemological inquiries and lifelong contributions.
Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2009. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
In this Reader, Anzaldúa scholar AnaLouise Keating puts together key texts (previously published and
unpublished work), which are fundamental to fully understand the making and development of Gloria
Anzaldúa’s political and aesthetic project over time.
Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2016. Gender and Equivocation: Notes on Decolonial Feminist Translations, in
Wendy Harcourt, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development Critical Engagements in Feminist
Theory and Practice. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 48–61.
Informed by cultural studies, critical feminisms, and translation studies, Costa (2016) presents an intro-
ductory thought-provoking conceptualization of the political and ethical issues concerned in decolo-
nial feminist translation practices.
Related topics
Decolonial feminist translation, transnational feminist translation studies, feminist ethos and trans-
lation, gender and retranslation, borderlands feminism and translation
Notes
1 Translations into Spanish of chapters 2 and 4 appeared respectively in bell hooks et al. (2004) and García
(2009). Translation into French of chapter 7 was published in Cahiers du CEDREF (2011).
2 A detailed analysis of the poetry section is beyond the scope of this chapter.
3 In this chapter, the “x” in terms such as “Latinx” and “Chicanx” is used to avoid sexist and binary gen-
der constructions.
4 An early paper by Rosario Martín Ruano and África Vidal Claramonte (2004) examines the literary, cul-
tural, ideological, economic and methodological factors implied in the translation of US Latinx literatures.
5 For more information on this Society, see https://elmundozurdo.wordpress.com/about/
6 Borderlands was completely translated into Italian (Zaccaria 2000) and is now being translated into
French (Cantú 2018).
7 See Anzaldúa’s poem “To live in the Borderlands means you” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 216–217).
8 See Anzaldúa and Moraga (1981). On intersectionality and translation, see Flotow (2009).
9 See Costa (2016) for a full development of her proposal.
10 The so-called conciliatory method is, according to Esplin (2016, 182), exemplified by fragments such
as “[h]ocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being
mal criada” (Anzaldúa 1997, 76, my emphasis), in which a translation/explanation of the three Spanish
nouns is offered in Anzaldúa’s own text.
11 In this chapter, I follow the second edition of the book.
12 Belausteguigoitia highlights the connections between Anzaldúa’s legacy and the Zapatista Women
Movement in Mexico.
13 “Las personas lectoras a las que se ha tenido en mente a la hora de traducir no constituyen un público
académico, pues el profesorado y alumnado universitario se maneja ya bastante bien en inglés, por lo
que el texto multilingüe de la versión no ofrecería ninguna dificultad. ¿A quiénes se dirige esta edición
de Borderlands? ¿Quién puede ser “la Nueva Mestiza” de esta edición? Podría ser cualquier ser humano,
mujer, hombre o cualquier otra etiqueta con la que se identifique, a quien el uniforme de género del
patriarcado le quede estrecho, le apriete, le ahogue o se le estalle por las costuras” (Valle 2016, 31).
14 A quite literal translation of said passage may read: “The Spanish of other Spanish-speaking groups (in
the United States) is going through the same.” Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of
Cantú’s and Valle’s work are my own. Likewise, except when differently specified, emphasis added to
certain fragments is mine.
15 “As Anzaldúa uses the borderland(s) in a much more complex way . . . we have decided not to translate
this term.”
16 “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge
the current masculinity” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 106).
248
17 This is not to say the translator does not know the difference between these two terms. In effect, the
translator’s note at page 42 explains the evolution of the use of the term “queer” in the second half of
the 20th century.
18 “Gloria started to menstruate early as a consequence of a hormonal disorder.”
19 “Anzaldúa studied in Edinburg, Texas, at the Pan American University, today the University of Texas,
Pan American.”
20 For a comprehensive study of the notes in this translation, see Spoturno (2019).
21 “In this section Anzaldúa attempts a description of the linguistic features of the Texan Southern accent
and an explanation of its origin. Even without the academic intruments to characterize the linguistic phe-
nomenon . . .; Most certainly, Anzaldúa found the quote where Picasso claims . . .”
22 “En boca cerrada no entran moscas. ‘Flies don’t enter a closed mouth’ is a saying I kept hearing when I was a
child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much.” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999: 76).
23 “In some cases it has been possible to bifurcate the genders in the translated version; i.e., to include the
feminine as much as the masculine.” In a recent paper, Cantú (2018) indicates her personal preference
and political position regarding the use of terms such as ‘Latinx’ and ‘Chicanx,’ which may include non-
binary gender constructions.
24 “In the sections in which Gloria Anzaldúa uses Spanish, she sometimes employs masculine generic
forms and I have respected them.”
25 The usual form of this word in Spanish is “latinoestadounidenses.”
26 “She’s . . . borrowed from friends in order to pay the coyote . . .” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 34).
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Part III
Feminism, gender, and
queer in translation
19
At the confluence of queer
and translation
Subversions, fluidities, and performances
Introduction
Performative, fluid, subversive – the shared applicability of these adjectives to discourses on both
translation and sexuality, underscores the recent confluence of translation studies and queer
studies as a necessary and fruitful point of intersection. In her etymological exploration of the
roots of the term ‘queer,’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick illustrates its mobility describing queer as a
“continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant” (Kosofsky Sedgwick
1990, xii). Its Indo-European root – twerkw, meaning ‘across,’ also yields quer (traverse in Ger-
man), the Latin torquere (to twist), and athwart in English. Interestingly, translation’s own root,
from Old French or from the Latin translatio(n), means ‘carried across.’ Both terms are charac-
terized by their relational quality to a perceived original but also, by their departure from it.
Their processes of traversing from one mode of being to another is often performative, marked
by theatricality and flourish, an unmasking of both linguistic and social norms. As BJ Epstein
and Robert Gillet intimate, translation, “as an indefinite deferral of meaning, but also as a site of
othering, hegemony and subalternity, marks it out as always already queer” (2017, 1). Yet, despite
their overlapping origins and practices, the critical intermeshing of translation studies and queer
studies has been relatively tardy despite translation studies’ prolific engagement with gender and
feminisms since the mid-1990s.
Historic and current perspectives

Casting a look over the field, one of the first voices, and for a considerable time, the only voice to
articulate important links between queer identity and translation was Keith Harvey (1998, 2000,
2003a, 2003b), whose work on the translation of gay French writers shed light on the way that
“translated texts can suggest models of otherness that can be used in processes of internal iden-
tity formation and imagined community projection” (Harvey 2000, 159). Christopher Larkosh’s
edited volume Re-engendering Translation (2011), includes several chapters which deal with queer
identity, either in relation to texts or their translators. Numerous special issues of journals on
translation and queer have appeared in recent years, including the special issue “Translating
Queers/Queering Translation” of In Other Words, edited by BJ Epstein (2010); a special issue
255
of Comparative Literature Studies (2014), “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation” edited
by William J. Spurlin; and a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly edited by David
Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, entitled Translating Transgender (2016). Since the 2015 “Queer-
ing Translation – Translating the Queer” conference at the University of Vienna, a more con-
centrated proliferation of texts has appeared such as the edited volume, Sexology and Translation
(2015) by Heike Bauer which focuses on the way in which sexological discourses have been
disseminated transnationally via translation; BJ Epstein and Robert Gillet’s edited volume Queer
in Translation (2017), which sets out to explore the intersections between queer studies and
translation studies in literature, media, politics, linguistics, and culture; and Queering Translation,
Translating the Queer (2018) edited by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, which deals with
three main sub-areas, namely, theorizing translation through a queer lens, queer translations and
translators, and the role of translation in queer activism. A monograph by Héctor Domínguez
Ruvalcaba, Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations (2016) focuses on
queerness in the Latin American context and the production of queer knowledge transnation-
ally, albeit without mobilising discourses from a translation studies perspective. Furthermore, a
panel on queer translation at the 2018 International Association of Translation and Interpreting
Studies (IATIS) conference highlights the importance of queer interrogations in the discipline.
Critical issues, topics, and research

In terms of topics covered at the intersections of queer and translation, an important area of
research is an exploration of the translation of literary, filmic, and dramatic queer texts. For
example, Spurlin (2016) explores the translation of texts by queer Maghrebi writers such as Nina
Bouraoui and Abdellah Taïa and the ways in which they create queer spaces within the colo-
nizer’s language, Cristiano Mazzei (2007) explores how translators deal with the linguistic and
cultural challenges of translating a gay-male Brazilian subculture in three contemporary novels,
and Jeffrey Angles (2017) examines how the translation of Anglo-American novels articulating
queer desire and eroticism into Japanese in the 1990s, helped “shape images of queer sexuality
for audiences that went well beyond a queer readership in Japan” (2017, 88). Although yet still
largely under-researched, the audio-visual translation of queer films is explored by Dimitris
Asimakoulas (2012) in his examination of how transsexual identity is modified via subtitling in
the film Strella and most recently by Ting Guo (2018) who explores the strategies employed by
Chinese LGBT fan-subbing groups in the translation and dissemination of international queer
films. In drama, David Kinloch (2007, 2011) explores how queer Québécois theatre is transmog-
rified and enriched through a queer Glaswegian vernacular. Another growing area of research
concerns more sociologically informed studies of queer translators, such as Eric Keenaghan’s
(1998) exploration of gay poet Jack Spicer’s translations of Lorca, Larkosh’s (2011) spotlighting
of translation studies’ forefather James S. Holmes as an openly gay man, active on the Dutch
leather scene and a prolific translator of queer texts and lastly, Baer’s (2017) portrayal of the 19th-
century Russian poet and musician Aleksei Apukhtin and his queering of Western European
lyric poetry through translation.
Another key topic concerns translation’s role in the politics of identification. As a category,
does the term ‘queer’ both linguistically and conceptually travel seamlessly across borders? Vari-
ous scholars argue against any form of homogenization of a global queering, since it invariably
operates at the level of neo-imperialist control, failing to acknowledge the cultural and linguis-
tic local specificities of the experiential in gendered and sexual modes of being. For example,
Wangtaolue Guo (2018) explores the various translations for the term ‘queer’ in the Taiwanese
context and their use for self-affirmation and destigmitization by the local LGBTQ community.
256
At the confluence of queer and translation
Shalmalee Palekar (2017) explores the Indian context, highlighting the plurality of indigenous
queer lives and bodies and the dangers of ‘chutnification’ they face in translation, rather, as she
attests, “it is vital to construct a hybrid queer theory which is capable of accommodating local
specificities and pluralities” (2017, 8).
A further emergent research topic from this intersection is the use of queer theoretical appa-
ratuses to think through the practice of translation. As Spurlin (2017) intimates, in its othering,
translation functions as a queer praxis. Spurlin considers translation as an interstitial space, one
which is open to an erotics of alterity and is therefore marked out as queer. Others (e.g. Breen
2017) have reflected upon translation’s propensity for ‘failure,’ in the queer sense, drawing upon
Jack Halberstam’s notion (2011) that, in its modes of replication and repetition, a translated text
will always ultimately fail, yet by doing so, it is successful in destabilising any feigned constancy
of an original, just as queer modes of being dissolve normative conceptualizations of gender and
sexuality. José Santaemilia (2018) and Elena Basile (2018) also discuss the sexualization of trans-
lation via a queer lens. Through her reading of queer poet, Nathanaël, Basile explores the idea
of a ‘fuckable’ text, namely, the idea that the translative intimacy at the scene of the dissolution of
cultural and linguistic boundaries is a form of undoing (in the queer theoretical sense imagined
by Bersani and Phillips 2008; Berlant and Edelman 2014) which cannot necessarily be separated
from the prospect of violence.
A further important area of research at the confluence of queer and translation, concerns the
translation of queer theory itself. Originating largely in North America from the early 1990s,
queer theoretical modes of critical inquiry seek, via poststructuralist approaches, to question and
destabilize social constructions of genders, sexes, and sexualities. Coined by scholar Teresa de
Lauretis in a special issue of the feminist journal Differences, entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian
and Gay Sexualities” (1991), ‘queer theory’ has been conceptualized and elaborated through
work by leading proponents such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Epistemology of the
Closet (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction
(1996), Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (2004) by Lee Edelman. More recently, there have been reorientations of queer theory
away from questions based on understandings of identity around psychoanalysis, performativity,
and language, towards topics such as capitalism, as explored by Rosemary Hennesy in Profit and
Pleasure (2000), securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism, as explored by Jasbir K. Puar in
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and queer theorizations of disability
in Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory (2006).
In terms of the dissemination of queer theory, tracing the transnational travels of queer
theoretical texts via translation is not only reflective of the ways in which different cultures have
engaged with notions of queer identity at various socio-historic moments but is also indica-
tive of the fact that there is a prevailing unidirectional, anglophonic flow of ontological queer
thought, albeit local queer lives and practices may be divergent. For example, Butler’s Gender
Trouble (1990) now appears in translation in 27 different languages. The first translation appeared
in German just one year after initial publication and has since been followed by translations into
Japanese (1999), Dutch (2000), Croatian (2000), Hungarian (2006), and Chinese (2008) amongst
many others. As Michela Baldo (2018) has investigated, the translation of queer theoretical texts
is often precipitated through activism. In her exploration of the Italian context, Baldo highlights
how the translation of Butler’s texts was often instigated by queer activist collectives and groups
such as Laboratorio Smaschieramenti from Bologna. Furthermore, she reflects that the recent
retranslation of four of Butler’s texts can be attributed, in part, to a “need for retelling, expand-
ing and redefining aspects of her theories” (2018, 189–190) in light of recent public debates
and in strengthening resolve against anti-gender movements which seek to delegitimize the
257
important work done in articulating queer lived realities. A further important issue regarding the
translation of queer theoretical texts is a linguistic one. According to Gillett (2018), the reason
for the swift translation of certain key texts such as Gender Trouble and the uncharacteristically
slow uptake of others (i.e. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet has still not been translated in
its entirety in German) can, in part, be traced to lexical problematics, whereby terms for which
bilingual approximations can be used such as ‘Geschlechtsidentität’ for gender (literally ‘gender
identity’) have more resonance and lend themselves more easily to translation than queer terms
which are specifically rooted in anglophonic culture such as ‘closet,’ which gets translated as
‘Versteck’ (literally ‘hiding place’) in German, thus losing connotations of performativity, mas-
querade, and exposure. In this sense, then, understanding both the contextual factors surround-
ing the translation of queer theory such as when and why a particular text is translated, but
also how a text is translated, looking specifically at a close textual level, is revelatory not only
of a particular culture’s engagement with and/or resistance to queer theory but also indicative
of how queer theoretical perspectives are either readily assimilated or inflected by localities of
queer thought. The following two short case studies of the translations of Gender Trouble and
Epistemology of the Closet into French will illustrate these points as well as highlighting, in both
cases, the pivotal role which the translator plays in brokering queer thought across cultural, lin-
guistic, and affective borders.
The trouble with Gender Trouble: translating

on inhospitable terrain
As a foundational text in queer theory, Butler’s Gender Trouble offers a radical rethinking of the
ontological categories of identity, highlighting that gender and sex are ultimately always politi-
cal. By critically engaging the work of theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir,
Monique Wittig, and Michel Foucault, Butler navigates the fields of philosophy, anthropology,
literary theory, and psychoanalysis, in order to subvert essentialist assumptions of gender and
elaborate a theory centred on performativity. As Lisa Disch comments, “Gender Trouble, of all
Butler’s work, is the one that we think of as the most French” (2008, 47). Yet, despite the fact
that much of Butler’s theoretical thinking in this text is underpinned by work from an amalgam
of French theorists, the translation into French of Butler’s key text, experienced what Eric Fassin
terms a “delayed broadcast” (2005, 5) of 15 years. The French sociologist attributes this lag to a
French reluctance to import what has come to be known as ‘French Theory’ – the intentionally
untranslated derisive moniker employed to signal Anglo-American thought. Nevertheless, the
changing sociopolitical climate of post-millennial France and fresh debate surrounding issues of
gender, meant that Butler’s text offered a timely intervention for elaborating a theory of gender
in France and in 2005, Gender Trouble was translated by the American philosopher and academic,
Cynthia Kraus, as Trouble dans le genre: Le féminisme et la subversion de l’identité. An exploration of
the contextual socio-historical factors surrounding this text sheds important light on how the
text was translated and the role which the translator played in rehabilitating Butler for a sceptical
French audience.
In her preface to the 1999 edition, Butler admits that “Gender Trouble is rooted in ‘French
Theory,’ which is itself a curious American construction” (Butler 1999, x). She goes on to
underscore Gender Trouble’s foreignness in relation to French intellectual thought, stating that
“Gender Trouble tends to read together, in a syncretic vein, various French intellectuals (Lévi-
Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Wittig) who had few alliances with one another and whose
readers in France rarely, if ever, read one another” (ibid.). Butler’s use of quotation marks
around the term ‘French Theory’ here serves as a harbinger of another instance of constructed
258
theoretical assimilation which predates Gender Trouble. Similarly encapsulated in inverted com-
mas, the term ‘French Feminism,’ first employed by Christine Delphy, serves to signal Anglo-
American thought, constructed, as Delphy states, “by comparing French writers who cannot
be compared, by ‘putting in dialogue’ people who have nothing to say to each other” (1995,
214). Delphy advocates that “ ‘French feminism’ exporters,” as she terms them, have wrongly
conflated ‘women writers’ with the ‘women’s movement’ thus obfuscating the activism central
to the Women’s Movement in France. For Delphy, this was not a scholarly oversight, instead
she argues that ‘French feminism’ exporters such as Alice Jardine (Gynesis, 1985) and Toril Moi
(French Feminist Thought, 1987) had a specific ideological agenda and that the purpose of ‘lump-
ing together’ theorists, who in reality had very little to do with one another, was a systematic
process of “internal homogenisation and external differentiation” (Delphy 1995, 214) which
allowed the French Feminist proponents to have the power to name its Other. Delphy argues
that heralding this exotic Other (a voice of straw women who supposedly question and invali-
date a feminist approach from within feminism itself ) provided Anglo-American exporters with
a form of validation to reintroduce essentialism into feminist debates and thereby eke out a new
route for such scholars to re-engage in dialogue with male authors.
Claire Moses highlights how the process of translation provides the catalyst for this academic
construction, tracing its origins to the American feminist journal Signs, whose associate edi-
tor at the time, Domna Stanton, according to Moses, “most likely played the important role of
obtaining, if not originating, these translations and analyses for Signs” (1998, 254). As Moses
recounts, Signs published the first English language translations of Julia Kristeva and Hélène
Cixous in 1975 and 1976. Thereafter, in 1981, in a special issue of the journal entitled ‘French
Feminist Theory’ there appeared translations of Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” Cixous’s “Castra-
tion or Decapitation?,” and Luce Irigaray’s “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other.”
While the editors never referred to these three women as ‘feminist theorists’ but instead as ‘writ-
ers’ or ‘intellectuals,’ as Moses illustrates, the way in which the translations were framed sets up
a specific group identity which undoubtedly plays a role not only in homogenizing these three
thinkers and their critical positions but also in presenting them as the sole exponents of feminist
thought in France. As Moses points out, “most U.S. readers would have lacked the knowledge
to recognize the omission of other forms of politically significant practice” (ibid.). In this sense,
then, Butler’s perpetuation of this American scholarly appropriative reflex left little desire for
the French to translate the text, questioning the utility of importing back artificially exported
theory.
In order to further examine this question, let us turn now to consider why Gender Trouble
was translated into French after all, and perhaps more importantly, how it was translated. In his
preface to the French edition, Fassin states that the questions Butler poses in Gender Trouble are
the same as those French people currently find themselves facing (2005, 7). Two burning topics
in the French National Assembly at the time, namely the recognition of homosexual partner-
ships (known as Pacte civil de solidarité–PaCS) and the question of instituting gender parity in
the legislature, brought to light the fact that the political and social system had, until this time,
been based unquestioningly on what Fassin terms “ ‘a Symbolic Order,’ in other words, a sexual
order” (ibid.) or as Disch terms it, “a presumption of heterosexuality” (2008, 47). Butler’s text,
Fassin argues, shines a much-needed light on these contemporary debates around sexuality and
Butler offers a way of thinking outside of these heteronorms. Yet, for Butler’s voice to resonate
in France, she must be rehabilitated via translation.
In her translator’s preface, Kraus delineates certain translation choices she makes, including
how she chose to translate the terms ‘French Feminism’ and ‘French Theory.’ Kraus outlines the
historic context of controversy, going so far as to provide references to the articles by Moses
259
and Delphy cited previously. Taking her cue from Butler’s 1999 preface, she states that “ ‘French
Feminism’ is neither French – despite the French (mostly male) authors cited [. . .] nor feminist
‘French Feminism’ being closest to differentialist French feminism, a form of essentialism which
is, in fact, a form of anti-feminism” (Kraus 2005, 23 (my translation)). She cites this as the reason
for opting to leave the term untranslated in the target text flagging it as an untranslated derisive
moniker. While this translation strategy is suitable for her translation of Butler’s 1999 preface in
which conscious awareness of this imported construct is acknowledged, her use of this transla-
tion strategy in the body of Butler’s text, must be questioned. For example, in Chapter 1, the
translation reads as follows:
TT: Dans l’éventail de la théorie du French feminism et du post-structuralisme, la production

des concepts identitaires du sexe est analysée à partir de régimes de pouvoir très différents.
(Butler 2005, 85–86)
ST: Within the spectrum of French feminist and poststructuralist theory, very different
regimes of power are understood to produce the identity concepts of sex. (Butler [1990]
1999, 24–25)
If we look at Butler’s text here, it is evident that the term French feminist theory is not marked
in any typographical way to flag it as a reference to the ‘made in America’ construction and
rightly so, since the text exists in a space before detractors voiced their criticisms and hence
before Butler had the chance to reframe her argument as she did in the 1999 preface. Yet,
although this reframing is present in the translation, since it includes the 1999 preface, Kraus’s
decision to leave the English term untranslated in the body of the French text, serves retroac-
tively to rehabilitate the source text’s ideological footing. By including the term untranslated
and italicised in her target text here, Krauss emphasises its alterity, quelling its unpalatability for
a French audience, who is already wary of American scholars’ propensity for homogenising
different theoretical feminist positions. This is a significant strategy, since not only does it com-
pletely alter the meaning of the target text but inherent therein is a presupposition that Butler
was aware of the artificially constructed nature of ‘French Feminism’ from the very beginning.
Kraus’s rehabilitative translation strategy extends much further and another pertinent transla-
tion decision to analyze concerns her deliberation over how to translate the word ‘gender.’ This
is notoriously difficult in French since an analogous term is not readily apparent. Kraus outlines
her justifications for translating ‘gendered’ with the French word ‘genre,’ citing existing French
texts in the fields of sociology, history, and literature which employ this term, to substantiate
her translation decision. Likewise, she makes a case for why she opts not to adopt other possible
translations for the past participle ‘gendered’ (such as ‘genderisé’ or ‘gendré’). However, the most
curious translation decision concerns the nominal term ‘gendering’ for which she chooses the
term “le processus de/la mise en genre” (Kraus 2005, 23). She goes on to say that it would have
been possible to translate ‘gendered’ by the term “marqué par le genre” but the reason she chose
not to do so was that “this expression makes one think straightaway of Monique Wittig’s article
‘The Mark of Gender’ and more generally of the radical materialist position” (ibid. [my transla-
tion]). With regard to the criticism levelled at Gender Trouble, a key grievance was Butler’s lack
of proper acknowledgement of French materialist feminism in the text. Stevi Jackson argues
that Butler’s radical deconstruction of gender “owes much to materialist feminism without itself
being materialist” (1995, 13). This was a point of contention for many feminists in France and
further fuelled a sense of apprehension vis-à-vis Butler’s gender theory. Here, Kraus deliberately
uses this linguistic translation strategy in order to downplay the intertextual reference to Wittig
260
for the French target audience. By suppressing this tangible linguistic link to Wittig’s materialist
stance, Kraus averts the target reader’s attention from possible misgivings concerning Butler’s
lack of acknowledgement of the influence of materialist feminism on her work and, instead,
serves to bolster Butler, setting her apart as an individual authority on the concept of gender
identity.
Kraus’s interventionist translation approach raises important questions in relation to the eth-
ics of queer theory translation. As a nascent discipline, in a particularly mutable state of constant
expansion, redefinition, and problematization, should a translator apply updated critical perspec-
tives to older texts? It seems that in the translation of queer theoretical texts, the role of the
translator must indeed go beyond lexical and semantic conveyance, in order to create a queer
textual space which affords the target culture the possibility to appreciate different queer per-
spectives while, at the same time, accommodating local contexts. The translator’s very active role
in the dissemination of queer thought is equally evident in the second case study.
Out of the translator’s closet

Like Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet only arrived on the
French scene recently, having been translated, 18 years after its initial publication in English, by
academic Maxime Cervulle as Epistémologie du Placard (2008). Shunning the now clichéd role of
the ‘invisible translator,’ Cervulle makes his presence extremely visible through both a lengthy
preface and in an abundance of translator’s footnotes. Additionally, there is an acknowledge-
ments paragraph in which the translator also thanks le Zoo – a French queer activist collective –
who had been requesting the translation of this text since the mid-1990s, again highlighting the
important impact of activism in the context of queer translation.
In his translator’s preface, Cervulle reflects upon the premise of Sedgwick’s seminal text,
namely, a call, via legal, literary, and philosophical approaches, for the destruction of binaries
employed to articulate modes of sexual being. The concluding paragraph to his preface empha-
sises the performative and affective qualities of translation praxis. He says,
Ce ne sont là que deux ou trois choses que je sais d’Eve, quelques fragments que j’ai saisis
en apprenant à traduire Sedgwick, en apprenant à me fondre dans sa langue, à manier son
gout des épithètes, son humour sophistiqué et sa sensibilité décalée.
(Cervulle 2008, 21)
Those are just a few things I know about Eve, some fragments I grasped while learning
to translate Sedgwick, learning to lose myself in her language, to handle her penchant for
epithets, her sophisticated humour and her offbeat sensibility.
(my translation)
His evocation here of the translation process is at once cerebral and corporeal, in the sense
that he talks about the dissolution of the self in order to assume Sedgwick’s own idiolect and
cadences. The intimacy of this practice is signalled by his use of her first name to refer to Sedg-
wick here. Cervulle’s illustration of his praxis gives a clear example of the way in which the
process of translation can be a queering experience for the individual engaged in the task.
Concerning the translator’s notes, Cervulle gives explanations of various American cultural
references for his French speaking readership, including a definition of Ivy League universi-
ties, clarifications of the US Bill of Rights, as well as literary intertextual references, such as
261
Sedgwick’s allusion to a poem by Emily Dickinson. He also uses this space to delineate specific
queer terminology. For example, in the first translator’s note to accompany Sedgwick’s introduc-
tion, he discusses her use of the term ‘liminality’ in relation to the notion of “transitivity between
genders” (Sedgwick 1990, 2). Not only does he explain that the French term ‘liminalité’ is the
semantic cognate, but he also comments that this term is part of the current lexis of queer and
cultural studies in French. The translator also provides footnotes to explain terms which are
specific to American gay culture, such as Sedgwick’s reference to the identifier ‘beefcake.’ He
explains that the term refers to the homo-erotic imagery of muscled, oiled athletes from the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which appeared in men’s magazines such as Muscle Power, Pictorial, or
Tomorrow’s Man (Cervulle 2008, 130). Not only does he provide this definition along with pri-
mary sources, but he also suggests further academic reading on beefcake culture and its gay read-
ership via Thomas Waugh’s (1996) work. In instances when specific queer terminology has no
lexical equivalent in the target language, the translator uses footnotes to explain his creation of
certain neologisms. For example, he proposes the neologism ‘alloérotisme’ to translate ‘alloeroti-
cism’ and defines it as the antonym of autoeroticism and meaning, “une relation érotique avec
une personne autre que soi-même” (Cervulle 2008, 51) [an erotic relationship with someone
other than oneself] (my translation).
A further translation strategy which is appended with a translator’s note concerns the retrans-
lation of references. In her introduction, Sedgwick includes a lengthy quotation by fellow queer
theorist David Halperin in order to evoke the ways in which Halperin’s views on the conceptu-
alization of homosexuality are divergent from Foucault’s interpretation (the former’s assumption
based on gender intransitivity and the latter on gender transitivity). The citation comes from
Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), which was translated into French by Isa-
belle Châtelet as Cent ans d’homosexualité (2000). In his translator’s note, Cervulle states that he
has retranslated sections of the first and last sentences in the extract, “afin de rendre plus claire
la critique du propos de David Halperin par Sedgwick” (Cervulle 2008, 65) [in order to make
Sedgwick’s critique of David Halperin’s remarks clearer] (my translation). The retranslation of
this intertextual reference highlights the interconnectedness of queer theory and the fact that
key terms must be meticulously translated across texts since they exist within constellations of
interrelated concepts.
One final interesting example when examining how queer theoretical texts are translated is,
like the previous example, linked to the linguistic complexity and at times, cultural singularity
for expressing concepts related to queer modes of being. Following her introduction, Sedgwick
includes a full-page definition for the term ‘closet,’ which she takes from the Oxford English
Dictionary. In this entry, there are ten different meanings for the word, some of which are in
current usage while others are anachronistic. Among the meanings, closet is defined as a room
for privacy or retirement, a place of private devotion or study, a private apartment of a monarch,
a repository, a small room, a den, a secret place, a bathroom, a sewer, or a private, meditative space.
The translator does not choose to simply translate this dictionary entry, but instead seeks out
an entry from Le Petit Robert, the French authoritative dictionary. Interestingly, the French cog-
nate ‘placard’ does not have as many connotations (only seven) and while there are overlapping
definitions such as a room or a cupboard, others are extremely different from the English, with
the additional meanings of a poster or notice, a coating, a decorative wooden panel adorning
a door, and in slang terms, ‘placard’ means a prison. By adopting a domesticating strategy here,
the translator highlights the very important point in the translation of queer theory, namely, that
although terms can often be easily translated with cognates, the assimilated meanings connected
with terms in different locales open queer theoretical perspectives up to a spectrum of different
interpretations.
262
Future directions
In terms of further research at the intersections of queer studies and translation studies, there
is a need for more sociologically informed studies of queer translators and their praxis. While
the majority of studies on translating queer identity are based on literary texts, there is scope to
understand how other mediatic articulations of queer identity are being translated, for exam-
ple, via audio-visual translation, translation of social media, and the intersemiotic translation of
queer images. To date, there is no substantial body of work on pedagogy and queer translation,
neither on translating queer texts, nor on queer methodologies of translation. Another fruitful
area to explore would be the domain of interpreting, in terms of public service interpreting,
there are important questions to ask about how queer individuals’ voices are heard in different
legal, medical, and social settings. Furthermore, what role do interpreters play in transnational
queer activism? More scholarly attention must be paid to discovering other queer theoretical
perspectives beyond the anglophone context and promoting their dissemination via translation.
Finally, as queer theory itself continues to evolve, there will be important work to be done con-
cerning the study of retranslations of canonical queer theoretical texts, as well as the recovery of
marginalized queer voices.
Further reading
Harvey, Keith. 2000. Gay Community, Gay Identity and the Translated Text. TTR: traduction, terminologie,
rédacti, 13, 137–165.
One of the first scholars to explore the relationship between queer identity and translation, Harvey
examines the way in which translated literature can play a crucial role in the formation of gay subjectiv-
ity and community building.
Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
A comprehensive introductory guide to different queer theoretical perspectives.
Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations.
London: Zed Books.
This monograph focuses on the dissemination of queer knowledge throughout Latin America via pro-
cesses of translation, adaptation, and epistemological resistance.
Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillett, eds. 2017. Queer in Translation. London: Routledge.
This edited volume brings together scholars examining how queer texts (literary, filmic, theoretical,
graphic) are being translated and applies queer thought to issues of translation.
Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, eds. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice,
Activism. London: Routledge.
This volume focuses on the intersections between queer, translation, gender, and sexuality in transcul-
tural contexts with contributions covering three main areas: theoretical approaches to understanding
queer translation, the practical application of queer translation, and the role of translation in issues of
queer activism.
Related topics
Feminist translation theory, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, translation and activism
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263
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Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters. New York: Routledge, 47–61.
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20
Feminism in the post-communist
world in/as translation1
Kornelia Slavova
In the early 1990s, after the collapse of communism, feminism emerged in Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) in and as translation – literally and figuratively speaking. Unlike the feminist
movements in North America and Western Europe, which came into being through years of
grass-roots women’s organized activism, the feminist projects in the post-communist world
emerged as a process of translating Western liberal ideas through direct political acting from
“outside” and from “above.”2 This top-down strategy of infusing gender equality through leg-
islation, funding, and university programmes has been seen by some scholars as yet another
form of Westernization, Americanization, “EU dirigisme” (Weiner 2009, 211), “feminism from
above” or even “room-service feminism” (Miroiu 2004, 208). In an attempt to transcend the
East/West binarisms, the current chapter (focusing on case studies from Bulgaria, Romania,
Croatia, and the Czech Republic) approaches the post-communist feminist projects as culturally
translated practices in the global flow of feminisms at the end of the 20th century. Through the
lens of cultural translation, it poses broader questions: Can this form of “intellectual feminism”
really trigger social change in the region? What does it mean to be gendered in a Slavonic
language? Which meanings of Western liberal feminism have been toned down, contested or
rewritten in the process of translation, self-translation, and reverse translation?
In most CEE countries women’s movements existed since the late 19th century – as part of the
nationalist liberation movements, nation-building movements or those demanding women’s suf-
frage. Despite the different intensities of these women’s movements, after World War II (when
the communist regimes took power in the Soviet sphere of influence) their activities were inter-
rupted, their property was confiscated, and most women’s organizations were banned.3 Seen as
a Western bourgeois ideology, feminism was rejected as the Communist Party was supposed to
take care of women, giving them access to education, work, childcare, and protection from the
state. Hence, in most socialist states (with the exception of Yugoslavia where Tito’s regime fol-
lowed a policy of non-alignment with the USSR) there were no independent women’s organi-
zations and almost no women’s activism beyond the Party-controlled women’s organizations.
After the collapse of communism in 1989 feminist ideas and practices were transplanted into
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Feminism in the post-communist world
the region with two major factors pushing for change. First, in the early 1990s, Western finan-
cial and academic institutions, agencies, and foundations (such as Soros Open Society Institute,
World Bank, Ford Foundation, IMF, USAID, UNDP, as well as women’s NGOs) supported fem-
inist projects in the region in an effort to enhance democratic processes and promote Western
liberal ideas. In the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century the feminist projects gained
additional momentum in the preparation of CEE countries for their accession to the European
Union (EU), demanding new standards of gender equality. Paradoxically, feminist ideas were
met with suspicion and resistance despite the worsening of women’s status during the transition
(in terms of unemployment, lower income compared to men, loss of social privileges, weaker
political representation and so on). Once again, feminism was displaced because it was seen as
smacking of Bolshevism or left-wing ideologies – now unacceptable ideologies.
Yet, despite this negative situation on the ground, marked by gaps in theory and practice,
lack of feminist structures, and overall resistance to feminism, many feminist ideas did travel to
post-communist societies precisely through translation channels. In the 1990s, there began a
massive process of translating philosophical and political theory (primarily from English) in an
attempt to catch up with Western developments after 45 years of Marxist-Leninist indoctrina-
tion. This opened the doors to the translation of feminist texts dealing with diverse issues such
as reproductive health, body politics, criticism, and sophisticated gender theories. The initiators
of these translation projects were primarily academic women, seeking new methodologies for
their research, successful educational platforms or models to reform social policies as a whole.
Feminism through the lens of cultural translation

The study of women’s and feminist movements in CEE had been neglected for obvious rea-
sons under communism but after its collapse the perspectives of women from the region were
still missing from transnational research. Because of this persistent neglect some scholars have
claimed that the “second world” has fallen through the cracks of transnational feminist dis-
courses, a kind of “non-region,” positioned vis-à-vis the first world – a legacy from the Cold
War (Nowicka 1995; Suchland 2011). Indeed, feminist and gender politics as part of the Cold
War divide were a blindspot in Cold War cultural studies, though it had been an integral part of
state politics and had influenced enormously the lives of women in CEE. The Cold War legacy
can still be felt in recent scholarship on feminism in the post-communist world, where discus-
sions are often framed in comparison and/or opposition to Western feminisms (publications
by scholars such as Nanette Funk, Magda Mueller, Barbara Einhorn, Susan Gal, Gail Klingman,
Krassimira Daskalova, Laura Grünberg, Biljana Kašić, Hana Havelková, Kornelia Slavova, and
others). Much existing research has employed historical, social or political frameworks of analysis
and has focused on the uneasy alliances between East/West feminisms, thus cementing to a great
extent Cold War divisions.
My own background as an activist and veteran translator of feminist texts has alerted me to
the instrumental role of translation in the transnational feminist exchange. This is why I approach
this rather text-centred, intellectual, and academic phenomenon as feminism in/as translation –
not simply as cultural imposition or import but as a two-way incomplete process (in translation),
a set of culturally translated practices, ideas, analytical models, and concepts that have developed
through contact and negotiation. Such a translational perspective can trigger a more nuanced
and non-hierarchical understanding of the East/West feminist interactions, placing the so-called
second world within the bigger frame of feminist geography. Also, this approach corresponds
to the latest developments in the field of feminist translation studies (FTS), which has acted as
a double catalyst of innovation in recent years. On the one hand, FTS has expanded translation
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Kornelia Slavova
studies research by placing on its map discussions about the visibility of women translators
across languages and cultures, about the negotiations of gender, religious, and regional aspects of
identity through translation – i.e., it has boosted the “internationalization of translation studies,”
which – as Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzdad have insisted – “by definition, must be
international, but which has long been dominated by Anglo-American and European perspec-
tives” (2017, XIII). On the other hand, FTS has invigorated feminist praxis because as Olga
Castro and Emek Ergun rightfully argue, “the future of feminisms is in the transnational and the
transnational is made through translation” (2017, 1).
Yet there has been little research on the interconnections between feminism and translation
in CEE: the existing scholarship has focused primarily on the linguistic (un)translatability of
“gender,” on the imposition of English as a lingua franca in feminist discourses, or on sexist
language in Slavonic languages (Havelková 1997; Kašić 2004; Temkina and Zdravomyslova
2006; Tratnik 2011; Valdrová 2016).4 This is why it is necessary to go beyond the linguistic
aspects of translation towards translation as cultural and social practice, taking into consideration
ideology, history, and politics, as well as various categories of social and cultural difference. The
recent “cultural,” “activist,” “sociological,” and “performative” turns in translation studies reflect
the expanding use of the translation paradigm – especially in regard to the societal impact and
consequences of translations. In the last decades, cultural translation theory has been successfully
employed for so many purposes: to do “comparative analysis in global ways” (Asad 1986; Clif-
ford 1997); to analyze cultural communication as well as resistance and violence (Venuti 2002);
to discuss conflict and power imbalance (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002) or “to understand
different modes of being, living and acting in the world” (Maitland 2017). Feminist transla-
tion scholars have also emphasized the transformative potential of translation as an act of “co-
authorship” and “co-operation” (Massardier-Kenney 1997); as a theory and practice of political
responsibility (Spivak 1992; Flotow 2014) or as a tool for social transformation and activism
(Anzaldúa 1987; Castro and Ergun 2017).
By employing the combined lens of cultural translation and FTS, we can look at the con-
tradictory feminist developments in today’s CEE not simply as a zone of expansion but as a
“translation zone” (Apter 2006) – a space of translation practices, of intense interaction across
languages, as well as conflict and change in time. This transnational multilayered translation zone
(beyond the national framework) involves the co-presence and clash of heterogeneous cultures,
ideologies, traditions, and values: from patriarchal legacies, through communist myths of equal-
ity to principles of Western liberalism and postmodern postfeminist frivolities.
Feminism in/as translation: appropriation and distanciation

Feminism in the post-communist world began its existence in a rather translational and aca-
demic mode, as a form of intellectual activism (Gajewska 2010; Grünberg 2011; Slavova 2014).
In the very beginning the feminist flow went primarily in one direction – from West to East,
from the countries with stable democracies to the so-called countries in transition. This process
was erratic and unsystematic, and there was no logical order in introducing feminist theory and
criticism: deconstructionist and postmodern works were translated before feminist classics – for
example, the works of Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, David M. Halperin, Joan W. Scott, Laura
Mulvey, Shoshana Felman, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and others appeared in Bulgarian,
Czech, and Romanian before the classics by Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, or Kate
Millett.5 The leap in time caused a paradoxical situation: more recent anti-foundationalist texts
(post-structuralist, queer, and post-identity theories) spoke in Slavonic languages before the very
foundationalist texts they had been built upon or reacted to.
268
The chaotic and piecemeal practices of translating Western texts brought about many para-
doxes and negative effects. First, skipping decades of feminist development and debate made it
impossible to make connections between various stages and trends in feminist theory (such as
liberal, radical, cultural, Marxist, etc.). Second, this artificially created the impression of femi-
nism as one monolithic movement (under the common denominator “Western feminism”) and
obscured the fact that there are multiple feminisms and multiple Western feminisms too. Until
today no distinction is made between Anglo-American, French, Third World feminisms, black
feminism, Chicano feminism, Islamic feminism, and so on. Third, the idea of one monolithic
and monolingual feminism that speaks English (with a pronounced American accent), has sim-
plified feminist knowledge and has erased the distinction between major types (for example,
between equality feminism and feminism of difference).
The same holds true for the translation of major concepts of Western feminisms – such as
‘gender,’ which has caused much confusion in Slavonic languages. The social and cultural mean-
ings of the term were unfamiliar before the 1990s (only its linguistic usage was known), which
turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. The fact that ‘gender’ had no ideological baggage
related to communist dogmas, and that it sounded less openly feminist and more inclusive
towards men, gave a strong momentum to its appropriation. At the same time, the novelty of the
concept and the lack of knowledge about its almost 30-year history in Western theory created
many difficulties and conundrums.
Four major strategies have been employed for rendering the nomadic concept of ‘gender.’
The first one uses the corresponding grammatical term (‘rod’ in Bulgarian, Slovenian, Czech,
Russian, and Serbian or ‘gen’ in Romanian) – a solution preferred by linguists and literary schol-
ars, who want to emphasize the role of language as a regulatory fiction, thereby insisting on the
separation of “sex” and “gender.” The second strategy – trying to keep both the connection and
the distinction between “sex” and “gender” – coined neologisms such as “social sex,” “socio-
sex,” or “cultural sex,” which explicitate the connection with the body in a rather descriptive but
confusing manner. For example, in Slovenian (and other Slavonic languages) “sex” has been ren-
dered as “biološki spol” (biological sex) and “gender” as “drušbeni spol” (social sex). The third
strategy involves transcribing or transliterating the English word – the easiest option, but it marks
the term immediately as foreign. This is common in Russian and Czech (“гендер”/“gender,”
respectively) but it has also been adopted by many NGOs in CEE because of their closer ties
with Western institutions, women’s advocacy groups, and gender think-tanks, which also pro-
moted the term “gender” through their gender action plans or consultancy practices. A fourth
strategy, adopted primarily by administrative institutions, uses the familiar term “sex” to refer
to gender constructs in a more accessible manner: such as “spol” in Slovenian, “pol” in Serbian,
Croatian, Bulgarian, and Russian, “pohlavie” in Slovak. All these multiple equivalents are used
simultaneously and produce a cacophony of feminist idiolects. Often, they do not work with
established gender definitions but against them.
The conceptual confusion surrounding the porous term “gender” has produced further dis-
crepancies and contaminations: logical and historical connections between the different mean-
ings and uses of the term have been lost in translation; the nuances concerning the sex/gender
distinction have often disappeared, which made the translations of some philosophical texts
extremely challenging.6 Gradually, “gender” as an analytical category has totally displaced the
category of “women” or “feminism.” This conceptual shift has brought about serious political
consequences: it has depoliticized feminism and has further accentuated the d/rift between
practice and theory. Gender is often used to refer to women as a social group – thus taking
over body, sexuality, and other categories of human difference such as class, race, and ethnicity,
while simultaneously failing to establish intersectional connections with them. As a stand-alone
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Kornelia Slavova
category gender is not productive: for example, trafficking of women in CEE is seen primarily
as a women’s issue without being related to the deteriorating economic position of women in
the new capitalist order.
The fluidity of “gender” has affected the translation of many other related terms such as gender-
sensitization, gender-mainstreaming, gender-blindness, transgender, gender-bender, queer,
queering, drag queen, etc. Such has been the case with the concept of “queer,” which operates
differently when transplanted into post-communist reality: in most Slavonic languages the word
has been simply transliterated or non-translated, despite its strong foreign feel. Initially, as was
the case with “gender,” there were attempts to introduce coinages: for example, “queer theory”
was translated into Bulgarian as “teoria na obratnite” (theory of the non-straight ones); “queer
studies” was translated into Polish as “studia pedalskie” (faggot studies) or “studia odmieńców”
(studies of outsiders) but in both cases the idea of non-normativity was lost and pejorative con-
notations are easily felt. Suzana Tratnik, translator of gay and lesbian fiction and queer theory
into Slovenian, has commented how in her translations she “was forced to queer her native
language in order to accommodate concepts and lifestyles that as yet had no place in Slovenian”
(2011, 137). The difficulty here concerns not simply finding an appropriate equivalent for spe-
cific words but translating lesbian and gay cultures as a whole – i.e. deconstructing in translation
major categories and binarisms that have shaped the understanding of sexuality and gendered
identities for centuries on end.7
Non-translations involve the risk of oversimplification and theoretical imprecision, despite
the fact that usually they are accompanied by lengthy editor’s or translator’s explanations, pref-
aces or notes – what Kwame Appiah calls “thick translation” (1993, 817 in Venuti 2000, 417).
But thick translation cannot make up for the thinning or distortion of meaning. For example,
the Western academic fields of feminist studies or women’s studies were ‘translated’ and safely
packaged in CEE in the more inclusive and trendy label “gender studies,” which was easier to
be approved by academic and political institutions (for example, teaching and research institu-
tions in the Czech Republic use “gender studies” and not the translated form “rodová studia”
or “studia rodu”).8 However, diverging academic and epistemological projects are often hidden
behind such newly adopted or borrowed terms: for example, the Russian distinction between
women’s studies and gender studies does not correspond to the Anglo-American distinction as
the “former deals with demography, psychology and family sociology in the Soviet tradition,
whereas the latter is more related to Western developments” (Temkina and Zdravomyslova
2006, 242). Another twist of meanings can be observed in Polish: “ ‘feminism’ implies an activist
bent, whereas ‘gender studies’ refers to a kind of academic feminism, dealing with theory and
criticism” (Gajewska 2010, 11).
Similar ambiguities have arisen in reverse translation or self-translation when we try to theo-
rize our own communist or post-communist experience in the politically correct and sophis-
ticated Western terminology. It is not accidental that major Western liberal concepts such as
“equality,” “women’s question,” “women’s rights,” and “emancipation” reverberate cynically in a
post-communist setting – for more than four decades in the past they were used as clichés and
empty slogans by communist propaganda, hence, they still carry strong ideological inflections.
Let me give two recent examples of cultural translation of EU gender policies, which have
produced somewhat ironic effects because of the misuse of concepts in the past or their misap-
propriation in the present. The first one concerns the institutionalized policy of gender equality
in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria as part of harmonizing national laws
with EU legislation. The greater part of EU policy papers and laws primarily use the word-
ing “gender equality” (such as The European Pact for Gender Equality) or the more descriptive
270
wording (such as The New European Pact for Equality between Women and Men for the Period
2011–2020). In an attempt to make EU and local policy papers accessible to general audiences,
the respective national documents in translation use different variants for “gender.” For example,
in Croatian and Bulgarian the term “sex” (“spol” or “pol,” respectively) substitutes “gender” as
evidenced in the following titles: Nacionalna politika za ravnopravnost spolova od 2011 do 2015
and Natsionalna strategiya za nasurchavane na ravnopostavenostta na polovete za perioda 2009–2015
(emphasis mine). In Czech and Romanian “gender” is often explicitated as “men and women”
as in the following titles: Aktualizovaná opatření Priorit a postupů vlády při prosazování rovných
příležitostí pro ženy a muže and Strategia nationala pentru egalitatea de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi
pentru perioada 2010–2012 (emphasis mine). Obviously, official translations in the local languages
aim at greater clarity but in practice they have either obliterated the distinction between “sex”
and “gender” or have reduced the meaning of “gender” to the two traditional genders only. In
addition, EU translated documents reveal an interesting slippage of terms: “equality” has been
gradually replaced by safer (less ideologically loaded) terms such as “equity,” “equal opportuni-
ties” or “gender mainstreaming” – a noticeable trend in the Western world too.
Initially, the cultural and linguistic mimesis in translating the Anglo-American concept of
“gender” seemed to work: it avoided ideological confrontation and ensured easier inclusion
into global discourses and policy-making. But as in any process of translation there comes a
moment when accumulated misapprehension backfires – as demonstrated recently in the case
with the so-called Istanbul Convention. In fact, the appellation refers to Treaty No 210 of the
Council of Europe – a 30-page document postulating measures on preventing and combating
violence against women and domestic violence – which was signed in Istanbul by almost all
EU countries in 2011. In January 2018, the Bulgarian Parliament did not ratify the Conven-
tion because of the confusing translation of “gender” as “sotsialen pol” (socially constructed
sex), which was misinterpreted as “third sex” by some religious institutions, nationalist parties,
and political organizations – hence, seen as a dangerous gateway to legalization of transgen-
der people and gay marriages.9 After heated debates, protests, and petitions on all possible
sides, the Bulgarian Parliament cancelled the ratification process. This case of translational
contestation demonstrates the serious consequences of translation as a political act and proves
that domestication does not happen on the page of the translated text but in everyday social
practices.
Feminism in/as translation: adaptation and rewriting

After the initial phase of intense translations of Anglo-American gender-centred texts into the
languages of CEE countries, there followed a process of interpreting and re-thinking of what
had already been translated and paying greater attention to the context of the receiving cultures,
the political systems, the applicability and translatability of concepts and practices. The Western
feminist knowledge already translated did not remain a static foreign product – it was re-created
and rewritten from the vantage point of the receiving cultures. There followed a process of
CEE women speaking back or translating back their specific experience under two drastically
different social and political systems into the dominant paradigms and discourses of Western
feminism – through local publications in the respective languages or in international journals
in English, blogs, local and international conferences. The rapidly growing feminist research in
CEE (on women’s history, literature, culture, politics, law, etc.) in the respective languages reveals
bifurcated tongues and positions of local feminists in their attempt to “translate” Western theo-
ries into local politics and vice versa.
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Over the years, the cultural struggle over meanings has become less dramatic with the reali-
zation that gender roles and conceptions of sexuality are different from culture to culture, from
language to language (as evidenced in the resignifications of feminisms and gender in German,
French, Chinese, and other languages). The early stages of resistance and distanciation have given
way to more productive feminist negotiations through translation. One such inspiring example
of transnational feminism in post-communist CEE has been the adaptation of the American
feminist classic Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), published first in 1971 by The Boston Women’s
Health Book Collective, and already translated into 40 languages. Around the beginning of
the 21st century seven NGOs in CEE published their translated versions of the book (funded
through the Soros Open Society Network) into Russian (1995 and 2007), Bulgarian, Ser-
bian, and Armenian (2001), Romanian (2002), Polish (2004), and Albanian (2006). As the first
medical resource book on women’s health these editions were groundbreaking. They informed
women how to be educated consumers of health care at a moment when the old healthcare
system had been dismantled; they empowered them at a time marked by increasing feminization
of poverty and unemployment, growing drug abuse, abortion rates, and domestic violence, as
well as trafficking of women, and many other problems.
All these editions have to a different extent adapted the content and structure of the original
OBOS by cutting certain sections or chapters from the original, as well as adding locally relevant
information and visual material. For example, the Bulgarian and Armenian adaptations stress the
ideology of the book as a program for women’s health movements, whereas the Polish adapta-
tion and the Moldovan edition (distributed in Romania too) focus on medical information
rather than political activism. The Bulgarian team included activists and doctors who seriously
adapted the chapters on nutrition or over-medicalization as they were not relevant in a country
with medication and food deficits at the time.10 Apart from paying attention to the feminist
politics of the original, the translators had to take into account the poetics of translation too.
Translating such a rich and non-hierarchically written book of testimonials by women of dif-
ferent race, age, class, profession, religion, and sexual orientation, who spoke openly about their
bodies and sexuality was a rather challenging task for Eastern European translators, trained in
uniformity, sameness, and pseudo-prudery. As translator of the Bulgarian edition Nashite tela,
nie samite I was simultaneously overwhelmed and frustrated by the polyphony of voices in the
book: how to render the inclusive “we” language in a form that sounded natural and inviting for
Bulgarian readers who had a strong aversion to consciousness-raising practices after decades of
enforced Bolshevik collectivism? This is why the more extreme collective calls for global sister-
hood had to be toned down in the Bulgarian language. Thanks to the editorial freedom enjoyed,
the adaptations of OBOS in CEE have been meaningfully and creatively domesticated by bring-
ing the book closer to the needs and the cultural norms of the receiving societies – thus serving
as a successful model for transnational feminist collaboration and activism through translation.
Gradually, in the last two decades, “feminism in/as translation” has grown into a double-
sided project of simultaneous construction and deconstruction: appropriating relevant Western
feminist knowledge and methodologies, while critically adapting and revising them; bending
the languages and cultural norms in CEE, while destabilizing the language and foundations of
existing feminisms. The continued process of feminist translation and self-translation in CEE
has brought more and more tensions and contradictions to light, questioning established con-
ceptions and ideas such as the Western understanding of patriarchy and patriarchal structures;
the universality of women’s oppression and victimization as the sole basis for feminist struggle;
the narrowness of “the equality of rights agenda”; the universality of feminist goals, methods,
theories, and analytical concepts; the role of alliances with men; the automatic alliance between
feminism and Marxism, and other serious issues.11
272
Conclusion
The newly emerging feminist projects in the post-communist world have demonstrated once
again that translation is essential to the process of change that feminism advocates: on the one
hand, as culturally translated practices, they have destabilized established meanings and categories
of feminist thought, but on the other, they have evolved and particularized in the very process
of translation. Despite the time warps and divergences in the CEE feminist “translation zone,”
the body of translated feminist texts, policies, and ideas has had an invigorating effect on soci-
etal transformation in the region in many ways: by providing transferable knowledge through
which a whole range of new methodologies, standards, analytical concepts, and categories were
brought into research in the region; by breaking representational taboos about sexuality and the
body, and creating new sensitivity (including gender-sensitive language) to combat sexism and
homophobia; by operating as a tool of democracy building, fostering greater critical thinking
about overall power structures and oppression based on “gender” and other categories of human
difference, as well as other positive effects. At the same time, the incomplete development of the
feminist projects in/as translations in CEE can hopefully provide useful material for continued
research in the area of cross-cultural collaboration and activism as well as transnational femi-
nism – which are by default translational.
Further reading
Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History.
The only journal in English on the history of women in CEE; contains useful clusters on The Birth of
a Field: Women’s and Gender Studies (2011, Volume 5 (1)), Gendering the Cold War in the Region
(2014, Volume 8 (1)), Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited (2016, Volume 10 (1)).
Flotow, Luise von and Farahzad Farzaneh, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons.
The collection introduces case studies on feminist translation practices from under-researched locations
such as Iran, Egypt, Japan, Eastern and Central Europe, China, and other regions.
Jusová, Iveta and Jiřina Šiklová, eds. 2016. Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
An informative book about gender, sexuality, and ethnicity issues in Czech culture, drawing parallels
with other CEE countries.
Phoenix, Ann and Kornelia Slavova, eds. 2011. Living in Translation: Voicing and Inscribing Women’s
Lives and Practices. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4).
This special issue discusses the connection between language, translation, and women’s identity in
Europe, including CEE.
Related topics
Feminist translation studies, women in central and Eastern Europe, cultural translation, gender
studies, transnational feminism
Notes
1 The research for this chapter was made possible by the generous support of IFK, Kunstuniversität Linz
in Wien.
2 “Post-communist world” or “CEE” are used here as umbrella terms to delineate common tendencies –
claiming neither universality for the 29 countries involved nor exhaustive investigation. The terms ‘com-
munism’ and ‘socialism’ are used interchangeably: the former refers to the specificity of the communist
political regime whereas the latter to society, economy, and way of life as a whole under ‘state socialism.’
273
Kornelia Slavova
3 See Alena Wagnerova, Women as the Object and Subject of the Socialist Form of Women’s Emancipa-
tion. In Czech Feminisms (2016); Georzheta Nazarska. 2007. The Bulgarian Association of University
Women 1924–1950. Aspasia, 1, 153–175; Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, eds. 2002. Patriarchy and
Emancipation in the History of Romanian Political Thought. Iaşi: Polirom.
4 Slavonic languages are synthetic and highly inflectional, with three genders and rigid marking in nouns,
adjectives, and tense forms. The pervasive usage of gender-specific suffixes and forms facilitates sexist
usage: as Jana Valdrová explains about the Czech language, “due to generic masculine forms women
are invisible in language use and sexist patterns are common” (2016, 272).
5 See the anthologies Miglena Nikolchina, et al., eds. 1997. Vremeto na zhenite. Sofia: Sofia University
Press; Sneja Gunew, ed. 2002. Feministkoto znanie. Sofia: Polis; Martina Pachmanová, ed. 2002. Nevid-
itelná žena: antologie současného amerického myšlení o feminismu, dějinách a vizualitě. Praha: One Woman
Press. Former Yugoslavia makes an exception as the first feminist texts were translated there as early as
the 1970s (works by Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Julia Mitchell,
and Julia Kristeva).
6 For example, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity makes no sense in
Bulgarian translation [D. Zaharieva, trans. 2003. Bezpokoistvata okolo rodoviya pol. Feminisum i podrivane
na identichnostta. Sofia: KH] due to the obliterated distinction between sex and gender. The translations
into other languages in the region adopt diverse strategies as seen in their titles: Bogdan Ciubuc, trans.
2000. Genul – un mar al discordiei. Feminismul si subversiunea identitatii. Bucuresti: Editura Univers; Suzana
Tratnik, trans. 2001. Tezave s spolom: Feminizem in subverzija identitete. Ljubliana: ŠKUC Lambda; Jana
Juráňová, trans. 2003/2015/2017. Trampoty s rodom. Feminizmus a podrývanie identity. Bratislava: Aspekt;
Mirjana Paić-Jurinić, trans. 2003. Nevolje s rodom. Feminizam i subverzija identiteta. Zagreb: Ženska
infoteka; Karolina Krasuska, trans. 2003/2005/2008. Uwiklani w pleć. Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna.
7 Under communism homosexuality was criminalized and medicalized – often presented as yet another
dimension of Western decadent bourgeois lifestyle. However, there were some noticeable differences
in CEE: translations in the field of sexuality and homosexuality were popular in former Yugoslavia as
early as the 1980s through alternative sub-culture and women’s and lesbian groups. Socialist Czecho-
slovakia also had a more enlightened politics – the first country in the Eastern bloc to decriminalize
homosexuality in the mid-1960s, which explains its more tolerant public attitude towards gays and
lesbians as well as its vocal LGTB community today.
8 Ironically, years later the label “gender studies” turned out not to be so safe: for example, in 2018 the Hun-
garian government banned gender studies programs, forcing the leading institution in the development of
gender studies in CEE (Central European University) to move to Vienna after 25 years of existence.
9 The resistance was targeted primarily to article 3(c), which defines “gender” as “the socially constructed
roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men,”
Available at: www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/090000168008482e
10 The prefaces to the translated editions are available at: http://ourbodiesourselves.org/global-projects).
For more on the travelling of OBOS see Kathy Davis. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How
Feminism Travels across Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; for Eastern European adaptations,
see Anna Bogic ‘Translating into Democracy: The Politics of Translation, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the
“Other Europe.” ’ In Flotow, Luise von and Farahzdad Farzaneh, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different
Voices and New Horizons. New York: Routledge, 56–75.
11 For a more detailed analysis of this double-sided project, see Kornelia Slavova (2006).
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21
The uneasy transfer of feminist
ideas and gender theory
Post-Soviet English-Russian translations
Tatiana Barchunova
Introduction
Russia has a rich history of feminism going back to first-wave feminism dealing with political
rights (Stites 1991). However, in the late 20th century, feminism was perceived as a Western
phenomenon. Therefore, when the interest in gender studies and feminist theory arose in the
1990s, these topics began to develop within two frameworks: that of the history of the women’s
movement and private life in Russia connected with earlier Russian traditions, on the one
hand, and that of research on economics, the sociology of gender, and the history of Western
feminist philosophy, on the other hand. The second framework was essentially a translation pro-
ject per se, though some translation projects were also realized within the first framework. The
great majority of the translated texts in this late 20th century period were from English. This
chapter focuses on translations of broadly understood feminist academic texts including texts
in feminist theory and gender studies, but excluding fiction and political journalism. Russian
gender studies and translations of gender studies and feminist texts developed in several waves.
The first wave began in the ten-year period between 1992 and 2002. It was followed by a high
wave of translations from 2003 to 2006 when these were funded by private Western funds and
individuals, and printed by publishing companies of varying sizes. The decline of the systemic
funding occurred between 2007 and 2015 when Western foundations had to close or reduce
their grant programs and leave Russia. This situation was caused by a crisis in the relations
between the Russian Federation and the West. The activities of Western charity organizations
began to be perceived as an instrument of brain drain and ideological subversion. The wave of
gender studies and feminist translations after 2007 has not been high. However, certain pub-
lishers continue to print interesting materials on sexuality and everyday history, and Internet
networks accumulate and disseminate feminist translations and resources, which all contribute
to the development of feminist discourse.
This chapter is based on an analysis of the texts translated and published during the first two
waves, and my own experience of translating from English to Russian during the first and third
waves of recent feminist and gender studies. I see translation in this field as a process of creat-
ing a new type of economy of discourse, which occurred not only in gender studies in Russia
but in the other social sciences and humanities as well. By economy of discourse, I understand
276
Feminist ideas and gender theory
a certain mode of organizing texts (and communication in general) related to a certain institu-
tional framework. Translation is not just a transfer carried out through Russian-language texts;
it plays a role in the constitution of a new economy of discourse which is perceived as Western
although over time it has come to include more and more non-Western texts. I will expose
the differences between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ types of economy of discourse later in the chap-
ter (see sections two and three).
This chapter consists of four sections. The first three deal with the institutional and discursive
settings of the translation of feminist texts into Russian. They provide descriptions and expla-
nations of the challenges that the translators of feminist and gender studies texts encountered.
Section one deals with the Russian language as lingua franca during pre-Soviet, Soviet, and
post-Soviet times. Section two deals with the Soviet economy of discourse and its approach to
translation. Section three addresses the issue of the transformation of the Soviet economy of
discourse since the 1990s and the constitution of the new discourse. Here, I look at the emer-
gence of gender studies in the post-Soviet context, and how translation as a practice has changed
within the framework of the social transformation the USSR underwent. Section four is an
empirical analysis of the conceptual challenges the Russian translators faced in their attempts to
appropriate the Western discourse of feminist and gender studies.
Section one: Russian language as lingua franca

The first waves of translation of feminist materials in the former Soviet Union comprise largely
English texts moving into Russian; the translations I refer to come from the Republic of Belarus,
the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, three independent states constituted by a treaty in 1991.
Today, Belarussians and Ukrainians also translate from English into the corresponding titular
languages. Single translation projects of feminist literature into Russian were implemented in
other post-Soviet states.
These translations into Russian tended to continue the language policy of both pre-Soviet
Russia and the Soviet Union. Both Belarus and Ukraine became parts of the Russian Empire
before 1917, before the October Revolution. Belarus became a part of the Russian Empire at
the end of the 18th century, and some parts of Ukraine even earlier. After the revolution of 1917,
both regions became socialist republics, and were later integrated into the Soviet Union. The
official policy of the Russian Empire was russification. In 1836, education in the Belarusian lan-
guage was forbidden, and the Latin alphabet was forbidden in 1859. Ukraine went through the
same process. In 1876, the publication of books in Ukrainian was forbidden. In the Soviet Union
this policy continued, and the Russian language was officially announced as “the language for
international communication.” Between 1989 and 1991, language policy changed radically with
the Baltic States and other former republics of the Soviet Union becoming independent states.
Today, the linguistic situation varies in different post-Soviet countries. In some cases, the Rus-
sian language has lost its official status and been replaced by titular languages of the respective
nation state plus English. In Belarus, however, Russian remains one of the important commu-
nication instruments. The major reason for translation into Russian seems to be pragmatic: the
non-governmental organizations that funded the translations thought that if the text were trans-
lated into Russian more people would read it than if it were translated into the titular languages
of the new post-Soviet states.
The good thing about the Russian language as lingua franca is that it is open to borrowings.
Such novel concepts as gender, queer, sexism, heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and
cathexis were phonetically calqued and integrated into the discourse of social sciences. However,
some terms, such as “emphasized femininity,” or words such as “empowerment,” “advocacy,”
277
Tatiana Barchunova
“sensibility,” “standpoint,” and others, are more difficult to appropriate since they cannot be
readily calqued and need to be introduced through lexical innovation. This takes time and
discussion.
What is difficult about Russian is that it is a strongly gendered language. It has three gram-
matical genders. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles, and verbs in the past tense are gendered
and have to be gender coordinated. Therefore, the English-Russian translation of feminist texts
demands that any subject be designated either as male or female. In English, this aspect is very
often indeterminate but the Russian translator has to make a choice. Very often, it is not clear
which version is preferable. This problem is not just a grammatical issue. It raises the question
about how the subject of feminism is to be understood: is it always a woman or can it be a man?
Section two: the Soviet economy of discourse,

and translation practice
Registers of the Soviet discourse

The transfer of Western feminist ideas through Russian translation proved to be a complex
project of appropriating concepts that did not exist in Russian-language social sciences. Further,
besides the particular conceptual challenges, translators had to deal with different principles of
organization of discourse and translation practice in general. Therefore, to understand the dra-
matic process of searching for equivalence it is important to look at a wider framework which
may help consider concrete cases of misinterpretation that obscured the meanings of the source
texts through deliberate translation solutions.
The general Soviet economy of discourse had much in common with earlier discursive
traditions. The pre-Soviet Russian economy of discourse was constituted by three unequally
developed registers: official, private, and public. Experts in Russian history, literature, political
philosophy, and linguistics claim that the Russian communication system is dominated by two
registers – the official and the private; while the public register, which is quite prominent in the
English language economy of discourse, is underdeveloped (Vakhtin and Firsov 2016). The Rus-
sian official discourse originates in the concept of a single truth of the Orthodox Christianity.
Later it evolved into the concept of monopoly of the state to know the one truth and to transfer
this truth to the people.
The official register is a formal and highly ritualized type of discourse. The goal of this type
of discourse is not to discuss a problem, or develop negotiation that aims for consensus. It is
rather a ritual designed to demonstrate a formal agreement of the members of a collective.
A typical case of such an official discursive situation might be a meeting of the Communist
Party or the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) members, which had a very strict pro-
tocol with several speeches and a final vote in favour of the resolution that had been written
before the meeting. The essential part of the official register is to unmask dissidents. It is called
a critique but it is not about critique per se. It is about othering that can imply stigmatization
or exclusion from the collective – exile or professional segregation. This is not a specifically
Russian phenomenon.
The goal of communication in the private register is not negotiation or discussion either. Its
goal is to express one’s opinions, but it has little to do with a common agenda or action (Vakhtin
2017). A typical Soviet case of a private conversation is the so-called kitchen-talk. The Soviet
kitchen was a semi-public semi-private space to discuss political and world view problems
and to raise the famous Russian questions – “Who is guilty?” and “What should be done?” –
and sometimes even to suggest answers. Private discourse can be very passionate and produce
278
conflict but usually it will not lead to any common action. The participants of the kitchen-talk
express their opinions but they will not reach an agreement or common agenda.
The public register aims at a free exchange of opinions, sharing information, and making a
collective decision to act. It must be based on arguments essential to persuade the opponents.
This register is either totally lacking or is underdeveloped at different stages of Russian history.
Official register and the translation canon

The official register had a strong impact on the Soviet approach to translation in social sciences
and literature. Academic discourse, which covers such scientific genres as conference papers,
publications in periodicals, books, and dissertations including translations of academic literature,
is normally considered a version of the public register. It must be different from the official reg-
ister because, as a public discourse, it has to be based on the argumentation: its goal is to prove
a thesis by demonstrating the empirical data and theoretical bases. It is also different from the
private register since it proceeds from shared assumptions, and its goal is to persuade the reader
of the correctness of the conclusions. However, in pre-Soviet Russia and in the Soviet Union,
the impact of the official discourse on science was determined by the political control of the
Russian Academy from its incipience in the 18th century. The impact of the official register was
realized through three interrelated practices: structural organization of texts, state control of publica-
tions, and conceptual design. These three principles also constituted the Soviet approach to the
translation of scientific and popular science literature, especially in the social sciences.
The compulsory principle of the structural organization of any text in the social sciences was
ideological framing, the so-called critique of bourgeois science from a progressive Marxist-Leninist
standpoint that proclaimed the advantages of socialism over capitalism. The so-called critique
of bourgeois social sciences was the canonical way of exposing any Western concept or theory
that was inconsistent with Marxism-Leninism. The Marxist-Leninist approach was considered
a universal explanatory model. For example, in the preface to the translation of the book Words
and Things. A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology by Ernest Gellner, the
Soviet philosopher Vladimir V. Mshvenieradze writes:
Gellner who was brought up in the traditions of the bourgeois culture, is not devoid of
the bourgeois prejudices against the revolutionary proletariat and its ideology–Marxism-
Leninism. [. . .] Ignoring Marxist-Leninist philosophy closes to the author [Gellner] the
only scientific way to crush linguistic philosophy.
(1962, 21, 23) (my translation)
The political part of Marxism-Leninism – scientific communism – involved the schematic

exposition of Marxist ideas about the development of human society and its inevitable cli-
max – a socialist revolution – as a means of attaining a society with justice and equality. In a
sense, Marxism-Leninism followed the old Russian tradition of doing philosophy as a world
view represented by the philosophical ideas of Russian writers. However, unlike pre-Soviet
thought, the Soviet approach was characterized by apologetic attitudes and the lack of criti-
cism towards the current political regime. And in regard to gender, since the socialist revolution
was considered the universal means to solve the women question, such problems as occupational
hazards and discrimination against women were silenced. Mainstream women’s history had to
describe the experience of those women who were involved in the revolutionary movement
or World War II, who belonged to the progressive classes, contributed to the building of social-
ism, or belonged to the artistic milieu. There were also books about women-scientists. Though
279
Tatiana Barchunova
women’s history written under the Soviet regime was one-sided, the appropriation of Western
gender and women’s history through Russian translations was smoother than the appropriation
of feminist philosophy. The quality of translations of historical texts was better even during the
first wave of translations.
In Soviet Russia, strict state control filtered any publication that went beyond the permitted
criticism of minor deficiencies of the social system. The risk of being persecuted for a critique of
the socialist economy or human condition was high. When in the late 1970s, a group of women
intellectuals in Leningrad tried to openly address issues of discrimination against women, they
were persecuted and eventually exiled. Even mild forms of criticism could imply the total dis-
possession of the critic. The members of editorial boards risked their status and employment
if they published papers that might provoke debates. The only translated book on the women
question I could read before the 1990s was Woman and Socialism by August Bebel translated from
German by an anonymous translator and published in 1959 by the State Publishing House of
Political Literature. My hypothesis is that it could be printed at that time for two reasons. First,
it was the so-called Khrushchev Thaw period, when Soviet readers got more access to Western
literature. And second, the book was ideologically proper from the point of view of the Soviet
authorities. Bebel qualified the independent women’s movement as bourgeois. Yet, the goals of
the socialist liberation movement coincided with the goals of women’s movement. He sup-
ported the doctrine that women could suffer only under capitalism, while under socialism all
problems of discrimination would be automatically solved. This doctrine rendered an independ-
ent women’s movement and feminism as its ideology superfluous. It is the socialist state, the soci-
ety, that has to address women’s problems. Soviet women were ‘allowed’ to associate only for the
sake of solidarity with those who suffered under the yoke of capitalism. Translation of any materi-
als addressing the issues of mobilization of women into independent movement was impossible.
State control over the translation and circulation of Western resources implied the formation
of a canonical approach to printed texts in general and to translations in particular. The consti-
tuting character of the canon is standardization. There are several traits of this standardization:
standardized registers, standardized editorial norms, and selection of lingua franca. A positive
side of the canon was professional editorial preparation of the manuscript. The standardization
of stylistic and grammatical requirements and strict scheduling of publications implied high-
quality editorial work, copy-editing, and spell-checking. Using Russian as lingua franca was a
part of the canon.
Section three: the post-Soviet economy of discourse: translation

becomes an instrument to appropriate Western gender
studies and feminism
Institutional changes and naive translation

At the end of the 20th century the radical changes in economic and social policies brought
with them changes in the institutional design of the economy of discourse and in the politics
of translation.
In the early post-Soviet period, the so-called Transformation of the 1990s, an avalanche of
Western texts flowed into the former Soviet Union. The Soviet economy of discourse encoun-
tered the Western economy of discourse directly and in a different setting. Mediation by the
state substantially decreased while other agents appeared on the translation scene. Texts in gender
studies and feminist theory comprised only a part of the multi-temporal and multi-paradigmatic
English discourse that had to be appropriated.
280
The institutional setting included both new and old agents in the translation process. Among
the old agents were professional translators and researchers in the relevant areas who could act
as either translators or editors. Among the new agents were private publishers, foreign pri-
vate funders, and “naïve translators.” “Naïve translator” is not an absolute and unified category.
A naïve translator is not familiar with the subject matter of the source text, and their com-
mand of the languages of both target and source texts may be low. The level and the quality of
naïveté can differ. Basically, a naïve translation has linguistic mistakes (grammatical and stylistic)
and is either totally or partially semantically non-transparent. Naïve translators, unlike amateur
translators, are often unaware of the difference between their own translation competence and
accepted linguistic and publication standards. Sociologically, they can be volunteers in non-
governmental organizations or freelancers who do not have sociological, historical, philosophi-
cal, or any other appropriate background for the work in question.
The post-Soviet version of the Russian economy of discourse inherited the problem of
the underdeveloped public register of discourse. However, the domination of the official reg-
ister over the scientific discourse decreased with the decrease of state control over publication
processes. The discursive rituals such as references to the ideologically approved texts and the
critique of bourgeois science were gone with the new winds from the West. Major agents pro-
moting the introduction of gender studies into Russian academia were private Western funders
that funded single projects via relatively extensive grant programs. For instance, American pub-
lisher and editor Katrina van den Heuvel supported the translation and publication of The
Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (Friedan 1994). She also supported publication of the Rus-
sian version of the famous book Our Bodies, Ourselves. A Book by Women and for Women by The
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective which was printed in 1995 by Progress and Univers
Publishers. The majority of English to Russian translation projects were funded by The J.D.
and C.T. MacArthur Foundation, and the George Soros Open Society Foundation. The most
extensive translation project was realized by the Soros Foundation that supported single book
translations and the series of translations entitled “Gender Collection. Foreign Classics,” which
consisted of about ten books and some other editions.
The selection of articles and book chapters for Russian-language readers or anthologies in
many cases follows the Western canon of feminist and gender studies readers and anthologies.
They include papers and single book chapters by such authors as Judith Butler, Nancy Cho-
dorow, Carol Gilligan, Heidi Hartmann, Laura Mulvey, Gayle Rubin, Joan W. Scott, and others
which were selected by editors of anthologies in the West.
Some translations in gender studies and other fields of the social sciences and humanities,
which were printed under the auspices of the private foundations, were done by translators who
had appropriate linguistic and professional training. However, the private funding and printing of
translation projects had an ambiguous effect on the translation scene. Making a tremendous con-
tribution to opening up Western science and philosophy to the Russian-speaking readers, these
projects also promoted the marketization of translation and precarious employment: underpay-
ment, limited contract time, lack of professional editing and proofreading, lack of time for profes-
sional discussions. The private funders operated through a grant system, which may have been
too strict for professional translators who were used to different timing. This is when naïve trans-
lators entered the scene. They were not familiar with the publication canon: stages of translation,
editing, and proofreading. Some of them were volunteers, enthusiastic about the subject matter of
the source texts but lacking the appropriate skills. Since the state no longer controlled the quality
of the publications, the quality of printed translations decreased. Many texts produced by transla-
tors in the 1990s and the early 2000s are examples of naïve translation, and they are abundant. For
instance, all translations of Judith Butler’s texts made at that time were naïve.
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I will give two examples of naïve translations here. The first example is the anonymous
translation of the article by Susan Moller Okin Gender, the Public and the Private (Okin 2001).
The source text was published in the collection of papers Political Theory Today (Held 1991).
However, in the Russian annotation, the collection of papers is called “Political Sciences Tuday”
[sic]. The quality of editorial preparation of the manuscript is poor. Many English-language
references are confusing. The author of the article is called Okeen (Okin 2001, 129, 131). The
reader of the book will have difficulties in recognizing Rawls in Rouls (129); Elshtain – in
Elstain (130) and Elstein (129); Pateman – in Paitman (131); A. Jaggar – in E. Jegger (ibid.), etc.
The philosophical competence of the translator and editor is insufficient to interpret the argu-
mentation in the source text. They do not seem to be familiar with the discussions about the
dichotomy of private and public in liberal philosophy, and its criticisms. For their interpretation
of these terms they selected terms from the repertoire of Marxism-Leninism – social and personal
(общественное и частное or личное) – that have different connotations than the ‘public and
private’ dichotomy. According to Marxism, private property has to be demolished, while for
liberal writers the area of the private and privacy have a special value. Thus, Okin, following
Virginia Woolf, writes about the importance of privacy for women. The cohesion of the target
text is ruined when privacy is translated as “seclusion” (уединенность) (see more about inco-
herence of translations in Section four of this article). The term gender is translated as sex (пол),
though by 2001, the term gender (гендер) was already widely used in Russian. In cases where
Okin discusses both gender and sex, her argumentation in the target text is not transparent.
One of the major concepts of the source text – construction and deconstruction – are semantically
disconnected in the target text. Construction is translated as structure, or form (оформленность)
while deconstruction becomes analysis (разбор) (114, 119). The dichotomy ‘masculine and feminine’
is translated as ‘masculinist and feminist’ (маскулинистский и феминистский) (119).
Another case of the naïve translation is the Russian version of Collins Dictionary of Sociol-
ogy by David Jary and Julia Jary ( Jary and Jary 1999). It is a more radical example of a naïve
translation because one expects that a dictionary as a normative text is clear and correct. There
is no mention of the editorial board of the Russian edition. The edition is full of mistakes:
grammatical, stylistic, semantic, terminological, factual. I will give only a few examples here (for
more examples, see Barchunova 2001). For instance, in the translation of the title of the book
by Claude Lévi-Strauss Wild Opinion (Дикое мнение) ( Jary and Jary 1999, vol. 1, 62), it is very
difficult to recognize the original title La Pensée sauvage. Simone de Beauvoir is hidden behind
the name Bovua (Бовуa) (388, 411, Vol. 1), Helene Cixous – behind the noun sixa (cикса)
(Vol. 1, 208) and the name Six (Vol. 2, 388). Almost every article of the Dictionary has refer-
ences to the literature, but there is no bibliography or index. Some articles related to gender and
feminism sound anecdotal to say the least. Femininity is called feminity (Vol. 1, 208). The concept
of homosexuality is medicalized and translated as homosexualism (Vol. 1, 125); suffragette is called
sulfragette (Vol. 2, 312); gay marriage is translated as licentious (беспутный) (Vol. 1, 61).
Naïve translations of this kind undermine the readers’ trust in the content of the source texts
and the potential effects of the feminist agenda.
English-Russian conceptual gap

The major paradigmatic gap between the Soviet social science tradition and Western gender
theory is found between the materialistic foundationalism of the former, and the social con-
structionism of the latter. For many years, Russian-speaking social scientists had to follow the
simplified version of Marxist social theory and to refer to its basic statement: matter is primary,
and consciousness is secondary. In social science, this so-called materialistic approach meant
282
reducing social phenomena to economics and the development of the mode of production.
This reduction was defined as the principle of causality, which was proclaimed as one of the
advantages of historical materialism in comparison to bourgeois sociology. The concept of gen-
der as a social construct and social constructionism in general in opposition to essentialism and
naturalism (materialism) proved to be one of the challenges for translators who were educated
in the spirit of materialistic foundationalism. The appropriation of the term gender is a graphic
illustration of the conceptual gap that loomed large.
At first, the way that the concept of gender was appropriated reproduced the reductionist
schematics of materialism. After the publication of Russian translations of several important
constructionist and phenomenological works in sociology and social anthropology (Berger and
Luckmann 1995; Schütz 2003; West and Zimmerman 1997) the interpretation of gender as a
social construct became more consistent, and the term itself slowly but surely began to be used
on a par with the term sex. In 1992, gender was first used in brackets and translated as social sex
(социальный пол) (Voronina 1992, 11, 109). In 1994, both sex (пол) and gender (гендер) were
used to translate the term gender (Lorber 1994). By 1997, gender (гендер) began to be wide-
spread. In 2002, the Dictionary of Gender Terms (Denisova 2002) fixed the term gender (гендер)
and its various implementations in social science and humanities. However, in order to over-
come the materialistic schematics certain other notions were needed as well. The most impor-
tant of these was the denial of the biological origin of gender differences, and the implantation
of the idea that social reality is constructed through social interaction: for example, recognition
of the fact that emotions and responses to them are social phenomena and can lead to beliefs that
men are rational and women are not. The notion that social reality is socially constructed proved
to be very difficult for the interpreters/translators of gender-focused texts who were used to the
naïve realism of Marxism-Leninism. I will demonstrate this later in the chapter.
An example of the materialistic reductionism in the interpretation of gender is the trans-
lation of the famous definition of gender by Joan W. Scott. Scott presents her definition of
gender as consisting of two parts, and the second part is more important than the first (see
Table 21.1). In her interpretation of the text, the Russian translator E. Ananieva reproduces the
materialist scheme, Marxist naturalism, though in a sophisticated way. The translator also divides
the definition into two parts but unlike the source text, the first part of the target text refers to
gender, while the second one refers to sex. The meaning of the target definition is: there is a
primary biological substratum (sex), and there is gender which is consciousness of differences
between sexes.
Table 21.1 Definition of gender by Joan W. Scott in Russian translation
Original Printed translation from English into Reverse translation

Russian
“[. . .] gender is a “осознание гендерной “the awareness of

constitutive element of принадлежности – belonging to a gender is
social relationships based конституирующий элемент a constitutive element of
on perceived differences социальных отношений, social relationships based
between the sexes, and основанный на воспринимаемых on perceived differences
gender is a primary way of различиях между полами, а between the sexes, while
signifying relationships of пол – это приоритетный способ sex is a prior means to
power” (Scott 1988, 42) выражения властных отношений” express power relations”
(Cit. in: Lorber 1994, 127) (Cit. in: Lorber 1994, 127)
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Tatiana Barchunova
Later interpretations of the cluster of terms constructionism are variable. The spectrum of
translation of the terms construct, construction, and constructionism is wide and inconsistent. I will
give some selected examples from the translation of the paper by Alison M. Jaggar Love and
Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology ( Jaggar 1989).
For one thing, Jaggar develops a constructionist interpretation of emotions. One of the sec-
tions of her paper is titled Emotions as Social Constructs ( Jaggar 1989, 134). This title is translated
as Emotion as a Social Product ( Jaggar 2005, 159), which does not fit Jaggar’s conceptualization of
the social construction of emotions as a process.
Further, in the same section, the concept “socially constructed” (134–135) is interpreted as
“social origin” (социальное происхождение) (159) and “social basis” (социальная основа)
(160). The verb “to construct” (135) is interpreted as “to emerge” (возникать). The phrase
about concepts as “socially constructed ways of organizing and making sense of the world” (135)
is interpreted as “a way of social organization of knowledge and understanding of the world”
(способ социальной организации познания и понимания мира) (159) which ascribes a dif-
ferent meaning to Jaggar’s statement. Jaggar’s statement refers to concepts about emotions, while
the translated text refers to institutional arrangements of knowledge.
The wrong interpretation of the idea of social construction brings in further conceptual aber-
rations. Jaggar’s point is that emotions are not “passive or involuntary responses to the world.
Rather, they are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world” (137). Therefore,
they can be also reconstructed, i.e. changed. However, the interpretation has the opposite meaning:
“The emotions were created by the society. Therefore, let them be again recreated” (162).
The translator does not perceive social construction as a key concept that runs throughout
the paper. She uses several equivalents to translate it into Russian, which undermines the cohe-
sion of the argument. While the source text aims at the constructionist subversion of approaches
to emotions as physiological reactions, the target text communicates a different notion. That
notion focuses on how abstract society determines emotions. This notion seems to be better than
the notion of emotions as “natural kinds,” which Jaggar criticizes, but it is not adequate to her
standpoint that insists on active perception through emotions. It is this active perception that
makes emotions so vital for knowledge.
Besides the concept of social construction, there are other concepts that are a challenge for Rus-
sian translators. They are such basic concepts as exclusion/inclusion, agent/agency, contingent/
contingency, to enact/enactment, negotiations, performance, dispossession, economy, welfare state,
empowerment, subjectivity, sensibility, and many others. These challenges are the result of the lack
of appropriate theoretical training and the gaps between the English and Russian economies of
discourse. Here, I will illustrate some ways of coping with the concept of negotiations.
The notion of negotiation (переговоры) as a social practice is not typical for the totalitar-
ian economy of discourse and for the totalitarian system in general. In Soviet social science,
negotiations were discussed primarily as the practice of professional diplomats. Such notions as
negotiation of meaning or negotiation of identity sound unusual in Russian with its dominance
of top-down approaches to making decisions and social interaction. Negotiations belong to the
same register as debate and discussion, which for a long time were underdeveloped.
O. Dvorkina, the translator of the paper Feminism and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller (Kel-
ler 1989) completely avoids the concept “negotiating” which is used in the source text: the
word “negotiating” is omitted (Keller 2005, 208). Similarly, Alexei Garadja, the translator of
the A Manifesto for Cyborgs by Donna Haraway (1990, 208) also omits the concept of negotia-
tion in the phrase negotiating child care (Haraway 2005, 346). In the translation of Judith Butler’s
paper Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” (1992, 6, 7) by Zaven
Babloyan, this concept is replaced by the concepts “to endorse (to coordinate)” (согласовать)
284
(Butler 2001, 239) and “to reconcile” (улаживать) (Butler 2001, 241). Therefore, the meaning
of the target text is unclear and very remote from the idea of negotiations. Unlike the notion of
negotiations, the target notion of coordination is a very typical element of the Soviet economy
of discourse. To endorse the documents in the official register usually means to get the docu-
ment approved or sanctioned by the authorities. It has nothing to do with negotiations.
Section four: problems of textual cohesion
Inconsistency in the translation of key concepts

Textual cohesion is provided by anaphoric references, consistency of interpretation of terms
and concepts, lack of unwarranted omissions, stylistic isomorphism. The most common and the
most damaging to the cohesion of target texts is inconsistency in the interpretation of the key
concepts, as in one of the preceding cases seen in regard to the cluster around constructionism.
There are many other such examples. But I will give only one more illustration that shows how
the meaning of the target text dissipates due to lack of consistency in the way how a concept
that runs through a text is translated. This example comes from the translation of A Manifesto for
Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s by Donna Haraway (2005). The
major goal of A Manifesto is to develop the idea of ironic faith, which is grounded in the image of
the cyborg – a fusion of machine, human, and animal. Cyborg is a monster, a fiction that provides
a perspective on the post-gender world. Haraway here considers ironic faith a “blasphemous
myth.” Though her mythological “dogmatics” seems to offer an alternative to “secular-religious,
evangelical traditions of U.S. politics including the politics of socialist feminism,” she often refers
to Christianity and Marxism. Her discursive instruments include religiously charged concepts
such as the Garden of Eden, or garden, Fall, apocalypse, original innocence (no innocence), guilt,
genesis, pollution, worship, conversion, the Enemy, God, rebirth without flaw, etc. Sometimes, her
statements involve several religious metaphors (1990, 199). She also considers religious organiza-
tions important “women’s historical locations in advanced industrial societies” (1990, 212).
These religious concepts and metaphors in the Manifesto seem to be a challenge for the Rus-
sian translation which undermines the cohesion of the target text. For example, the first passage
of the original text begins with a statement: “this chapter is an effort to build an ironic politi-
cal myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is
faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. [. . .] At the centre of my ironic faith, my
blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg” (190–191). In the Russian translation the four occur-
rences of “faithful” are translated as “adequate” (адекватный, адекватно), while “faith” in this
passage is translated as “вера,” i.e. by the direct Russian equivalent (2005, 322–323). The other
translations of the original words with the root ‘faith’ are inconsistent. Since the cluster ‘faith-
faithfulness-faithlessness’ is essential for the original discourse, the lack of consistency in its trans-
lation undermines the coherence of the argumentation. There are numerous other instances of
lack of consistency in the translation of essential concepts in this target text (for example, for
terms such as translation, location, essentialist, incorporation, appropriation).
Successive approximation
Often times, different translations of the same term constitute a sort of successive approximation
to equivalence. The primary occurrence of the term is translated incorrectly, while further occur-
rences are translated adequately. Let me give an example of how successive approximation under-
mines the coherence of the argumentation – from the translation of the concept of “ensemble” in
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Tatiana Barchunova
Julia Kristeva’s paper Women’s Time (1997). In this paper, Kristeva discusses different approaches
to temporality by different generations of women’s movements. She analyzes this problem within
the framework of the crisis of the idea of nation. She argues that the nation as a dream of the 19th
century based on “economic homogeneity, historical tradition, and linguistic unity” was crushed
by several historical events, including World War II (Kristeva 1997, 860). Kristeva states that “a
new social ensemble superior to the nation has [. . .] been constituted, within which the nation,
far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange temporality, in a kind
of “future perfect,” where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive character to a logical
and sociological distribution of the most modern type.” She assumes that Europe is a “representa-
tive of such a sociocultural ensemble” (860). Unlike the nation, the sociocultural ensemble is
based on “art, philosophy, and religions manifest” (ibid.), which constitute the collective memory.
This is one of her key concepts, which she discusses in detail in the first section of the paper. She
uses it six times before she proceeds to a detailed analysis of various notions of temporality in
feminism. In Russian, the first occurrence of the concept is translated as social distribution (Kristeva
2005, 123); the next one is translated as structure (123), then there come structuration (124) and
structures (124). In the final paragraph of the theoretical introduction where Kristeva formulates
her agenda and speaks about the ensemble “Europe” as a “repository of memory” through which
“female sensibility” should seek “its own trans-European temporality” (1997, 864), the translator
finally comes up with a more appropriate term for ensemble (ансамбль) but uses it in quotation
marks (128) demonstrating that the term still remains alien to her.
This successive approach to the correct final decision seems to represent the translator’s pro-
cess of understanding the text which leads to her realization that the word ensemble is the essential
concept, and different from structure, structuration, and sociocultural distribution. However, the lack of
consistent translation of the key term hampers the process a Russian reader needs to mobilize to
understand the text, and even more so because it is not the only case of target text incoherence.
Inversion of meaning and its snowball effect

The most paradoxical cases of meaning shift occur when the target text communicates a meaning
that is the opposite of the original meaning. These cases are not as rare as one might expect. They do
damage not only to the phrase where they occur, but also to further parts of the target text since the
translators have to adjust their wrong decisions to the context and thus offer ad hoc interpretations.
One typical case of how the meaning of the source text is inverted in the target text occurs
in a discussion of the impact of sexist gender stereotypes on biological research by Helen E.
Longino (1989). Among gender stereotypes she mentions the “assumption of male mathemati-
cal superiority,” and the “designation of appropriate and inappropriate behaviours for male and
female children.” She writes, “we did not find [. . .] that these assumptions mediated the infer-
ences from data to theory that we found objectionable. These sexist assumptions did affect the
way the data were described. What mediated the inferences from the alleged data [. . .] was what
we called the linear model” (1989, 210). The Russian translator replaces the notion of mediation
with the notion of influence and thus the text loses its coherence and there emerges a state-
ment which is the opposite of what Longino claims. The reverse translation from Russian into
English goes as follows: “However, we have not discovered that these assumptions influence the
theoretical conclusions. The sexist assumptions, in fact, have not affected the description of the
data. The mediating link between the inferences from the data was the model which we called
the linear model” (Longino 2005, 241) (italics mine).
Here, we see the snowball effect of an accumulation of the kinds of mistakes we mentioned
previously. An inaccurate translator’s hypothesis that simplified the author’s statement made
286
her adjust the next statement to the wrong hypothesis and this adjustment, in its turn, said the
opposite of what the author expressed in the original.
Conclusions
1 To translate from English into Russian means to transfer from one type of economy of dis-
course to another. The Russian economy of discourse and its Soviet version were originally,
and to a substantial extent still are, different from the Western economy of discourse in its
configuration of registers, institutional regime, and conceptual basis. Unlike the discourse
in English with its developed public register, the Soviet economy of discourse, inherited
from earlier times, was dominated by the official register. The Soviet official register infused
the academic discourse as a variant of public discourse, including translations of scientific
literature, and produced a canonical approach to the interpretation of Western texts. Insti-
tutionally, the Soviet discursive canon was configured by censorship and governmental
control over the publication process. Conceptually, it was configured by the schematics of
Marxism-Leninism which attributed gender egalitarianism to the nominally socialist social
system of the Soviet Union. The Soviet version of the Russian economy of discourse had a
very specific regime of access to Western intellectual resources. This access for the general
public was mediated by professional translators and reviewers. The latter, in their turn, were
controlled by multiple state agents who selected, abridged, and edited the original resources
in the spirit of the dominant ideology and political situation.
2 The social transformation that began at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s was the
precondition for substantial changes in the approaches to translation as a practice. The post-
Soviet economy of discourse began to converge with the Western one, both institution-
ally and conceptually. The institutional setting of translation as a practice has substantially
changed in the post-Soviet period. State censorship and governmental control over the
publication process have been eliminated. The new agents – Western individual sponsors,
private foundations, and state exchange programs – supported scientific and social projects
aimed at problematizing the Soviet gender order and introducing new models and methods
of social research. Translations of texts in gender studies and feminist theory were one of
the ways of appropriating the critical approaches and presenting alternatives to the simpli-
fied versions of Marxist-Leninist interpretations of social problems.
However, the process of the convergence of the two economies of discourse was controversial,
both institutionally and conceptually. Together, the new international agents on the publica-
tion scene and the lack of state control brought about the de-professionalization of translation
and the emergence of naïve translators. The strict determinism and foundationalism of Soviet
social science was shaken up by various new approaches, but the gap between the two types
of discourse was too wide to be covered easily and quickly. The translators of Western gender
studies and feminist texts had to acquire different theoretical and methodological notions. The
appropriation has been a slow and non-linear process of designing new ways of thinking about
social reality as a contingent, performative, precarious, non-homogeneous world of exclusions
and inclusions, fluidity and rigidity, negotiations and redefinitions of conventions, and traditions.
This approach is different from the determinist world of Marxism-Leninism.
3 The analysis of the post-Soviet English-Russian translations reveals several clear strategies in
the translation of gender studies and feminist literature. The basis of these strategies begins
with a certain selection of canonical Western texts in gender studies and feminist literature,
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Tatiana Barchunova
i.e. those texts which were included in Western readers and curricula. The publication of
the first post-Soviet translations of these canonical texts had two goals: to make available the
contents of the texts to Russian readers, and to act in solidarity with an international collec-
tivity of experts in gender studies and activists. The latter goal was as important as the for-
mer one. The importance of performativity was one of the factors affecting the emergence
of naïve translation because in this case, the coherence of the target text is secondary to the
act of its publication. The other factor was the new institutional setting of the translation
process that did not provide enough time and expertise to make texts coherent. The naïve
translations analyzed earlier should have been edited by professional editors, specialized in
the relevant topics. Such editors were not generally available, however.
The terms and concepts that were misinterpreted by Russian translators were either non-
existent in the Marxist-Leninist approaches to social science (agency, social construction, contin-
gency, enactment), or contradicted the principles of the official register of the Soviet economy
of discourse (negotiations, debates, argumentation). The major defect of the bulk of translations
is inconsistency in the interpretation of the key terms, which undermines the logic of the texts.
Recent trends in translation are multidirectional. The development of the public register of
discourse and the Russian national school of gender studies provide hope for a new influx of
fresh ideas that may help immunize minds against the growing impact of conservative ideology
and the politics of isolation.
Future directions
On a par with printed English-Russian translations and their online versions, Internet networks
of feminists have emerged who regard translation as a form of political activism. It will be inter-
esting to see how their translations contribute to the evolution of the Russian economy of dis-
course. It will also be interesting to see if the proliferation of naïve translations not only in gender
studies and feminism but in other areas of social science helps to identify untranslatabilities.
Further reading
Adlam, Carol. 2010. Feminism, Untranslated: Russian Gender Studies and Cross-cultural Transfer in the
1990s and Beyond, in Alastair Renfrew and Galin Tihanov, eds., Critical Theory in Russia and the West.
This paper presents and analyzes differences between Western and Russian feminisms that complicate
the Russian perception of Western gender studies and the Western perception of Russian gender studies.
Avtonomova, Nataliya. 2016. Poznanie i perevod. Opyty filosofii iazyka [Knowledge and translation. Essays on the
philosophy of language]. Moscow, Saint Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ.
A book by one of the famous Russian translators of philosophical literature on translation as a process,
and its constitutive role in social science and philosophy.
Barchunova, Tatiana. 2006. A Library of Our Own? Feminist Translations from English into Russian, in
Marlen Bidwell-Steiner and Karin S. Wozonig, eds., A Canon of Our Own? Kanonkritik und Kanonbil-
dung in den Gender Studies. Innsbruck, Wien and Bozen: Studien Verlag, 133–147.
This paper provides a discussion of theoretical gaps that imply translation gaps.
Barchunova, Tatiana. 2009. Gender Studies in Russia as a Transnational Project, in Martina, Ineichen, Anna
K. Liesch, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, and Simon Wenger, eds., Gender in Trans-it. Transcultural and Transnational
Perspectives. Contributions to the 12th Swiss Gender History Conference. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 95–104.
This is a study of the impact of international academia on Russian intellectual traditions and translation.
English-Russian translations are discussed as an illustration of the paradox of translation formulated by
Walter Benjamin: translations are not for those who cannot read the original.
288
Gilburd, Eleonory. 2018. To See Paris and Die. The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The author develops the concept of translation as appropriation and domestication of Western culture
in the Soviet Union. She exposes the importance of the translator who is perceived as a co-author.
Liljeström, Marianne. 2016. Constructing the West/Nordic: The Rise of Gender Studies in Russia, in
Ulrika Dahl, Marianne Liljeström, and Ulla Manns, eds., The Geopolitics of Nordic and Russian Gender
Research (1975–2005). Stockholm: Södertörn University, 133–174.
The article includes a discussion of politics of locality, the emergence of gender studies in Russia, and
gender studies education as well as gender studies as a translation project.
Related topics
The most important related topic in Russia is education. Because of the huge gap between the
English-language resources, on the one hand, and English-Russian translation potential, on the
other, the challenge is to improve the linguistic competence of students. Another important
topic is sustainability of gender education and consciousness growing for all gender groups in
the context of an expanding conservatism.
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22
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s
Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s
Le Deuxième Sexe, and Judith
Butler’s Gender Trouble in Polish
Feminism, translation, and political history
Introduction
Modern feminist discourse in Poland (of the 20th and 21st centuries) has been shaped by fac-
tors both foreign and domestic. The legacy of the 19th century, an era of partition and lack of
state sovereignty for Poles, has comprised transnational emancipatory slogans proclaimed since the
Enlightenment as well as traditions of female political activity disseminated during the first wave
of feminism. In the Polish environment, these Western influences overlapped with strong models
of Polish patriotism concentrated on the fight for independence and the accompanying idea of
nationhood (Walczewska 2000). The formation of gender models was also affected by the tradi-
tion of Sarmatism, the epitome of Old Polish culture, which produced the model of a wise woman
(mulier sapiens) who was independent and capable of replacing a man in his tasks as a breadwinner,
an estate manager, and even its defender (Bogucka 1998, 66–85). Deeply rooted Polish Catholi-
cism with its extraordinarily strong Marian cult has also been influential for these paradigms.
A combination of domestic factors as well as those adopted from dominant Western cul-
tures – Anglo-Saxon, Romance, and Germanic – have characterized Polish feminism until the
present day. One of the key elements conducive to this symbiosis is a transfer of feminist ideas,
theories, terms, and practices through translation. With that in mind, this chapter will discuss
how Polish culture received the three books now considered to be milestones in the develop-
ment of Western feminist discourse: A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf, Le Deux-
ième Sexe (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir, and Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler.
Western feminism may encounter criticisms or rejection in non-Western countries, but it is still
a basic point of reference all over the globe. Debates and polemics rage within this discourse,
keeping it alive and well, and evolving all the time, while transnationally, this trans-border and
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trans-cultural flow of feminist thought and practice has encountered all sorts of barriers, espe-
cially in political terms. One such hindrance was the division of Europe into two distinct sectors,
following the end of World War II and the Yalta Conference, into Western Europe, on the one
hand, and what would come to be known as the ‘Eastern Bloc’ (dominated by the Soviet Union)
on the other. After the so-called Iron Curtain descended across Europe, actual contacts between
‘socialist states’ and ‘capitalist states’ (in the words of the time) were effectively hindered for many
decades. This state of affairs applied to all spheres of public and private life. The Eastern Bloc
countries were particularly affected by the so-called deficit economy, which rendered their liv-
ing standards drastically lower than in liberal Western democracies and free market conditions.
The complete inefficiency of the planned economy, which was implemented under this system,
had a major impact on the situation of women, who were primarily responsible for obtaining
household staples. Although equal treatment of women did represent an important element of
the ideology and actions of communist regimes, the general conditions of the totalitarian system
and production, which resulted in constant shortages of the most basic goods and services, did
not allow for any meaningful development of feminist movements or discourses. The raison
d’être of feminism is to question the existing social order and aim to change it, and in the
countries of the so-called people’s democracy, this approach and activity were firmly suppressed.
Consequently, women in Poland at the time were professionally active, had access to legal
abortion, and could place their children in free nurseries and kindergartens, while at the same
time, they had no real representation in power. Furthermore, they were excessively burdened
by double work: professional and domestic. Knowledge about Western feminist movements
reached beyond the Iron Curtain to a very limited degree, and in the circles of anti-Communist
opposition, which actively developed in Poland from the mid-1970s despite repression, these
phenomena were treated with a considerable dose of distrust and condescension.
In this context it is worth quoting the opinion of Maria Janion (b. 1926), in the past a Marx-
ist, later a devotee of hermeneutics, and at present the honoured tutor of Polish apprentices in
feminist and gender studies:
All those years I recognized a clear demarcation of things that were important and unim-
portant; in the face of subjugation striving for independence is important whereas unim-
portant is the struggle for women’s rights. Towards the end of the 1980s, I expressed this
view during a feminist forum in West Berlin, where I patiently explained to women from
the Free World that their way of thinking does not fit in with Polish experience. Solidarność,
I stubbornly maintained, has to first win independence and democracy for the entire soci-
ety and only later we shall tackle the issue of women in common.
( Janion 1999, 25)
This situation changed as a result of the political and economic transformations which took
place in the socialist countries of central and Eastern Europe, as well as Soviet Union, towards
the end of the 1980s, and with the fall of communism in the early 1990s, when the model based
on central planning gave way to the development of free market economies, and the forma-
tion of a political system based on rules of democracy and neo-liberalism. In almost an instant,
Western-style feminism – radical, anti-patriarchal, and founded on solid theoretical thought –
became an ingredient of these changes.

Let us first consider the dates of publication of the three books we are interested in. If we were
to include one more work, which is equally important to the annals of 20th-century feminism –
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Feminism, translation, political history
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett – we would realize that they appeared at almost evenly spaced,
20-year intervals: 1929 (A Room of One’s Own), 1949 (Le Deuxième Sexe), 1970 (Sexual Politics)
and 1990 (Gender Trouble). This cycle could be explained by the sequence of generations and
historical experiences. A Room of One’s Own is the work of a writer whose education and social
development took place in the last years of the Victorian era. Le Deuxième Sexe appeared shortly
after the end of World War II, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were shaping the
intellectual life of Paris, and their influence on literature, philosophy, and behaviours reached far
beyond French borders. Sexual Politics is a product of counter-cultural movements in the 1960s,
while the radical ideas presented in Gender Trouble developed thanks to a whole set of complex
factors affecting culture and the humanities of the 1980s, such as poststructuralism, so-called
French Theory, and the cultural turn. However, Kate Millett’s book, which for many US readers
became a landmark text, was not keenly read in Poland, and translated here only in parts (Millett
1982), which is why it is not included in our study. The same is more or less true of The Femi-
nine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), though its appearance in print is considered to mark the
start of what is now called ‘second-wave feminism.’ And yet, she too mainly shaped the thought
processes of American readers and thinkers, because her book was largely concerned with the
problems of middle-class women of Anglo-America. In Poland, until recently it was almost
unknown and appeared in translation only a couple of years ago (Friedan 2012).
First, let us have a look at A Room of One’s Own, Le Deuxième Sexe, and Gender Trouble from
the perspectives of genre, themes, ideology and style, asking questions about problems their
translators might have had to contend with.
The life of Virginia Woolf and her work are largely shaped by a rebellious reaction to the
Victorian culture and mores, which marked her childhood and early adulthood. A Room of
One’s Own was created in a post-Victorian spirit, and – differently to the avant-garde prose she
wrote – it was intended for a broader readership, though initially, it was written as a series of
lectures delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. In her diary Woolf refers
to the book as a ‘trifle.’ It is a relatively short text, written in accessible English, rich in rhetori-
cal devices which make reading it both easier and more pleasant. It is imbued with subtle yet
clear irony, sometimes bordering on sarcasm, while the syntax is based on complex structures,
occasionally sprinkled with single sentences, often phrased as questions. The translator’s task
can therefore be seen as one that replicates the orality, so clearly stressed in the text, and to find
equivalents for the ironic intonation. This is not particularly difficult, and so the translations of
A Room of One’s Own have not sparked much critical discussion in their target audiences. The
key words and topoí which emerged from it, such as the titular “room of one’s own,” “Shake-
speare’s sister” or “man’s sentence” versus “her sentence,” are easy to embrace, resulting in their
often being used as quotes, allusions, intertextual references and paraphrases. A Room of One’s
Own deals with the question of how personal space and financial independence affects women’s
ability to be creative, but it is also about the exclusion of women from certain patriarchal for-
tresses, such as the worlds of academia or mainstream culture, hinting at the ways in which this
exclusion can be turned into an advantage. It is this message that gives Woolf ’s essay a timeless
and trans-cultural universality.
Le Deuxième Sexe is the complete antithesis of a ‘trifle.’ This lengthy, two-volume treatise on
the history of women and constructs of femininity was written by Simone de Beauvoir with
the ambition to present, first of all, women’s experiences from physiological, psychological, and
cultural anthropology perspectives, from the times of antiquity up to the mid-20th century.
Secondly, it was “to [. . .] demonstrate how ‘feminine reality’ has been constituted, why woman
has been defined as Other, and what the consequences have been from men’s point of view;”
and thirdly – to describe “the world from the woman’s point of view such as it is offered to her”
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(Beauvoir 2010, 38). Academic and philosophical discourses are combined in this work with
elements of creative writing and journalism. According to the authors of the second English
translation, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Beauvoir’s style in Le Deuxième
Sexe is defined by its “long and dense paragraphs” which are “essential, integral to the develop-
ment of her arguments” (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier 2010, 16). Controversies connected
with the first (1953) and second (2010) translations into English are well-known and revolve
around critics such as Toril Moi (2002, 2010), Margaret A. Simons (1983) and Anna Bogić
(2010). For our purposes, though, it is enough to say that the translator is here faced with the
choice of strategy between domestication or foreignization in the target language. Domestica-
tion, intended to make the reading easier, takes place mostly at the expense of omissions and
simplifications of complex philosophical terminology, while foreignization, driven by the need
to preserve the ideas and style of the source text, reduces fluidity and readability in the target
text. The famous sentence which opens the second volume has been the cause of particular
controversy: “On ne naît pas femme: on le deviant” (Mann and Ferrari 2017) – “One is not
born, but rather, becomes a woman” in Howard M. Parshley’s translation (Beauvoir 1953, 273).
Differences of interpretation are mainly related to the question of whether this book is a mani-
festation of social constructivism, or rather existentialist phenomenology. In fact, one does not
exclude the other, since we are not dealing with opposites here, Beauvoir’s thought being ruled
more by dialectics than binaries. It is worth noting already at this point though that the Polish
translation changes the singular into plural and the sentence reads: “we are not born women, we
become women” (Beauvoir 2003, 299).
The third book we will be looking at, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, represents contempo-
rary academic writing from the field of humanities and contains all the strengths and weaknesses
of this genre. The book is a challenge in terms of both content and linguistic form; it is interest-
ing to note that its complicated lexis and syntax, a real challenge for translators, resulted in the
author winning the Bad Writing Contest in 1998 from the journal Philosophy and Literature. And
yet, the originality and innovativeness of the ideas contained in its pages transcend the book’s
flaws, making it a founding text of a new branch of cultural studies – queer studies. Butler initi-
ated her performative theory of gender with a discussion of Le Deuxième Sexe, thus emphasizing
the continuity of feminist thought. However, she was relying on its first English translation by
Parshley, which probably led to some misreading of Beauvoir’s canonical work (Myers 2016).
In the next part of the chapter, the most important issues related to Polish translations of the
preceding three texts will be discussed.
A Room of One’s Own

The essay appeared in print when its author was a well-recognized figure in the world of literary
modernists, and had already published her best novels: Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Light-
house (1927). Her prose was being translated in the 1920s, though often these were fragments
which appeared in the foreign press such as a section of To the Lighthouse titled Le Temps Passe
translated by Charles Mauron, published in the Paris quarterly Commerce no. 10 in 1926 (Woolf
1926), which appeared before the novel was published in English. The earliest translations of her
books were: a Swedish version of Jacob’s Room (Woolf 1927b, original 1922), a Czech version
of Orlando. A Biography (Woolf 1929b, original 1928b), as well as translations of Mrs Dalloway
into German (Woolf 1928a) and French (Woolf 1929a). However, A Room of One’s Own was
not of interest to foreign language publishers and the only pre–World War II translation of this
text was the result of Woolf ’s own personal literary connections. The author of the Spanish
translation (Un Cuarto Propio) was Jorge Luis Borges, and it was published in Buenos Aires by
294
Victoria Ocampo, a writer friend of Woolf ’s, in Sur, a literary magazine, dated December 1935
to March 1936 (Woolf 1936, Kirkpatrick 1980).
Continental Europe received Woolf ’s writing much like other parts of the world where her
books appeared in translation. Up until the 1970s, she was seen mostly as an apolitical author of
avant-garde psychological prose, a representative of high-brow modernism. Her experimental
novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Years (Woolf 1937) took precedence in trans-
lation. Woolf ’s debut, The Voyage Out (Woolf 1915), the most “traditional” of her prose works,
was left far behind: in Poland it was only translated and published in 2009 (Woolf 2009). It was
with second-wave feminism that A Room of One’s Own was rediscovered, making its author one
of the most celebrated feminist writers of the time and, as it turned out, of the whole century.
In Poland Woolf ’s prose was being translated from the late 1950s onwards, a time marked by
the death of Joseph Stalin and the end of what has since been referred to as his “era.” The first
full Polish translation of Woolf ’s writing – small fragments of her prose were rendered in Polish
in the 1930s – was The Years (Lata 1958), then Mrs Dalloway (Pani Dalloway 1961), To the Light-
house (Do latarni morskiej 1962), and also selected literary essays published as a book which took
its title from one such essay The Leaning Tower (Pochyła wieża 1977) along with The Waves (Fale
1983) (Terentowicz-Fotyga 2002; Klitgård 2002). Once the era of socialist realism (1949–1956),
during which writers were forced to tackle strictly defined propagandist themes, came to an
end, modernism and the avant-garde dominated Polish prose, poetry, and drama, resulting not
only in a new form of Polish writing but also leading to spectacular growth in the market for
translations of Western literature. Such translations were often crafted to a very high standard,
thanks to the demanding publishing criteria of that time.
As a result of the absence of second-wave feminism in communist countries, the ‘discov-
ery’ of Virginia Woolf as one of the main (albeit posthumous) post–World War II figures in
feminism took place in Poland as late as the 1990s. The first Polish translation of A Room of
One’s Own (Woolf 1997) became a kind of feminist manifesto. This was produced by Agnieszka
Graff (b. 1970), a Polish feminist academic and activist educated in the US, who helped initiate
the feminist movement in Poland in the 1990s, and by Izabela Filipiak (b. 1961, who recently
changed her name to Morska), who penned a very personal introduction to the book. Filipiak
is a writer who, in that decade, was the most well-known representative of new feminist prose
in Poland, thanks mainly to her novel Absolute Amnesia (Absolutna amnezja), published in 1995
and derisively referred to by some critics as ‘menstrual literature’ (Świerkosz 2014, 114–129).
In 1998, Filipiak used the pages of the glossy fashion magazine Cosmopolitan (the 15th Febru-
ary issue) to perform the first public act of lesbian ‘coming out’ in Polish history, and in the
aforementioned introduction she drew attention to the relevance of themes featured in A Room
of One’s Own, in the context of contemporary women writers, making reference to her own
personal and professional experiences.
The second (‘revised’) translation, produced by Ewa Krasińska, a professional and very expe-
rienced translator of English literature, was published in 2002 in one volume with the transla-
tion of Three Guineas by the same publishing house Wydawnictwo Sic! (Woolf 2002). Krasińska is
also the author of the introduction to this edition, which nevertheless is limited to an overview
of historic contexts in which both essays were created as well as a summary of their contents.
These translations do, of course, differ in certain ways – Graff ’s version retains traces of English
syntax, while Krasińska’s features a fuller form of domestication – though the language of the
source text did not cause either translator any major problems. But there is one notable excep-
tion. The narrator of Woolf ’s essay is supposed to present a lecture on the topic of “women and
fiction” to an auditorium full of female listeners. The word “fiction” does not have a straight-
forward equivalent in Slavonic languages – the Polish “fikcja” is its false friend, seeing as it means
295
something falsely imagined or “dreamt up.” Graff presents the topic of the lecture as “women
and literary creations,” while Krasińska as “women and literature.” Neither decided to apply the
genre term “novel,” which would perhaps be more appropriate here, since Woolf ’s text is actu-
ally devoted to female novelists.
The high regard, in which Woolf ’s essay has been continuously held in the target Pol-
ish culture thanks to its translation, is confirmed by the recent literary and editorial project
developed on the 90th anniversary of the publication of the original. It is a volume featuring
the text of A Room of One’s Own translated by Agnieszka Graff along with six narratives about
how the postulates formulated by Woolf are being enacted by Polish women who engage in
creative work. These narratives were developed by the feminist writer Sylwia Chutnik and the
journalist Karolina Sulej, based on the interviews conducted by them. They feature well-known
figures in Poland: the singer and songwriter Edyta Bartosiewicz, novelist Joanna Bator, actress
Małgorzata Cielecka, artist Katarzyna Kozyra, traveller and reporter Martyna Wojciechowska,
and psychologist Ewa Woydyłło. In the introduction to this publication, Chutnik wrote: “For
my generation of now forty-year-old feminists, Woolf was one of the key instructors. [. . .] she
gave us A Room of One’s Own, that is, the opportunity to be an independent artist – without
guilt or shame. Times have changed but A Room of One’s Own remains a gem” (Chutnik and
Sulej 2019, 6).
Le Deuxième Sexe
While we referred to A Room of One’s Own as ‘post-Victorian,’ Le Deuxième Sexe could be con-
sidered a ‘post-War’ book. According to Elizabeth A. Houlding: “Le Deuxième Sexe stepped into
history directly out of World War II and the German occupation of France [. . .] with its specific
gender conditions” (Houlding 1993, 40). These specific gender conditions include the tangible
lack of men in both the private and public spheres (as a result of deaths or imprisonments), the
Vichy government’s conservative pro-family and pro-natalist policy, which “forcefully bound
women as wives and mothers to the home” (ibid., 41) as well as the hardships experienced dur-
ing the occupation and in the years right after. “Through her exposure to the nature of women’s
everyday lives during the Occupation, Beauvoir first began to perceive the active construc-
tion of femininity,” (41) claims Houlding, who notes that such details as the unique turban the
French writer wore, were “yet another sign of the practical times, as trips to the beauty salon
became increasingly expensive and shampoo increasingly rare” (44).
Much has been written (Bogić 2010; Mann and Ferrari 2017) on how Le Deuxième Sexe
was perceived to be scandalous in France, and about the translations of this work into various
languages (numbering almost 40), while interest in the topic has amplified since the 50th anni-
versary of its original publication in 1999. Two English translations of the treatise have been
thoroughly dissected, especially in terms of their deficiencies. In Poland we have only one trans-
lation of this work at our disposal, but it has an interesting history. The “first life” of Le Deuxième
Sexe in Polish started in 1972, in socialist times. The “second life” was initiated after the political
and economic transformation of 1989 when the book was re-edited in 2003, entered into a
new phase in 2014, and has been sustained since by several re-issues published up to 2019. Two
remarkable translators worked on the book: Gabriela Mycielska (1902–1991) handled the first
volume and Maria Leśniewska (1916–1990) the second (Beauvoir 1972). They belonged to a
generation of emancipated Polish women who enjoyed the newly regained state independence,
had a better-quality education during the years between the World Wars, and led a success-
ful professional life in the second half of the century. They could speak a range of languages;
Mycielska produced Polish translations of the prose works of Herman Hesse and François
296
Mauriac, while Leśniewska those of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, J.W. Goethe, and Albert Camus.
She also translated the diaries of Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, which proved useful during the transla-
tion of the chapter titled “Marriage” in Le Deuxième Sexe, where they are frequently quoted.
These two translators represent a sizeable group of remarkable women-translators, responsible
for the extremely high-level literary translation achieved in Poland during the communist era.
Although all literary output of the time was subject to official censorship, it was, on the other
hand, free from the commercial influence of market forces. Their translations of Le Deuxième
Sexe do not suffer from significant omissions and are considered to be faithful to the original.
However, with one exception.
The inviolable rule of censorship in socialist countries was to reduce formulations that might
contain any criticism of the Soviet Union and Marxist doctrine. Typically, Simone de Beauvoir
refers to the USSR in a positive context; otherwise, the book would not have been approved
for publication in the Polish language. So, among the references to the situation of Soviet
women sprinkled around the original text, the following sentence in chapter 3 of volume 1 was
crossed out in the Polish version: “Ce sont exactement ces vieilles contraintes du patriarcat que
l’U.R.S.S. a aujourd’hui ressuscitées; elle a ravivé les théories paternalistes du mariage; et par
là, elle a été amenée à demander à nouveau à la femme de se faire objet érotique: un discours
récent invitait les citoyennes soviétiques à soigner leur toilette, à user de maquillage, à devenir
coquettes pour retenir leur mari et attiser son désir” (Beauvoir 1966, 103). In the new English
translation, this passage reads as follows: “These old patriarchal constraints are exactly the ones
the U.S.S.R. has brought back to life today; it has revived paternalistic theories about marriage;
and in doing so, it has asked woman to become an erotic object again: a recent speech asked
Soviet women citizens to pay attention to their clothes, to use makeup, and to become flirtatious
to hold on to their husbands and stimulate their desire” (Beauvoir 2011, 68). The preceding
example of censorship vividly illustrates how absurd the intrusions of the Communist censor
could be.
The year 1956 saw the development of key political shifts in the Soviet Bloc, anti-Soviet in
character: the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet-imposed policies was quashed in bloody
fashion, whereas in Poland mass worker protests ended with the so-called Polish October and
the rise in power of the reform faction within the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party. This
shift resulted in the liberalization (‘thaw’) of cultural politics which in Poland had a significantly
larger scale than in other countries of the bloc. The intellectual ferment and artistic activity
which followed these events led to wide reception of literature, philosophy, and culture from
the West. Jazz, rock’n’roll, film noir, and other trends of Western pop culture became en vogue
among young generations of Poles. The ensuing fashion for French existentialism meant the
works of Sartre and Beauvoir started to appear in Polish translation as early as 1957. It helped
that both were perceived as so-called poputchiks, fellow travellers – Western intellectuals, writ-
ers, and academics who sympathized with communist ideology and the Soviet empire. By 1972
as many as 11 volumes of Sartre’s works had been published in Polish: Rozważania o kwestii
żydowskiej [Réflexions sur la Question Juive] (Sartre 1957b), Dramaty (Sartre 1957a), Wiek męski
[L’âge de Raison] (Sartre 1957c), Zwłoka [Le Sursis] (Sartre 1958c), Rozpacz [La Mort dans l’âme]
(Sartre 1958b), Mur [Le Mur] (Sartre 1958a), Huragan nad cukrem [Ouragan sur le Sucre] (Sartre
1961), Słowa [Les Mots] (Sartre 1965, 1968b), selection of literary criticism entitled Czym jest lit-
eratura [What is Literature?] (Sartre 1968a), and Wyobrażenie: fenomenologiczna psychologia wyobraźni
[Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de L’imagination] (Sartre 1970). These were followed by
another four volumes before the end of communism. Beauvoir was slightly less popular, but also
well-represented. Before the appearance of Le Deuxieme Sèxe, six of her books were published in
Polish (Mandaryni [Les Mandarins] in 1957, Pamiętnik statecznej panienki [Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille
297
Rangée] in 1960, Cudza krew [Le Sang des Autres] in 1963, W sile wieku [La Force de l’âge] in 1964,
Siłą rzeczy [La Force des Choses] in 1967 and Śliczne obrazki [Les Belles Images] in 1968).
This connection between Sartre/Beauvoir and communism in its Soviet incarnation can
present a paradox: an anti-authoritarian existentialist doctrine of individualism (it is sufficient to
recall Sartre’s famous statement that “Hell is other people” from the play Huis Clos (Sartre 1976,
45) is after all not easy to combine with the collectivized social experiment introduced by Soviet
leaders. What links existentialism with Marxism is how work is seen as a condition of individual
freedom and agency. Under the Soviet system, however, work did become a tool for oppression
and punishment, something neither Sartre nor Beauvoir wanted to take into consideration. Le
Deuxième Sexe also addresses themes of work as a condition of women’s empowerment and
agency. It compliments the Soviet state in this regard, and often refers to Marx and Engels as
relevant thinkers, which was a welcome and even obligatory practice within the framework of
the socialist – and therefore also Polish – publishing policy.
With its elaborate discourse on sexuality, Le Deuxième Sexe was also effectively incorporated
in transformations of morality, which marked the Polish culture of the 1970s. In Stalinist times,
the Communist authorities displayed a certain kind of ‘sexophobia’; this attitude was, particu-
larly symptomatic of Władysław Gomułka’s rule, who became the First Secretary of the Polish
United Workers’ Party after the events of 1956, and in practical terms, the head of the state.
Consequently, references to sexuality were very limited and rarely explicit in literature, art,
and media. However, the year 1970 witnessed another wave of workers’ protests related to the
economic conditions and power was assumed by a government that was even more open to
contacts with the West. Thanks to loans from Western countries, there was a palpable growth in
the economy and consumer products, which translated into some crucial changes in the private
lives of Polish men and women.
The liberalized attitude towards sexual matters manifested itself, among others ways, in
the publication of popular guides about sex, such as for example Theodoor Hendrik van de
Velde’s Ideal Marriage. Its Physiology and Technique translated and published in 1972 (Van de
Velde 1926, 1935, 1972), or Mikołaj Kozakiewicz’s Małżeństwo niemal doskonałe (Almost Ideal
Marriage) published from 1968 onwards and Michalina Wisłocka’s renowned Sztuka kochania
(The Art of Love) from 1978. Some reviewers, as well as most ‘common readers,’ tended to
perceive Le Deuxième Sexe as a representative of this particular genre of writing, which was in
great demand at the time.
Another important aspect in the context around the Polish translation of Le Deuxiéme Sexe
was the emergence of individual yet distinctive and powerful voices of female writers and artists
at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970, which could be referred to as a “small second wave of
feminism” (Kraskowska 2009, 32), even though at the time it was not perceived in such terms.
This ‘wave’ was largely driven by the women artists and intellectuals who, like Beauvoir, had
been educated in the interwar period. The more widely known representatives include the poet
Anna Świrszczyńska (recognized in the English-speaking world as Anna Swir) or the sculptor
and graphic artist Alina Szapocznikow, among others. At the time, femininity was also sup-
ported by UN initiatives, which announced the year 1975 as the Year of Women, and the years
1976–1985 as their Decade. Poland, similarly to other East Bloc countries, attached considerable
importance to UN activity, because a membership in this organization legitimized its democ-
racy and lawfulness. However, the feminist and anti-patriarchal message of Beauvoir’s work was
not entirely reflected in the first edition of its Polish translation. This is strikingly illustrated by
its introduction whose author was Konstanty Grzybowski, a male professor of law and philoso-
phy. The 16-page text focuses mainly on the book’s place within the existentialist movement,
leaving the feminist questions aside. The few reviews that were published in official literary
298
periodicals do stress the centrality of the ‘women’s cause’ in Beauvoir’s treatise, yet they express a
certain condescension towards her theory, calling it outdated and unnecessary in the communist
society. As philosopher Elżbieta Pakszys puts it: “the timing was wrong, and the book was met
with modest interest, although it sold well. At that time, it could not possibly have a target reader.
The feminist movement in Poland was nonexistent. Its official ersatz [. . .] could not be taken
into account” (Pakszys 2000, 177).
Grzybowski’s introduction disappeared from the second edition of the translation, which
was published with no paratexts in 2003 by a private publisher founded by the prominent psy-
chologist and therapist Jacek Santorski. This moment may be considered as symbolically closing
the decade of the 1990s when the Western feminist discourse in Poland had been intensely
received, initiated by a wave of book and magazine publications familiarizing Polish readers
with the ideas of the second Anglo-Saxon wave of feminism, the French écriture feminine, and
the new feminist trends emerging at the turn of the millennium. Around the same time, the
English-language article by Agnieszka Graff entitled aptly Lost Between the Waves? The Paradoxes
of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Poland came out, where the author wrote:
What makes Polish feminism exciting – and paradoxical from the point of view of the
movement’s history as it is written in the West – is its peculiar mixture of second wave
politics and third wave themes and tactics. Our goals concern basic reproductive rights,
domestic violence, equal pay for equal work; our street performances show the drudgery
behind the domestic ideal. But this content – reminiscent of second wave manifestos [. . .] –
is dressed in a campy form very much in tune with the third wave of feminism. Either
we are “lost between the waves,” or what we are building calls for a description that goes
beyond the wave metaphor.
(Graff 2003, 103)
A dozen years later, Graff ’s diagnosis is still up-to-date, although there is another factor that
determines it today, which would have been unfathomable in the 1990s: the so-called anti-
gender war waged by the Catholic church and right-wing, nationalistic populists since the start
of the 21st century in many European countries (not just post-communist states), as well as in
other parts of the world (Kuhar and Patternotte 2017). These campaigns make use of linguistic
manipulation, exploiting the lack of knowledge many social groups have about what the term
“gender” represents – a term which is then subjected to a unique form of “intralingual transla-
tion.” Linguistic creations such as “genderization,” “gender ideology,” “gender lobby,” “gender
delusion,” “gender fascism,” and “culture of death” are coined as “a specific (mis)representation
of [. . .] feminist and queer theories, which is used as a background story to delegitimize all kinds
of progressive policies in the fields of gender and sexuality” (Mayer and Sauer 2017, 24).
One of the many reactions of the Polish feminists to the attacks made by the Church and
conservative groups was a reissue of the translation of Le Deuxième Sexe in 2014 by Jacek
Santorski’s publishing house, which in the meantime had been renamed Czarna Owca (“black
sheep”) and had significantly broadened its range. This time, Beauvoir’s treatise was prefaced
by the Polish female philosopher and feminist activist Magdalena Środa (b. 1957), who enti-
tled it Widmo krąży po Europie. Widmo gender . . . [A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre
of gender . . .] (Beauvoir 2014, 7). By making a reference to the famous opening sentence of
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Środa rendered Beauvoir’s work a timeless message while
simultaneously inscribing it in another historically up-to-date cultural context. Thus, with the
use of a paratext, the book was reframed as a feminist classic serving as a statement in a current
ideological conflict.
299
Gender Trouble
Though Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler quickly gained
the status of an important, influential, widely discussed, and controversial text, Polish publishers
did not rush to publish it. By 2008, when its complete translation did come out, Butler’s theories
were already well known, especially by representatives of Polish academic feminism and gender
studies, as well as the broader community of the humanities. This came about as a result of frag-
ments of Gender Trouble having been translated and published earlier, in journals and antholo-
gies, of influential discussions authored by Polish researchers, as well as individual readings of
the book in English.
The first Polish translation of a fragment of Gender Trouble appeared quite early on, dated
1994/1995, in the collected volume Feminist Encounters [Spotkania feministyczne], which was
the product of feminist seminars. This minor publication had a limited reach, however, and the
translation itself, produced by Barbara Kopeć, a translator who would later come to specialize
in literary texts, was marked by flaws in terminology and contained risqué conceptual solutions
which did not find favour with the theoretical community. The next translation of a fragment
of Butler’s book appeared in 2003, produced by Iwona Kurz, a specialist in visual cultures,
published in an arts journal focused on theatre – it went on to be reprinted three times in
various anthologies (Butler 2003, 2005, 2007). A subsequent translation was done by Krystyna
Kłosińska, a literary expert specializing in feminist criticism, and Krzysztof Kłosiński, an aca-
demic specializing in literary theory. Their translation was published in 2006 in an anthology of
texts intended for students (Butler 2006b). In that same year, another version was published in
an academic journal by Karolina Krasuska (Butler 2006a), who would later translate the whole
book. Her complete translation of Gender Trouble (Butler 2008), produced while she was study-
ing for her doctorate in cultural studies, was received by an already prepared audience. The book
was published by Krytyka Polityczna, a press connected with a leftist journal of the same name.
It opens with an introduction which is short and popular rather than academic in character,
written by the novelist Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), who was to become internationally famous
as the 2018 Nobel prize winner. In her characteristic, metaphoric style, and drawing upon her
own philosophy of identity, Tokarczuk wrote:
If reality resembles a kind of tent stretched over a frame made of notions, thinking habits,
and ideas, then Butler’s book strikes at one of the fundamental pillars of this frame, at its
main axis. The blow is so severe that the tent starts to teeter, its surface ripples and loses its
familiar appearance. Then, in front of our eyes, it assumes a new shape, and this is what we
need to grow accustomed to, revising what is taken for granted, everything that is “normal”
and domesticated. Well, this is how important books achieve a breakthrough.
(Tokarczuk 2008, 5)
The translation is also accompanied by a short afterword, penned by the translator, covering
questions of Butler’s style and justifying some of the solutions adopted in the Polish version.
Krasuska explains (among other things) the motivations for choosing a rather controversial
Polish title Uwikłani w płeć. Feminizm i polityka tożsamości [Entangled in Gender. Feminism and
Identity Politics]. This title is complicated by the fact that the word she uses, płeć, is a traditional
term, equivalent to the English sex. However, the translation troubles do not end there, seeing
as the most commonplace way of rendering the sex/gender dyad in Polish (aside from using the
word gender in its original form) involves adding to this basic, well-established noun ‘płeć’ various
300
defining and differentiating adjectives – such as ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ (and so sex becomes
‘biological’ and gender ‘cultural’). At first, it might seem that the title refers to the ‘old’ under-
standing of gender/sex, and yet Krasuska argues that such a choice was motivated by the shifts
Butler makes in relation to these terms, disrupting the gender/sex dyad and insinuating that sex
is also a cultural construct.
The translation of the words sex and gender is one of the key challenges the translators of
Butler’s book have had to contend with, forcing them to choose between leaving the foreign
sounding gender as it is, using one of several existing Polish versions, or else finding a new vari-
ant. Further, it is also challenging to describe the mechanisms of gender performativity, because
the Polish language does not allow for easy fluidity of meaning or the linking of commonplace
and theoretical uses of some words, as in Butler’s treatise (to perform, performativity, performance, to
act, act, enactment etc.). Other difficulties arise from the translation of terms such as drag, butch,
femme, or crossdressing and are related to the changing state of Polish discourse about gender and
sexuality. Challenges also appear in the theoretical jargon used by Butler and her numerous
references to other theoreticians, whose works may not have been translated or well-grounded
in the Polish language.
An analysis of the Polish translations of fragments of Gender Trouble and then the full text
shows the reciprocal influence that translations and critical discourse can have, and allows us
to see certain general tendencies in interpretation. In the case of this series of texts, transla-
tions have mostly drawn from the already existing solutions rather than inspiring new ones.
Attempts to introduce new variants or modifications of the existing materials have not sub-
stantially affected the state of the language of criticism in Polish humanities. What is notable is
translation’s strong connection to English-speaking discourse – translators often make the deci-
sion to keep the foreign terms (e.g. the couple butch and femme), probably for lack of accurate,
well-established Polish equivalents. Moreover, tracking the ways of rendering important terms
allows researchers to observe that along with a growing number of translations, an increasingly
better availability of sources, and a richer reception of the foreign-language thought translations
become saturated with recognizable theoretical references and evolve towards more sensitivity
to the political implications of linguistic choices.
Today, Judith Butler is a well-known figure in the Polish humanities, and her theory has
enjoyed great popularity. We owe this state of affairs to both the overviews of her thought fea-
tured in books and articles by Polish authors and the translations. This chapter cannot possibly
elaborate on the intricacies of Butler’s reception in Poland, particularly her concepts on gender
and their influence on the development of the Polish queer studies. However, it is noteworthy
that in the first instance, key roles were played by Polish commentaries on her theories rather
than the translations of fragments of her work that were published in magazines and collabo-
rative volumes. The book translations – since Gender Trouble, 2008; Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
between Life and Death (Butler 2010b); Excitable Speech (Butler 2010a); Frames of War: When Is
Life Grievable? (Butler 2011); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Butler 2014);
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Butler 2018); Notes Toward a Performative Theory
of Assembly (Butler 2016) – represent the apex of in the reception of an already recognized
theoretician.

The three books we have discussed earlier have shaped the rhythm of how feminist discourse
developed in Western culture. Virginia Woolf ’s essay represents ideas belonging to the first
301
wave of feminism (emancipation, education, equal rights, and economic independence for
women), amplified by reflections on the theme of women’s creative and artistic potential.
Simone de Beauvoir’s treatise is a sort of summary of this first wave and a forerunner of the
second – for many women writers, philosophers, and theoreticians who shaped feminist dis-
course in the 1960s and 1970s it became one of the most important points of reference, much
like the rest of Beauvoir’s output. Gender Trouble – Judith Butler’s academic treatise – belongs
to the post-feminist, post-structuralist criticism of binarism and essentialism in relation to sex
and gender.
In Poland, as well as in other Eastern Bloc countries, this rhythm was disturbed by several
decades of communist hegemony, sometimes politely referred to as real socialism (a term coined
in the 1960s, which should not be mistaken for “socialist realism,” the Stalinist doctrine of pro-
letarian arts). As Agnieszka Graff observed at the start of the 21st century, this disruption caused
contemporary feminism in post-communist countries to become “eclectic” (Graff 2003, 104),
meaning that after 1989 these countries received a broad and intensive influx of texts – and
not only those from the 20th century – representing the entire Western canon of feminist and
gender-related thought. In less than three decades, authors (writers, theoreticians, philosophers)
representing various historical epochs, as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft, were translated and
commented upon. Wollstonecraft, a precursor of women’s emancipation, was almost unknown
in Poland (the first translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 2011),
although the works of the Enlightenment thinkers (including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom
Wollstonecraft makes direct reference) belong to a philosophical tradition which is well estab-
lished there.
The stories behind the transfer of Western feminist and gender classics into Polish show that
the translation is often the crowning glory of the reception the original has already received,
facilitated by other channels of dissemination – summaries, discussions, reviews, paraphrasing
and the like – which is the way all academic discourses evolve and travel. Of the three texts and
their translations covered earlier, A Room of One’s Own has managed to meet the actual needs
of its new and present target audience, not only initiating a revival of interest in the writings of
Virginia Woolf and allowing new interpretations of her work, but also helping today’s women
in the former communist countries to find their own path of personal development. Written in
the interwar period, it has become one of the most important feminist manifestos of the 20th
century. Its literary merits, which have stood the test of time, have certainly helped the essay
achieve lasting success. The history of the Polish translation of Le Deuxième Sexe illustrates, on
the other hand, how in volatile political conditions, this work continues to fit in the strategies
of resistance against the systems oppressing femininity.
Contrary to these two titles, which address a relatively broad range of readers, the translation
series that aimed at rendering Gender Trouble in the Polish language is a strictly academic phe-
nomenon, hence, limited to rather hermetic circles. Despite that, the role which Judith Butler
played in the constitution and advancement of Polish queer studies (Warkocki 2013) has also
rippled outside academia, in the increasingly noticeable participation of LGBT movements in
Polish public life. It is these movements that are currently exposed to the most ruthless attacks
from the authorities and Church in Poland.
Another interesting phenomenon that can also be partly attributed to the reception of But-
ler’s theories is the extensive growth of Polish masculinity studies, which were practically non-
existent before the year 2013, and which today can boast a diverse output of considerable value,
both thematically and methodologically (Matuszek 2016; Śmieja 2016; Kaliściak 2017; Dziadek
2018; Dziadek and Mazurkiewicz 2018). Their representatives emphasize their link and affinity
with feminist discourse as well as queer theory and gender studies.
302
Future directions
It would be difficult to point to a work in the area of Polish feminist discourse and practice of
the past three decades – 1989 to 2019 – that could compete with the cultural and academic
impact of the three books discussed previously. This does not mean that the discourse has been
exhausted, but rather that it has entered a phase of a certain problematic and spatial dispersion.
Local projects of specific historical, cultural, social, and political placement are gaining impor-
tance over diagnoses of universal ambitions or great narratives in the style of Le Deuxième Sexe.
The role of texts translated from foreign languages – especially from English – seems to have
diminished in Polish academic circles, mostly due to the increasingly widespread knowledge of
this language among scholars, and the free circulation of foreign-language scientific literature.
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the era of the Internet, it was rare to find quota-
tions from English-language works in books and articles written in Russian, Polish, Hungarian,
Czech, etc. (the situation was better with regard to German and French source texts), it is the
norm today. Nowadays, as the Polish administrators of academic funding seek to internationalize
local research, a greater emphasis is being placed on translating from ‘peripheral’ into ‘dominant’
languages rather than the other way around.
The National Program for the Development of Humanities, launched in 2010 by the Polish
Ministry of Science and Higher Education, is a good example of this translation policy. Its goal
is to finance major research projects from the area of the humanities. One of the modules of this
program includes the translation of prominent foreign-language works in philosophy, theory,
history, sociology, and so forth into Polish. In the almost ten years of the program’s operation,
not even one translation of a work representing feminist trends in academic studies has been
financed. Fortunately, numerous Polish-language dissertations, typically published by local uni-
versity presses, are written, whose aim is the critical reading of major internationally recognized
feminist works (see, e.g., Kłosińska 2010; Majbroda 2013; Szopa 2018). In the next decade, it is
likely that the above-characterized trends will continue.
Further reading
Caws, Mary Ann and Nicola Luckhurst, eds. 2002. The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London and
New York: Continuum.
This multi-authored monograph explores the impact of Woolf ’s work in European literary tradition. It
also includes bibliographical material, as well as information on translations of Woolf ’s work.
Mann, Bonnie and Martina Ferrari, eds. 2017. On ne naît pas femme: on le devient . . . The Life of a Sentence.
New York: Oxford University Press.
This collection of 19 essays by authors from different countries covers multiple themes for which a
meticulous analysis of the famous single sentence opening the second volume of Le Deuxième Sexe is a
starting point. A separate section is devoted to translations of Beauvoir’s treatise into several languages.
Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equal-
ity. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
This multi-authored collection of essays examines how an academic concept of gender, when delib-
erately mis-translated and mis-used by the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing politicians across
European countries, becomes a weapon of propaganda against gender equality.
David-Ménard, Monique and Penelope Deutscher. 2014. Gender, in Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques
Lezra and Michael Wood, eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
641–648.
This entry in the magnificent dictionary of multi-lingual philosophical concepts discusses issues of
understanding and translating the term ‘gender’ and explains the distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’
It contains a sidebar by Judith Butler reviewing different theories and linguistic aspects of ‘gender’ in
the light of her own approach.
303
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the translators of this chapter Mark Kazmierski and
Katarzyna Szuster.
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23
Translating feminism in China
A historical perspective
Zhongli Yu
Introduction
Feminisms in history have developed in many different social and cultural contexts, and translation
has often played a role (cf. Flotow 2012). This chapter provides a historical overview of the trans-
lation of Western feminist work in China. I will first briefly introduce the differences between
what feminism means in the West and in China. The subsequent overview of the Chinese transla-
tion of Western feminist works will help explain the relationship between Western and Chinese
feminisms and the role played by translation in the development of Chinese feminism.
Feminism: Western and Chinese

Feminism in general has long been a negative term in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
especially in Chinese Communist Party literature, where it is usually qualified as “bourgeois” or
“Western.” Feminism has been excluded from the official discourse, and the history of Chinese
feminism erased from the public mind (Wang 1999, 1). But what is feminism? In what follows
we distinguish between Western feminism and Chinese feminism.
Western feminism
Feminism in the West has been a troublesome term due to its complexity and diversity (Beasley
1999, ix). To put it simply, feminism is “a recognition of the historical and cultural subordination
of women” (where women are the only world-wide majority to be treated as a minority), and
a resolve to do something about it (Goodman 1999, x). Feminism is regarded as being “innova-
tive, incentive and rebellious” (Beasley 1999, 3). The history of Western feminism is commonly
divided into three waves (see Krolokke 2005; Rampton 2008), though some feminists do not
see the wave metaphor as a helpful way to understand “stages” in feminist history (Howie 2007,
283). The first wave covers the late 19th and the early 20th centuries and its agenda appeared
to be largely political in nature, either from a liberal or socialist point of view. The activities
and writings of the suffragette movement are typical of this wave. The second wave began in
the 1960s and continues into the 1980s, is often referred to as radical, and is concerned with a
308
wider range of issues, such as sexuality, reproductive rights, family, clothing, the workplace, as
well as the rights of oppressed minorities such as lesbians, women of colour, women of develop-
ing countries, etc., under the general slogan “the personal is political.” In the 1970s, the term
eco-feminism was coined to relate the oppression and domination of all subordinate groups (such
as women, people of colour, children, and the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature
(such as animals, land, water, and air) and to capture the sense that because of their biologi-
cal connection to earth and lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism
(Rampton 2015). Informed by postcolonial and postmodern thinking, the third wave, emerging
in the 1990s, is more oriented to diversity, multiplicity and even ambiguity in women’s lives. In
Europe, this is referred to as new feminism, concerning itself with issues such as trafficking, vio-
lence against women, pornography, etc., while theoretically undermining the earlier notion that
there can be universal womanhood. In some cases, supporters even shun the very label “femi-
nist” to characterize themselves as rejecting the dichotomy of “us and them.” Some third-wavers
claim the writings of feminists of colour from the early 1980s as the beginning of the third wave
(Heywood and Drake cited in Snyder 2008, 180).
However, the three waves should not be seen as independent of each other. The boundaries
are fuzzy; there is no sharp shift in attitude, content, or even dates. For instance, Mary Wol-
lstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of Her Own, as well
as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, may all be said to be iconic texts of the first wave of
feminism. Yet, Wollstonecraft’s book appeared as early as 1792 ( just after the French Revolu-
tion), fighting under the liberal flag of political rights; Woolf ’s in 1929 (between the two world
wars), introducing the notion of female bisexuality as well as announcing women’s unique voice
in writing; and Beauvoir’s in 1949 ( just after the Second World War), critiquing patriarchy and
the way it ‘others’ women. The Second Sex, together with Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Femi-
nine Mystique, have also been regarded as inaugurating the second wave feminism (Min 2005,
279). The second wave ended in the 1980s with internal disputes over issues such as sexuality
and pornography, which ushered in third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. The third wave has
been thought to be a continuation of the second wave as well as a response to the failures of
the second. It continues to emphasize personal experience, but rejects the claim that all women
share a set of common experiences (Snyder 2008, 184–186). Some people regard the third wave
as just another way of talking about the contemporary moment, while some others prefer to call
it post-feminism. Post-feminism literally means “after feminism” or what is “left when feminism
is over.” Open to many different, conflicting, and problematic interpretations on the one hand,
post-feminism seems to connote that feminism is in a mess, in decline, and has failed (Showalter
in Gillis et al. 2007, 292).
Recently, fourth-wave feminism is said to be emerging, partly because of the millennials’ artic-
ulation of themselves as their own kind of feminist. Feminism of the fourth wave goes beyond
the struggles of women. It sounds clarion calls for gender equity and a broader awareness of
oppression along with racism, ageism, classism, ableism, and sexual orientation (Rampton 2015).
Chinese feminism
Chinese feminism is no less difficult to define, due to its linguistic and conceptual ambiva-
lence and controversy (Ko and Wang 2006, 463). The birth of Chinese feminism was “an
event of global proportions” at the turn of the 20th century (Liu et al. 2013, 4–6). The wave
metaphor was also translated into Chinese to delineate the evolution of Chinese feminism
which can also be divided into four waves. The first wave began in the May Fourth Movement
(1915–1921) when Western feminism was introduced to China. The May Fourth Movement
309
Zhongli Yu
was an anti-imperial, political, social, and cultural revolution with the Chinese women’s libera-
tion movement as a part of it, during which Chinese male intellectuals adopted “a Western
view of history” and endeavoured to awaken Chinese women to “break from the traditional
Confucian highly unequal social relation of men and women” (Min 2005, 274–275). Arranged
marriage was condemned, and young people got the right to choose their own marriage part-
ners. The custom of foot-binding was denounced, and the new women were to be educated
just like their brothers. The term “feminism” at this time was translated into “女权主义 nüquan
zhuyi” [women’s rights-ism] to reflect the political desires and demands of feminists (Xu 2009,
203). The spirit of the May Fourth Movement flowed and ebbed, and the feminist movement
declined in the decades to come.
The period from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the 1970s
can be taken as the second wave, during which Chinese feminism was a state policy designed to
mobilize rural and urban women into the public sphere (Barlow 2001, 1288). As an important
aspect of socialistic revolution and construction, Chinese feminism is called “socialist feminism”
(社会主义女权主义 shehui zhuyi nüquan zhuyi, or 社会主义女性主义 shehui zhuyi nüxing
zhuyi) (Chen 2003, 278), or “socialist state feminism” (社会主义国家女权主义 shehui zhuyi
guojia nüquan zhuyi) (Wang 2017, 11), and gender relations were integrated with the Marxist-
Leninist-Maoist view of gender equality. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), with
Maoist ideology of “Woman can hold up half the sky,” the Chinese Communist Party was
committed to re-moulding women according to the male standards and emphasized the mascu-
linization of women. The masculinized women “liberated” by the state mitigated the long-held
gender stereotypes, but were still held responsible for carrying out the noble functions of mother
and wife in the family (Leung 2003, 359–366). From 1949 to the end of Cultural Revolution,
China turned inward on the whole, and writings from the capitalist West became unavailable
to ordinary educated people.
Western feminism re-entered China in the 1980s when China adopted open policies. This
marked the start of the third wave. The “movement towards the liberation of thought” and
economic reform after the Cultural Revolution increased women’s self-awareness. A collective
feminist consciousness arose among Chinese women, with growing recognition of gender dif-
ferences and inequality. As China started to shift from “state-socialism” to “market-socialism,”
Chinese women became more vulnerable, more frequently turned into sex objects, and
exploited and discriminated against in employment contexts. The differences between men
and women were re-emphasized to “justify inequalities” that came with economic reform (Min
2005, 275–276). At this stage, Chinese feminism showed an enthusiastic return to a female iden-
tity or “female essence” (女性气质 nüxing qizhi) (Zhong 2006, 637), i.e. imagined femininity.
With the proliferation of feminism in China, the previous translation of feminism as “wom-
en’s rights-ism” became unsatisfactory and now is often a derisive term in China, as it implies
the stereotype of a “man-hating he-woman hungry for power” and is usually related to “more
Western-oriented, politically-based oppositional feminism.” In the 1990s, the new translation
of feminism as “女性主义 nüxing zhuyi” [womanism/women’s gender-ism/feminine-ism]
replaced the old one in the academy in China, to “describe the orientation of the Chinese
women’s movement” and to “distinguish Chinese from western feminism” (Xu 2009, 203),
while “women’s rights-ism” is reserved for Western feminism. The new term sounds “far less
threatening” and is more popular among Chinese feminist scholars. It is said that it implies
“promoting femininity” and “reinforcing gender distinctions,” a position that would hardly be
regarded as feminist in the anglophone world (Ko and Wang 2006, 463). Now it also refers to
“new cultural strategies and attitudes towards women in the twenty-first century” and signi-
fies a “ ‘smiley’ or friendly/complimentary Chinese-styled feminism” (Schaffer and Song 2007,
310
20). According to Huang Lin (cited in Schaffer and Song 2007, 20), contemporary Chinese
feminism is “sharp but not aggressive,” concerned with “the harmonious development of both
sexes” and focused on the “eternal subject of humanity.” The implications behind the two (May
Fourth politicized, contemporary depoliticized) Chinese terms for feminism reflect a “pluralist
and complex feminism in China, where the formula of ‘difference within commonality’ put
forth by international feminism” (Spakowski 2011, 47) does not fit.
Like in the West, the fourth wave seems to have come with the turn of the new century,
a wave informed by activism, in spite of heavy censorship on civic activism (Yu 2019). Focus-
ing on gender inequality and sexual misconduct, feminist activists of the young generation and
NGOs have organized various campaigns, both online and offline. For instance, students of
Fudan University in Shanghai have organized activities on V-Day – a day established as part
of a movement to stop violence against women and young girls – since 2004 with an annual
production of The Vagina Monologues. The recent #MeToo Movement in China (cf. Yu 2019) is
another case in point. The growing online activism, which came with the development of digi-
tal technology and partly because the Internet has become a new source of women’s oppression,
reconfirming real-world power hierarchical relations (cf. Han 2018), has led to the emergence
of a Chinese digital feminism. In the digital era, Chinese feminist activism has close connections
with or is actually part of global feminism, as can be seen in the two examples just mentioned,
although they carry distinct local characteristics and elements. It should be noted that the term
Chinese feminist activists use to refer to feminism is “women’s rights-ism,” signifying that wom-
en’s rights are still an important issue today; meanwhile, the milder version “womanism” is often
used in academia. It should also be pointed out that some academics use both terms, such as
Li Yinhe (李银河), a sociologist and sexologist at China Academy of Social Sciences and Ai
Xiaoming (艾晓明), a professor in Gender Studies at the Sun Yat-sen University, also widely
known as a feminist activist, active in safeguarding the rights and interests of women, including
anti-(sexual) violence against women (Yu 2015, 73). Unlike many Chinese women intellectu-
als who are reluctant to be tagged a feminist, Li Yinhe bluntly acknowledges that she is a 女权
主义者 nüquan zhuyi zhe (women’s rights-ist). Condemning the demonization of feminism in
China, she interprets feminism as targeting a harmonious relationship between men and women
and argues that anyone who advocates equality between men and women is a women’s rights-ist
(Su 2010). According to Ai Xiaoming, there is not much difference between womanism and
women’s rights-ism. She uses one or the other, depending on the circumstances. When facing
a male chauvinist, she prefers to use the term “女权 nüquan” [women’s rights]. She believes that
the key issues of feminism are rights, resources, and power relationships (Yu 2015, 73).
Translation of Western feminism into Chinese feminism

The above very brief account of Western feminism and Chinese feminism provides a frame-
work for examining Chinese feminism from the perspective of translation. This section is an
inventory of what feminist works have been translated in different periods of time in the his-
tory of Chinese feminism, which will further reveal the trajectories and features of Chinese
feminism. The majority of the following data come from CNKI (China national knowledge
infrastructure) and Baidu (the world’s largest Chinese search engine), collected with a focus on
academic and non-fictional writings on feminism and gender. Some data was collected ran-
domly from the quotations in academic writings in women’s studies and feminist studies. The
data is not exhaustive as not much can be found from before 1949 on CNKI and Baidu, but a
story can be told with the key information collected. Literary works are excluded because of the
scope of this study. The following examination falls into three chronological periods, roughly
311
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following the waves of Chinese feminism: Late Qing (1895–1911) and Republican (1912–49),
the Mao era from 1949 till the late 1970s, and post-Mao era from the 1980s to the present.
Late Qing (1895–1911) and Republican (1912–1949)

Western feminist concepts or ideas came to China with the late Qing reformers who were learn-
ing from the West about how to strengthen the nation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
the concept of “女权 nüquan” [women’s rights] was introduced to China when Chinese reform-
ers, all men, promoted the notions of people’s rights or civil rights, human rights, and natural
rights with the goal of strengthening the nation. This is regarded as the beginning of feminism
in modern China (Ko and Wang 2007, 2). The term “女权 nüquan” was generally understood
as women’s rights. In his Chinese translation of Herbert Spencer’s 1851 treatise Social Statics: Or
the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, Ma Junwu
(马君武) translated the expression “rights of women” into “女权 nüquan.” As the first translation
on the subject of women’s rights in Chinese, Spencer’s work was extremely influential. From
1902, 女权 nüquan became a slogan in discourses of women’s liberation. On the eve of 1911,
there emerged debates on women’s rights, giving rise to the articulation of different gender roles
for women, such as mothers to the nation, equals in duty to men, seekers of new social roles
for women without gender distinction, and women as the main agents of their own liberation
(rather than looking to men for liberation) (Sudo 2006, 475–486).
The debates on women’s rights in this period of the early 20th century are deliberate efforts
by Chinese women elites, such as Jin Tianhe (金天翮), Qiu Jin (秋瑾), Zhang Zhujun (张竹君),
and He Zhen (何震, aka He-Yin Zhen 何殷震) to construct their versions of Chinese modernity
and new womanhood. The debates continued into the May Fourth Movement (1915–1921),
with shifted focuses and theoretical underpinnings. An exalted motherhood based on a mixture
of biological determinism, eugenics, and sexology was translated from Japan, the USA, and
Europe. During this period, the women’s rights movement in the global context was introduced
in journals, leading to the emergence of feminist organizations nationwide which demanded
women’s rights to equal educational and employment opportunities, freedom of marriage and
divorce, and equal political participation (Ko and Wang 2007, 5–6). In the May Fourth era, the
definition of women’s rights was much expanded to include all the preceding. The educated
women who acted from their newly acquired subject position of “being a human” formed a new
social category called “new women” (Wang 1999, 14). “To be a human” in that time meant “to
be a man” with all the constituting modern values. In other words, the May Fourth Movement
advocated that Chinese women should be the same as men, and not become ‘the other’ of men.
This May Fourth emphasis on women being human quickly took root in China, and equal-
ity between men and women as a principle was written into the platform of both the Chinese
Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (i.e. Kuomingtang) (Wang 1999, 19).
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, a time when feminism, women’s
liberation, and equality between men and women were under heated discussion. Because sev-
eral key founders had been vocal advocates of feminism, the Party endorsed the May Fourth
feminist demand for equal rights for women from its inception. After the Party turned to
Marxism, members steered the debates on women’s rights towards a socialist program, empha-
sizing the elimination of private ownership and the class system, and adopting an exclusionary
strategy copied from European socialists to differentiate the “proletarian women’s liberation
movement” (focusing on the Party’s goal) from the “bourgeois feminist movement” (focusing
on gender equality). As the Party aimed for political alignment rather than theoretical develop-
ment, the promotion of its feminist agenda on women’s rights co-existed with a disparagement
312
of women’s rights-ism. As a result, feminists in the Party learned to manoeuvre in the discursive
space of a “proletarian women’s liberation” so as to avoid the negative label of women’s rights-
ism that made them “bourgeois narrow feminists” (Ko and Wang 2007, 5–6).
The Mao era from 1949 until the late 1970s

In the Mao era, feminism was a taboo subject. The intellectual space for debating women’s
rights and social spaces for women’s spontaneous activism were closed down (Ko and Wang
2007, 6). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the publishing industry suffered serious
restrictions and translation publishing almost stopped. Only one book on women of socialist
countries is found: a book imported from the Soviet Union (China’s ally at that time), with
two Chinese translations of it being published respectively in 1950 and 1951. This translation
choice underlies the then current socialist ideology of women. The Party’s Marxist position on
women meant that women’s liberation could only be guaranteed by a socialist revolution with
a top-down approach. Mao’s statement “Men and women are the same,” uttered in 1964, some-
what echoed the May Fourth ideal of humanist inclusion of women. During this period, the
push for male-female equality is said to have been the strongest, and the boundaries separating
the sexes were overridden by the movement of women into men’s work and political activism
(Mann 2011, 49). The May Fourth urban middle-class “new women” were replaced with the
rural or lower-class urban “iron girls” (铁姑娘 tie guniang, referring to the selfless hardworking
women of the 1960s). The term “iron girls” embodies the socialist gender ideology and the
socialist value that women should be regarded as important builders of society. The perception
of women as constructing socialism laid a foundation for some degree of gender equality (Wang
Lihua 1999, 27, 34). However, a women’s liberation idea that maintained the male-universal as
the norm was problematic, because such equality between men and women actually deprived
women of their difference, and androgenized women somehow created the illusion that Chinese
women were liberated and enjoyed equal status as men (Yu 2015, 170), when in fact many of
them found the masculinist Maoist gender equality oppressive (Wang 1999, 19).
The post-Mao era from the 1980s to the present

In the post-Mao era, though still loaded with negative connotations, the term “feminism” re-
emerged, marking an opening-up of both discursive and social spaces for feminist contestations
and activism. The translation and publishing of feminist works in the decades after the Cultural
Revolution has been governed by policies for a publishing industry working in a complex social
and political context, and this has resulted in ups and downs in translation publishing, showing
three distinct features: the revival and fluctuation of translation publishing from 1980 to 1989;
the depression and reformation of translation publishing from 1990 to 1999; and the market-
oriented development of translation publishing in the 21st century (Yu 2015, 162–167). The
following review explores these three periods, with special attention to works with retransla-
tions, with year of publication indicated in the brackets after the source text title.
The 1980s
The reform and opening up that occurred in China from the late 1970s, especially the eman-
cipation of the mind, provided favourable conditions for Western theories coming into China,
which began to appear from the mid-1980s. At that time, about 20 feminist works were imported.
They were concerned with the female body, female sexuality, married women, working women,
313
Zhongli Yu
and gender sociology. Among them, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (TSS) (1986, 1988×2,
1998, 2004, 2009×2, 2011), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1988×3, 1992) were the
most popular. Each had three translations published in the 1980s and retranslations in the follow-
ing decades. Another three works that had retranslations are Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature:
The Roaring inside her (1988, 2007), Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much (1989, 2011),
Our Bodies, Ourselves of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1989, 1998).
Of all these works, Beauvoir’s TSS is the most influential one, with eight Chinese translations
published from 1986 to the present, showing its lasting influence. The arrival of TSS in China
is seen as marking the advent of European and American feminism. An important reason for
the popularity of Beauvoir’s book in China is that the difficult situation of women discussed in
its Book II is very similar to the situations Chinese women were facing as a result of the trans-
formations in China after the Cultural Revolution. Beauvoir’s naming of women as the second
sex reflected the experience of Chinese women as an invisible gender in society. Chinese urban
women in the 1980s were in theory equal to men at the political, economic, and legal levels
created by the socialist system. However, under this seemingly absolute equality, women faced
the heavy burden of a male standard of work in society and the concealed expectations of being
“贤妻良母” [good wife and virtuous mother] at home. The icons of model workers or “iron
girls” elevated during the Cultural Revolution were being replaced with “socialist housewives,”
the new exemplar for women who were committed and devoted to the family role (Leung
2003, 365). The campaign of emancipating the mind at the turn of the 1980s showed a tendency
to reconstruct a patriarchally centred gender order, and Chinese women’s political and social sta-
tus deteriorated with the economic reform. Beauvoir’s naming women as the second sex struck
a chord among Chinese intellectual women and prompted them to reflect on their own expe-
riences as the second sex. Chinese feminists of the 1980s made use of the phrase “women, the
second sex” to mark the existence of gender differences so as to break through their invisibility
at a time when slogans proclaimed “men and women are the same,” and to cultivate women’s
consciousness as being essentially different from men’s (Yu 2015, 168–170).
The 1990s
In the 1990s, about 40 translations were published. The increased number owed much to the
Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. This Conference
is regarded as an important marker in the reform-era history of China’s women’s movement
in its relationship with international feminisms, and a watershed in the history of Chinese
feminism (Wang and Zhang 2010). Through the Conference slogan of “gender mainstream-
ing,” the concept of gender (as opposed to biological sex) was clearly introduced. Moreover,
the Conference led to the growth of women’s NGOs in China, and increased the number of
gender-related international development projects, in which many women’s studies scholars
participated. Through projects, academic conferences, seminars, and workshops, the Confer-
ence brought Chinese feminists into much more frequent encounters with Western feminists.
A major concern that developed at this time was what exactly constituted Chinese feminism as
Chinese feminists perceived the need to “indigenize feminisms” within China (Xu 2009, 197).
Since the early 1990s, Chinese feminists are said to have enthusiastically embraced the global
feminist concept of gender and used it innovatively to create local practices of “gender training”
(Wang and Zhang 2010, 40). Examples of such innovation are not rare (cf. Min 2017), signifying
transformation and localization or indigenization of Western feminism to suit the local context.
One result is that the term “womanism” instead of “women’s rights-ism” became current as the
translation of feminism.
314
In this period, the translated works concerned not only women’s secondary position, wom-
en’s lives, the female body, female sexuality, and gender, but also women’s rights, needs, and self-
esteem, feminist theology, and feminist literary criticism. The most influential book was Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with two translations being published
respectively in 1995 and 1996, and several retranslations later (2005, 2006, 2012, 2016). The
Hite reports were very popular too. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality was
first published in 1994, with two retranslations being published in 2002. Germaine Greer’s The
Female Eunuch (1991) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1999) were both retranslated respectively
in 2003 and 2000. These key works were repeatedly translated and published in the next century,
implying that women’s rights are still a major concern of Chinese feminists, as the market econ-
omy, officially called the “socialist market economy,” which started from 1994, has resulted in
the rehabilitation of patriarchal culture and caused new problems for women as is discussed later
in the chapter. These developments explain why feminist activists prefer the version “women’s
rights-ism” as mentioned before.
The 21st century

A more market-oriented economy in the new century promoted the growth of translation
publishing. From 2000 up to July 2018, at least 214 works on feminist topics were published,
covering a wider range of issues. While the topics introduced in the 1980s and 1990s continue,
the imported works cover many more subjects on women, such as psychology, history, language,
literature, power, law, citizenship, economics, art, music, leisure, and women’s decision not to
marry. Gender has become another major subject, moving beyond issues of women and men to
address homosexuality, bisexuality, intersex, queer, desire, identity, history, ethics, science, semiot-
ics, media, and public administration. Prostitution is a new topic, with three translated works
published respectively in 2000, 2003, and 2009.
Besides the retranslations already mentioned, four other works have retranslations: Betty
Friedan’s The Second Stage (2000, 2007), Karen Horney’s Feminine Psychology (2000, 2009), Mari-
lyn Yalom’s A History of the Wife (2002, 2016), and Women’s Lives: A Psychological Exploration by
Claire A. Etaugh and Judith S. Bridges (2003, 2012). Translations of Shere Hite’s other reports
were published. The translation of the Hite report on male sexuality was published in the same
year as the retranslation of the Hite report on female sexuality (2002). In 2008, Chinese transla-
tions of the three Hite reports respectively on Shere Hite herself, the family, and sex and business
were published. The subjects of the translations and retranslations reflect social issues in China
of the new century, such as trafficking, prostitution, prejudice against female university students
in the job market, prejudice against gender minorities, and violence against women, includ-
ing sexual harassment and rape, partly exposed in the recent #MeToo Movement in China.
From the translations, Chinese readers learned not just concepts and theories, but also practical
approaches for activism, as discussed in Zhongli Yu (2017, 2019).
Conclusion
The brief explanation of Western feminism and Chinese feminism demonstrates both differ-
ences and interconnections. The overview of translations of Western feminist works in each
period largely shows how these coincide with the features of Chinese feminism in different
waves, and reveals their impact on Chinese women and feminism. The preceding discussion
focuses on works that have retranslations, regarding them as being more important for Chi-
nese feminism, with many more translations not mentioned due to lack of space. To sum up,
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Zhongli Yu
the translation of Western feminism has experienced three phases in China: introducing and
importing, learning and imitating, and transforming and localizing. The imported feminism
was transformed when interacting with the local society, and gradually developed into Chinese
feminism to accommodate local needs and agendas. Naturally, there exist both differences and
similarities between Western and Chinse feminisms.
The influx of Western feminism since the 1980s has led to a series of changes in China, demon-
strating the important role of translation in the development of Chinese feminism. From the 1980s,
courses, programs, and centres of women’s studies and gender studies were gradually established
in Chinese universities to counter gender-blindness in a class-focused Marxist theory of women,
the neglect of women in general history, and the ignorance about and prejudice against gender
minorities. From the 1990s, NGOs for women and gender minorities developed online and offline.
Activities or campaigns for women and gender minorities emerged and have been developing
despite strict censorship from the authorities. All such changes deserve scholarly attention.
Future directions
In addition to academic and non-fictional writings on feminism and gender discussed in this
study, a larger number of feminist literary works have been imported, and many are very popular
among Chinese readers: for example, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The
Scarlet Letter, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Golden Notebook, to name but a few. The
imported feminist literary works are an important part of (feminist) translation history, a his-
torical study of which would shed further light on the history of Chinese feminism, and hence
should be explored in the future.
Further reading
Liu, Lydia H., Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. 2013. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in
Transnational Theory. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.
This book introduces the birth of Chinese feminism at the turn of the 20th century. It focuses on
three important thinkers, i.e. He-Yin Zhen (何殷震, 1884–1920?, a pre-eminent feminist theorist and
founding editor of an anarcho-feminist journal Natural Justice), Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929,
a journalist, philosopher and reformist), and Jin Tianhe (金天翮, 1874–1947, a liberal educator and
political activist), and includes in the volume their major feminist texts (translated from Chinese). The
latter two were male scholars, another indication that the first wave of Chinese feminism was led by
Chinese male intellectuals (cf. Yu 2019).
Spakowski, Nicola. 2011. ‘Gender’ Trouble: Feminism in China Under the Impact of Western Theory and
the Spatialization of Identity. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 19(1), 31–54.
This paper examines articulations or rhetorics of a Chinese feminist “identity” as part of a new con-
ceptual grid of global-local interrelations. It takes reflections on “gender” as a departure to move on to
wider discussions of what Chinese feminism is in light of theory imported from the West.
Wang, Zheng and Ying Zhang. 2010. Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism Since the
Fourth UN Conference on Women. Feminist Studies, 36(1), 40–70.
This paper discusses feminist conceptual, organizational, and social transformations in China since the
early 1990s, which have unfolded in conjunction with transnational feminist movements during the
period when China became a global capitalist giant. It locates Chinese feminism at the intersection
of local and global processes, contributing to understanding the dynamics between locally grounded
feminist strategies and the global circulation of feminist concepts and practices.
Yu, Zhongli. 2017. Relay Translation of Feminism in China: An Intralingual Case. Journal of Translation
Studies (New Series), 1(2), 47–74.
This paper discusses an intralingual case of relay translation of feminism in China, i.e. the Chinese
campus production of The Vagina Monologues by students of Fudan University in Shanghai. It examines
316
the translators’ behaviour in the specific social context, particularly the strategies of the translators for
dealing with constraints that arise from social context and cultural differences.
Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. London and New York:
Routledge.
This book explores how Western feminism is translated in China, with reference to two feminist works
The Second Sex and The Vagina Monologues. It pays special attention to how the content on the female
body and female sexuality (including lesbian love) is translated or censored, the influence of the transla-
tor’s gender identity, as well as the social and political contexts in dealing with such content.
Related topics
Feminist studies, women’s studies, gender studies, feminist theory, feminist history, translation
history
Acknowledgement
Thanks goes to Dr Beibei Tang and Ms Chang Li who made great contribution to data collec-
tion for this work.
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24
Queer transfeminism and
its militant translation
Collective, independent,
and self-managed
Laura Fontanella
Introduction
This chapter focuses on queer transfeminist work in translation in European countries outside
the anglophone world. It defines the concept and then explores the work of selected groups,
mainly operating in Italy and Spain, who use translation as a political and queer transfeminist
tool, and concludes with research suggestions that might enlarge this topic to non-Western
countries and map non-European realities of queer transfeminist and militant translation.
Beyond feminist translation

Much has been written on “feminist translation,” its development in the 1970s and 1980s,
the strategies observed and deployed in feminist interventionist work, the theories developed,
and broader feminist perspectives on translation and translation studies. The field has oper-
ated in a context of linguistic creativity and political resistance (Sarapegno 2010), finding ways
for women to emerge in translation and in histories of translation with their femininity, their
desires, and their power. Feminist translation is largely about seeing and using translation as an
act of rewriting, of active intervention, an approach that takes a stand against chauvinism in all
its forms (Saidero 2013). While these efforts have rendered women visible in certain texts, at
least to some extent, these processes have also raised some political doubts (Castro 2009, 2012).
Feminist translation has largely been a ‘Western’ praxis since the scholars who first opened up
the topic were mainly English-speaking and addressed English topics. Now a growing interest in
the field has allowed it to expand into other contexts and cultures, as in the work of Claudia de
Lima Costa and Sonia Alvarez (2014), Zhongli Yu (2015), and others (Castro and Ergun 2017;
Flotow and Farahzad 2017).
This type of feminist translation has focused mainly on women. Originating from a particular
historical context that paid attention to the sociopolitical differences existing between men and
women, it was centred on the naturalization of the concept of woman as the subject of feminism
(Baldo 2018). This interest in women alone is understandable but it has led to the exclusion
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Laura Fontanella
of other categories of people who are oppressed because of their gender or sexual identity by
the hetero-cis-patriarchy (Butler 1988, 1990, 2014). Still, with the development of new areas of
study such as queer, lesbian, gay, and transgender studies, it has become evident that there are
similarities in the way patriarchy oppresses women and LGBTQI subjectivities. New alliances
are being born from this common denominator (Green 2006).
More inclusive approaches: translation, transition, transgender

The term transfeminism started circulating in the 2000s with the publication of the Transfeminist
Manifesto, a text written by scholar and activist Emi Koyama. This text states that transfeminism
is “a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to
the liberation of all women and beyond” (Koyama 2003, 244–245). The term includes “queer,
intersex, non-trans people, all those subjectivities who are sympathetic towards the needs for
trans women” (Baldo 2018, 1), and has spread all over Europe but acquired a particular reso-
nance in Spain and Italy where a variety of groups and collectives have declared themselves to
be transfeminist: some have started translation projects, seeing in translation a tool with which
to practice transfeminism.
According to Michela Baldo, “the term transfeminism can be considered [to refer to] a form
of feminism informed by transgender politics” (Baldo 2019, 1). It defines a feminism that is not
just for cis and trans women but includes all others who have suffered gender and sexual discrim-
ination: intersex people, trans men, non-trans women, non-trans men, non-binary, gender fluid.
Recognizing that trans, lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer and non-binary people are subject to
hetero-cis-patriarchal oppressions and violence (Green 2006) has caused proponents of feminist
translation to become more conscious of this movement’s own power dynamics, and construct
a more intersectional feminism as well as a more inclusive practice of feminist translation and
theorization (Santaemilia 2005; Hill Collins 2017). This recognition has been further developed
by explorations of the similarities between translation studies and transgender studies:
Like transgender studies, translation has historically been preoccupied with issues of authen-
ticity. Writers have historically characterized translation as secondary work, an unfaithful
and deceptive practice to be scrutinized with deep suspicion [. . .] this inherited concern
about authenticity allows us to draw parallels with the harassment that trans*,1 non-binary,
and trans persons experience in the violent accusation of deceitfulness and assertions that
their genders are not real and they are not faithful to the gender assigned at birth.
(Concilo 2016, 463)
This analysis by Arielle A. Concilo, which argues that the preoccupation with the authenticity of
translation somehow mirrors/reflects similar preoccupations around trans or non-binary persons,
has produced further discussion drawing attention to geographical and gender borders, binarisms
and language transitioning (Gramling and Dutta 2016). For instance, discussion around the poli-
tics of monolingualism bring in translation as a political tool and praxis that may subvert and
transgress norms that force identities and languages into limited, normative form, dividing them
into what is internal and what is external to the modern nation-state. This can be compared to
the cisgender system, and so the task of the politically aware translator is to remain in the queer
zones, in the untranslatable areas, in the “interstitial spaces produced in the encounter between
cultures [. . .] sites for addressing multiple lines of social invention, resistance” (Spurlin 2014c, 1–2).
Since translation works not only across linguistic and national borders but across social cat-
egories as well, the purpose of the transfeminist queer approach is not only to let transfeminist
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Queer transfeminism, militant translation
and queer identities emerge in a text but also to inquire critically about transfeminist queer
expressions, terms and lexemes that can or cannot be translated from one culture into another.
Many scholars have shown how this specific approach can bring identities to the surface that,
otherwise, would be marginalized, rendered invisible, and newly oppressed. Annarita Taronna
(2006) has shown how the last Italian translation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1993) by Ales-
sandro Rossatti partially deletes the queer identity of the main character. In English, Orlando’s
transition from female to male is marked by a moment of simultaneity. During the transition,
we can clearly read that Orlando, even for a moment, is both. The erasure of this gender-double
aspect has caused damage to Woolf ’s own writing and to Italian readers’ perception of it.
In Italian we read:
Ma sotto ogni altro aspetto, rimaneva lo stesso Orlando di prima.

Il mutamento di sesso poteva mutare il futuro dei due Orlando, ma non certo la loro
identità. I loro visi, come provano i ritratti, rimasero identici.”
[But in every other way, it was the same Orlando as before.
The change in sex could change the future of the two Orlandos, but certainly not their
identity. Their faces, as the portraits prove, remained identical]
In Virginia Woolf ’s English text, however, we read:
But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.

The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing to alter their identity.
Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same [. . .]
Rossatti, sacrifices the possible gender nuances, the diverse gender options included in
Woolf ’s “they\their” introducing, in Italian, the term “due” which means two – giving Orlan-
do’s transformation a binary connotation that is not suggested in the English test.
In Rossatti translated version, even the title is different: it reinforces gender binarisms too.
While Virginia Woolf ’s title was originally Orlando, in Rossatti edition we can find a relevant
adding: Orlando. É uomo? É donna? [Is he a man? Is she a woman?]. This textual addition suggests
the existence of only two genders, reinforces binary concepts, underlines the fact that human
existence has, necessarily, only two possible exits: either you are a woman or you are a man –
something that, in Virginia Woolf ’s text, is not given. This title cannot abide doubt, indefinite-
ness, the queer zone, anything beyond the margins. This title shows the didactic need to put
things back in their place, to put the elements back into their taxonomy.
Similarly, Crisitano Mazzei (2007) has analyzed the situation of two novels: Silviano San-
tiago’s Stella Manhattan, translated into English by George Yúdice in 1994, and Caio Fernando
Abreu’s Onde andarà dulce Veiga?, translated by Adria Frizzi in 2001 with the title Whatever
Happened to Dulce Veiga? In the first case, the protagonist Eduardo Silva is described with both
masculine and feminine gender referents (Santiago 1985), while the English translation shows
Eduardo entrapped in only a female body as only the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ occur (Santiago
1985). In the second case, the character of Jacyr, a cross-dressing adolescent, is called “louca,” “a
word used by transvestites to address themselves” (Mazzei 2007, 50) but this is translated into
English as “crazy girl” (Prado 2008; Abreu 1990, 2010) which erases its political queer value.
These examples show how the translation of transfeminist queer identities is not an easy process.
Deborah Elena Giustini gives further evidence in her analysis of the Russian translation of Sap-
pho’s ancient poems. In particular, Ode number two in which Sappho decants her jealousy for
another woman completely loses its lesbian connotation in Russian. The gender pronouns that
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show that the object of Sappho’s jealousy is a woman, are shifted, changed, and masculinized,
thus “obliterating any reference to a taboo lesbian relationship” (Giustini 2015, 17–18). The act
of translation can thus easily tamper with queerness in texts, erasing, ignoring, or neglecting
references to oppressed people rather than using its potential as a political tool to set free those
oppressed people (Cavagnoli 2010, 2012).
Not only feminist translation but many other translation theorists and researchers (Baker
1992, 2006; Venuti 1992, 2004; Tymoczko 2000, 2010) have shown how politics and translation
are linked in their relation to power and how translation can serve as a device to stand up to
power, give voice to the marginalized, excluded and oppressed. If translation is an instrument
able to give voice to those communities, subjectivities and identities that are squashed and flat-
tened by the hetero-cis-white-bourgeois-patriarchal system, it is easy to see the pressing need
felt by the members of these groups to translate in order to change the dominant narratives.
The need to emerge in writing and in translation has led to the creation of collectives, asso-
ciations, organizations whose members come together to produce self-managed, independent,
anti-capitalist, anti-racist, queer transfeminist and postcolonialist approaches to translation, with
a focus on the emergence of every kind of Alterity.
Queer transfeminist collectives and their translations

With the terms “Queer Transfeminism Collective,” I refer to groups that practise intersectional
feminism, a type of feminism that includes not only cisgender women but also trans people,
non-binary and gender fluid subjects, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, racialized people, subjects from
different classes and different cultural backgrounds. Queer, in this sense, is used to reinforce the
idea that this intersectionality is based on an alliance between feminist and LGBTQI move-
ments. The terms “Queer Transfeminist” are often a collocation used to describe certain left-
wing radical collectives, at least, in Italy.
Western countries may be experiencing a burgeoning number of publications about gender
and feminist issues in response to risks of feminist struggles being subsumed by patriarchy and
capitalism (Federici 2012), but the writings that are fundamental to a radically politicized queer
transfeminist audience often run the risk of remaining locked away in drawers. The mainstream
publishing industry does not seem to be very interested in publishing such texts. Some collec-
tives and independent associations are trying to address this problem, the more prominent of
which are described later. They include “Traduzioni Militanti,” a group born from an Italian
feminist blog, “Ideadestroyingmuros,” whose members are mainly based in Spain and who have
already translated masterpieces connected with the gender studies culture, “Plumas Traidoras”
who have applied the concepts of identity politics to the way they assign translations to a trans-
lator, “LesBitches,” one of the most influential translation collectives in Italy, “Utopia” with its
translation ‘atelier,’ and finally, “BLA” and “Interprise” which are also involved in interpreting.
These collectives have been chosen because of their proximity to the author and because, in
the militant Italian context they are the best known. For instance, I am a member of the group
“Traduzioni Militanti” – described later – and have translated an extract from the Transfeminist
Manifesto by Emi Koyama, for “LesBitches.” Because of this collaboration and because we are
part of the same activist network, it has been possible to contact the different collectives, inter-
view them on their work and discuss shared interests in gender and translation.
“Traduzioni Militanti” (Militant Translations), founded in 2013 through the famous feminist
blog, “Femminismo a Sud” (Feminism to South) and linked to the Facebook page “Abbatto i
Muri” (Tear Down Walls) has been filling the gap described previously in recent years. This
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group was born thanks to a “call for translatxr”2 issued by Isabella Gerini, administrator of the
website. It now offers a service where customers can request the translation of articles, inter-
views and texts about gender issues via email. The text is then assigned to an available translatxr
who shares the translation using social platforms such as the blog abbattoimuri.wordpress.com.
The group has gained social popularity and helped spread queer transfeminist contents via the
Internet. Recently, the translatxr have been translating different articles, pdf files and materials
written and shared by ICRSE, the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in
Europe from English to Italian. Other translated articles are from online newspapers such as
Huffpost, The Independent, VICE, BuzzFeed News, USA Today [. . .]. The translatxrs have also
translated brief extracts from Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme [Women’s
wombs. Capitalism, racialization, feminism] by Françoise Vergès (2017).
Ideadestroyingmuros,3 another such group, describe themselves as follows:
a trans-cultural collective formed in 2005. [. . .] In the light of our displacements towards
Granada, Paris, Barcelona, Palermo and Valencia we need practicing resistance, creative
processes, auto-anthropological research routes and self-management. The perspective that
we have chosen to share is based on several border positions in relation to: nation, gender,
sexuality, language and creation. [. . .] The instruments by which we transform our limita-
tions into resources are feminist research, translation and writing.
Because of its clear political positioning and its publication of Paul B. Preciado’s Anal Terror
(2009), the group has gained great visibility in Europe becoming an inspirational collective
in the field of translation and activism. As the first group to provide a translation of Preciado,
a work that was available in Spanish only. Ideadestroyingmuros understood the importance of
that text before any official publishing house did. In an interview released on January 2017, one
of the members of this collective using the nickname Mery, provided the reasons behind their
decision to translate not only Preciado from Spanish into Italian but also Pat Califia’s One of the
Occult Sides of Lesbian Sexuality from English into Spanish.
Preciado represented the cornerstone of a theoretical apparatus completely lacking in Italy.

Preciado, who knew the “Queer,” was pushing us on something completely unreleased.
Our translation has been made collectively. [. . .] We found many difficulties because many
terms, in Italian, didn’t exist. We didn’t want to publish our translations through a publish-
ing house because we didn’t want to enter into a capitalistic mechanism. We have published
everything via self-production and self-funding.
A transfeminist group, this collective works without reproducing hierarchical structures – also
in the translation process –, avoiding power dynamics and instead, sharing knowledges, com-
petences, insights, and suggestions. Moreover, it tries, sentence by sentence, to transpose the
discussions on gender, sexuality and feminism in their works, keeping feminist and LGBTQI
identities, maintaining them in translation, saving them from oblivion.
One example of this practice can be spotted in the word “transmaricabollo,” a term widely
used by the collective in their translations as a general replacement for the word queer. Once
again, the reasons behind this choice are political. At first glance, this is a composite noun,
made by ‘trans’ for transgender, ‘marica’ for gay or effeminate man and ‘bollo’ – which liter-
ally means pastry, pie, donut – for lesbian. Originally created by the Spanish queer activist
assembly of Madrid, Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol, this term – together with its political
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intentions – has been adopted by other collectives which want to distance themselves from both
heterosexual norms and the dominant mainstream LGBT activism.
According to Ideadestroyingmuros, some of whose members are involved in the Spanish
queer activist network, the term queer would hyper-politicise position in gender and sexuality
policies rather than a specific set of identities. Ideadestroyingmuros members have collectively
decided to use this ironic and provocative neologism in their translations from English in order
to explicitly point out the diversity of this coalition’s concerns which encompass issues such
as the normalization of sex-work, the antifascist and anticapitalistic struggle, the criticism of
national borders, the management of migrants and austerity – issues that the mainstream LGBT
movements do not generally take on, or refuse to face.
Another example of their approach can be seen in their translation of work by Pat Califia,
an American trans man who has become popular because of his essays about sexuality and his
erotic fictions and poems. His paper, “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” which first appeared
in English in a book entitled Public Sex: the Culture of Radical Sex (Cleis Press 1994) has been
translated as “Un lado oculto de la sexualidad lésbica” [One of the occult sides of lesbian sexual-
ity] and published in 2008, by Bellaterra Publishing House, as an essay inside the book BDSM.
Estudios sobre la dominación y la sumisión, [BDSM. Studies on Domination and Submission]. Ideade-
stroyingmuros translated this already translated text from Spanish to Italian.
In the very first lines of this text, where the author, in English used “the closet,” we find the
Spanish term “El armario” [the closet]:
El armario es mucho más grande de lo que se cree y no debería haber razones por las que
estamos en él, pero estamos allí. Es obvio que las fuerzas conservadoras, como la religión
institucionalizada, la policía y otros representantes de la mayoría tiránica, no quieren que el
sadomasoquismo florezca en ninguna parte, y las mujeres sexualmente activas siempre han
representado una amenaza que el sistema no tolera (Califia 2008).
In Italian, there is no expression related to the sexual closet, and, for this reason, no translation
for the collocation “coming out” which tends to simply be left in English in Italian texts. The
activists chose to use two different terms. In the first case they left the word “closet” in English,
inserting a glossary note at the end of the chapter explaining the term to the readers. The
term, according to Serena Bassi in her Displacing LGBT: Global Englishes, Activism and Trans-
lated Sexualities, is one of those terms that is gradually become well-known to the international
LGBTQI community members: the Ideadestroyingmuros activists thus decided to leave this
term in English since this would not compromise readers’ comprehension. In the second case,
they translated the two words literally as “armadio sessuale” [sexual closed].
Following is the Italian translation by the Ideadestroyingmuros activists:
Il closet/l’armadio sessuale è molto più grande di quel che si crede e non ci dovrebbero
essere ragioni per le quali ci troviamo in esso, però ci stiamo. E’ ovvio che forze conservatr-
ici come la religione istituzionalizzata, la polizia e altri rappresentanti della maggioranza
tirannica, non desiderano che il sadomasochismo fiorisca in nessun luogo inoltre le donne
sessualmente attive hanno sempre rappresentato una minaccia che il sistema non tollera.
[The closet/sexual closet is much bigger than you think and there should be no reason
why we are in it, but we are there. It is obvious that conservative forces such as institution-
alized religion, the police and other representatives of the tyrannical majority do not want
sadomasochism to flourish anywhere, and sexually active women have always represented a
threat that the system does not tolerate.]
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At the end of the text we find an explanation for this translation:
With the English term Closet sexual or Spanish Armario sexual we mean making our sexual
choice public. It normally refers to a homosexual condition or choice.
The typical Spanish “salir del armario” or English “coming out” means to declare and
make publicly visible one’s homosexuality. In this case, even we have left closet unvaried
as first result, the Italian armadio sessuale was preferred to literally translate the expression
“closet sexual” meaning a series of social constructions that create a boundary between the
heterosexual normative and hidden homosexuality.
Contrary to the work done by Ideadestroyingmuros, who split up the assignments among
members according to the length of the text and the time each member has available, Plumas
Traidoras,4 a group mainly composed of Italian activists who migrated to Marseille, France,
choose to divide their tasks according to a further variable. Since they claim to not be interested
in speaking for other subjectivities, they exploit an identity politics approach:
We assigned the pages that had to be translated according with our identity, starting from who
we are, choosing the portion of the text depending on self-conscious processes and discussions.
Plumas Traidoras organizes its work according to members’ identities and specific oppressions.
They theorize that translation tasks have to be assigned to someone who directly feels the same
specific oppression felt by the author. Through this practice, based on the feminist practice of
self-awareness, they hope to guarantee the absence of any gender, sexual, class, or ethnic bias in
the translation. Moreover, like Ideadestroyingmuros, Plumas Traidoras is particularly sceptical
and critical of publishing houses. They write:
We are not interested in entering the publishing mainstream and capitalistic world – espe-
cially when it is ready to exploit our forces. We prefer to publish these texts on our blog.
LesBitches5 (The Bitches) is a collective that defines itself as “transanimalfemminist*,” declar-

ing they are “bitches projected beyond gender, race, class borders who share the passion for
activism and for militant translations.” In this case, the asterisk at the end of the word transani-
malfemminist* is used as a gender-neutral suffix in order to avoid masculine or feminine endings.
In 2016 this group translated “Manifesto Xenofeminista” that appeared on the web page of the
xenofeminist transnational collective, Laboria Cuboniks, joined by activists and researchers such
as Amy Ireland, Diann Bauer, Helen Hester, Katrina Burch, Lucca Frase, and Patricia Reed, that
same year. The Laboria Cuboniks collective has spread across five countries and three conti-
nents. Their purpose is “to dismantle gender, destroy the ‘family’, and do away with nature as a
guarantor for inegalitarian political positions. Their name is an anagram of ‘Nicholas Bourbaki,’
a pseudonym under which a group of largely French mathematicians worked towards an affir-
mation of abstraction, generality and rigour in mathematics in the early 20th century.”6
LesBitches translated Johanna Hevda’s “Sick woman theory,” an essay published in Janu-
ary 2016 in Mask Magazine, which later appeared in the online magazine Effimera. They have
also translated “Reproducing futures without reproductive futurability,” by Helen Hester, senior
lecturer in media and communication at the University of West London and member of the
Laboria Cuboniks group. Most recently they translated Emi Koyama’s Transfeminist Manifesto,
written in 2001, published in 2003 and translated into Italian in 2018. LesBitches divided Koy-
ama’s writing by sections, assigning each part to a comrade.
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Since Italian is a gendered language which needs to inflect nouns, pronouns and adjectives
following only two different declinations – always masculine and feminine – the activist who
translated the section entitled Body image /Consciousness as Feminist Issue, tried to avoid any par-
ticular gender in translation.
Following is a brief extract:
Many of us feel so uncomfortable and ashamed of our appearances that we opt to remain
in the closet or to endure electrolysis, hormone therapy or surgical intervention to modify
our bodies in congruence with our identity as women.
These procedures are costly, painful and time-consuming [. . .] Why would anyone opt
for such a seemingly inhumane practice?
The Italian version is as follows:
Molte di noi si sentono così a disagio e provano così tanta vergogna per il proprio aspetto
da scegliere di rimanere nascoste oppure di sottoporsi a elettrolisi, terapie ormonali, inter-
venti chirurgici per modificare i propri corpi in modo congruo alla propria identità di
donne. Queste procedure sono costose, dolorose, richiedono molto tempo [. . .] Perché
qualcun* dovrebbe volersi sottoporre a procedure così disumane?
In Italian,“molti,” with –i suffix, is used to refer to a masculine plural subject while “molte,” with –
e suffix, stands for a feminine plural subject. These two options, with –e and with –i, are those with
which we generally create our plurals. In the first line, the activist translator has chosen to translate
“Many of us” which is gender neutral in English as “Molte di noi,” a feminine expression.
Indeed, in many cases – political assemblies, events, collective meetings – at least in those
countries in which gendered languages are spoken, comrades tend to use the feminine plural
forms in open contrast to and criticism of the falsely neutral masculine plural, which supposedly
“includes” everyone. Since Koyama’s entire text was translated using the general feminine, the
various translators involved doubtless collaborated in the decision-making process.
Although generalized feminine forms were chosen as the gender of the text, activists affirm
that it is also addressed to other people experiencing some forms of femininity. Accordingly,
in the last line of this extract, we can spot an asterisk on “qualcun*,” a symbol used widely to
avoid any specific gender suffix and to let other subjectivities emerge. In Italian, in particular, the
asterisk is used by militant collectives as a symbol indicating every type of human. Using it in a
text represents a precise political will: women are not only those people who were designated
as such at birth.
Jinny Dalloway, a nickname used by one of the LesBitches members, agreed to answer ques-
tions about their translative and political work:
As LesBitches we work mainly online because we have always been geographically far away
one from each other. [. . .] Translating militant or politically involved writings means being
part of a transfeminist and transnational community, breaking national borders, opening
channels and creating new alliances of solidarity that let us feel stronger.
LesBitches claim not to be interested in mainstream and capitalistic publishing but, differently
from other collectives, they also have critical positions about other media. In other words, they
recognize the capitalism behind specific and common tools but at the same time, they also rec-
ognize its matrix in other devices: Internet, social networks, and platforms are not better devices
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than publishing houses. On the contrary, they can maintain and reproduce those same capitalistic
mechanisms of exploitation, marginalization, or subsumption that they condemn.
We can negotiate with them and regulate ourselves strategically from time to time. Indeed,
as Les Bitches, we have translated a text for a publishing house, Mimesis, in 2007. During
the same year, together with Deborah Ardilli, I have translated Manifesto SCUM, written
by Valerie Solanas for Vanda/Morellini editions. [. . .] When I work hard on a militant
transfeminist queer translation to me it represents “cultural work” and I do it as a political
act so I don’t care about being paid for it.
Even when the publishing houses are politically close to the person translating, the risk of being
exploited remains. Unfortunately, in certain contexts, the idea still prevails that a translator who is
a militant – and a woman – does not mind being underpaid or not paid at all. Sometimes this is
justified as “contributing to ‘the cause,’ ” an approach that fails to recognize the difference between
volunteer work and an unpaid job. The boundary between these two modalities can be very
ambiguous. Consent, like in other contexts, seems to be the only way to negotiate these situations.
LesBitches works are available on their website, https://lesbitches.wordpress.com/ whose
contents are reposted through their Facebook page. Some members of LesBitches are not only
activists but also academics who have recognized in translation the perfect tool for their activism.
Since the group is composed not only of linguists, translators, and other experts in these fields,
but also professionals in gender and women studies who have years of experience in activism,
politics, and transfeminist collectives, their translations are widely claimed to be effective.
Other militant experiences in translation

Utopia is an independent group from Marseille, France, a translation collective made up of
people that have been touched by a range of different discriminations and oppressions. They
specialize in what they call “traduction située” [situated translation]. Even if they do not declare
themselves explicitly as a queer transfeminist collective, the group claims to be community-
based and self-managed by women, queer, and/or trans translators. Moreover, on their website
they guarantee a leftist, political and militant approach, a work done by professionals, the accu-
racy of the linguistic variables, the theoretical and cultural knowledge of the translator selected
for each project.
With the term traduction située we mean that our translations will be realized by militant
translators who are interested in the topics faced by the text, who feel themselves included
in the social categories and in the geo-linguistic spaces represented. This concept, of course,
includes gender, sexuality, class, race and their intersections.
They claim to be a “chosen mixity,” a group of people chosen among others for certain char-
acteristics: the group is indeed made up of all sorts of people except those who describe them-
selves as white, heterosexual, cisgender males. The choice to explicitly exclude men is based
on political reasoning about privilege, positioning, power dynamics that could be unleashed, if
men were accepted in the group. The idea is that even though men (like all other subjectivities)
might have the necessary skills to be part of a translation group, they have been socialized in
such a way since birth, that they would be much more confident in making a speech during a
meeting, in interrupting other comrades during their talks, in over-determining times, spaces
and others’ methods in translation.
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On the other hand, women and the other subjects – because of social mechanisms and the
gender discriminatory education they have received – will be more hesitant in participating
actively in discussions and in the translation tasks, revealing doubts, uncertainties, and fragilities
that would never be expressed in other situations. Although there could obviously be excep-
tions to these assumptions, Utopia members have established certain limits: the “chosen mixity”
approach provides women and other people who may suffer oppression related to their gender
identity with confidence so that they feel comfortable to go into mixed spaces together with men.
This case too underlines the preferred profile of the militant translator: a person who not
only has experienced collective forms of politics, specific oppressions or discrimination, but also
a person who has the appropriate experiences, skills, and knowledge in the field of translation
studies. Utopia is divided into two different ‘channels.’ One channel can be described as more
institutional and represents the public face of this organization. Their translation services are
used by the public and made visible. One of their most recent jobs was with a film crew who
required a French ‘située’ translation [a situated translation] of the movie they had made about
trans experience in Kurdistan. Utopia fulfilled this request by putting the team in touch with the
most appropriate militant translator available. The second channel is more informal and is made
up of those militants who organize a twice yearly “translation atelier” in which they discuss
transfeminist postcolonial translations with other realities and collectives similar to theirs. The
collective is made up of people from different cultural backgrounds and gender identities. Some
translators are Irish with Moroccan origins, some are from the Caribbean and others are from
Latin America. They are constantly in touch via Internet and their website page.
BLA7 is a collective that invests its energies in supplying support materials for interpreting.
They are a non-profit autonomous collective formed and maintained by volunteers involved
in grass-roots activist groups and networks across Europe. On their web page, they claim to be
connected with the activist network Reclaim the Field, a constellation of people and collective
projects willing to go back to the land and reassume control over food production. They also
claim to have been inspired by another translation collective called Coati, acronym for Colectivo
para la autogestión de tecnologías para la interpretación,8 formed in 2009, and coming out of
the international anti-capitalist, free-spaces and NoBorders networks and the experiences of free
and open source software, independent radio, and volunteer interpreting.
BLA saw the need to create a new interpretation-equipment collective, given the many and
different multi-language meetings that take place in Europe. They work with principles of hori-
zontal self-organization, consensus decision making, as well as open-source tools. They consider
that every person is involved and actively part of different power systems which lead to oppres-
sion and privilege, based on social categories (such as class, race, gender, age, culture, language
abilities) and, for this motivation, they also believe neutral positions do not exist in such power
systems and that these dominations are present and active in group discussions.
Because some languages were, and still are, brutally imposed by colonial power relations
(like English, French, Spanish), these languages and people who speak them still dominate
in multilingual transnational meetings. Therefore people who speak ‘minority’ languages
often don’t understand well and/or don’t feel confident enough to contribute to assemblies
that use dominant languages. We want to use bla’s technical equipment in multilingual
meetings in order to allow people to listen to and express themselves in a language in which
they feel comfortable understanding and speaking.
While the other collectives mentioned are involved mainly in written translations or papers,
articles, and essays, BLA also works orally. They use two different systems, depending on the size
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of the events in which they participate and the given conditions. For smaller events, workshops,
or events without power supply they use the COATI Open Source Spiders, a device they can
build themselves – and that anyone can build on her\his own. The interpreter speaks into a
microphone connected to the spider, which diffuses it to 12 headphone exits. With the help of
an extension the number of possible listeners can go up to 24 pro spider. For bigger events, they
use radios and transmitters. The speaker uses a microphone; the interpreters listen through
headphones to have a clear sound. Each interpreter speaks into a transmitter, and represents one
language. The transmitters use short distance radio waves and can be received by radios, which
BLA also supply. Listeners tune their radio into the frequency of the language they want to listen
to and have simultaneous interpretation of all that is spoken. In order to attend these meetings
and conferences, activist interpreters need to travel. They normally charge for the interpretation
tasks and transport, but since they want to guarantee an affordable and sustainable interpretation
service, they claim to be open to collaborations with collectives, groups, or organizations who
either can’t pay much or at all. According to their website, they can provide translation – using
their technologies – for a maximum of 600 people.
BLA’s purpose is to help fight a hegemony that is linked to linguistic abilities by making this
problem visible and providing equipment for simultaneous interpretation in different languages.
Since their aim is to support horizontal, self-organized groups and collectives active in social
movements and struggles, especially those that oppose capitalism, they work as translators and
interpreters only for those events they appreciate politically, and they insist on certain working
conditions:
We want to have a short amount of time (approx. 10 minutes) at the very beginning of an
event to talk about what we are doing, how and why we do it.
If we feel that the need arises, we want the possibility to talk about discrimination and
power systems: namely be able to make statements and talk about feminism, colonialism,
language, class dominations, etc.
The last group is called InterpRISE, an interpreting experience, located in Leipzig, Germany.
They support groups that are opposed political, social, or cultural power structures.
We want to raise awareness about the importance of interpreting by being a visible group.
We also want to show how language and oppression are connected and that mediators are
humans, not machines. We want to act politically. We think of ourselves as a collective that
is critical towards hierarchies and that acts by consensus.
While they don’t explicitly define themselves as a queer transfeminist collective, they claim their
anti-oppression stance:
We want to support self-organized groups and projects that are critical of hierarchies
and all kinds of oppression. We do not want to support groups that have a strict hier-
archy or depend on church or government. Furthermore, we do not want to support
the charity sector. We do not want to provide jobs for free which should be adequately
remunerated.
Unfortunately, the online trace of this collective disappeared in 2017.

For this reason, we cannot provide more information apart from that still present on their old
blog: https://interprise.nirgendwo.info/. On their blog they point out, for example, the political
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Laura Fontanella
and cultural problems behind the main use of English and German, underlining with particular
vehemence their aim to reduce, contain and uproot these oppressive dynamics.
Marginalised languages are often not interpreted to a sufficient extent; for example, by
omitting the details or through lack of concentration which results in information being
simplified or lost. Sometimes, for those languages, there is no interpretation at all. The
majority of the languages we offer are majority languages. And the fact that this text only
exists in German and English shows that there is still a long way to go in order to break up
the hegemony of certain languages.
As we have seen, some collective realities in Europe have clearly declared themselves as queer
transfeminist groups with a particular dedication to or interest in translation. They have identi-
fied their form of resistance as translation; translation for them is a tool with which to struggle
against the hetero-cis-patriarchal and capitalist system, a method with which to oppose the
reproduction of these systems through language. Those that do not declare they are queer trans-
feminist groups still claim to be politically involved in the fight against any form of gender or
sexual discrimination.
Future research: can the translatxr speak? On elitism,

classism, and identity politics
Militant queer transfeminist translation represents a powerful opportunity to create new nar-
ratives and attack the hetero-cis-patriarchal system, but its theorization and its practices reveal
some limits. For one thing, the figure of the militant queer transfeminist translator is a complex
one: acting alone or in a collective this person has to merge linguistic and translation skills with
their personal oppression. The preferred character seems to be someone who is both a transla-
tor and an activist, a person able to move in these fields and across their intersections, able to
transform the discrimination felt in society into linguistic practice. This person is in transition
between worlds, is living in the queer zones, blurring the edges.
While it is hard to find people involved in both politics and translation studies, it is probably
harder to find people aware of their privileges and of their bias in translation. In some of the
collectives that were studied, activists are often asked not to translate texts that discuss a form of
oppression they have not directly experienced.
Research might thus focus on this specialization of the queer transfeminist translator: How
are they formed? How do they work? What strategies do they need to acquire and deploy? In
training sessions held so far, queer transfeminist workshops were divided into two parts: a theo-
retical moment of sharing acquired knowledges and a moment of practice in which extracts
from texts of interest were translated, and discussions of the translation decisions ensued. In
each workshop group, texts were selected according to each participant’s own oppressions, own
personal experience. The choice was made after a moment of collective discussion, designed to
alert participants to their privileges and the oppressions the others around the table might be
suffering. Throughout, the emphasis was on guaranteeing the self-determination of each sub-
jectivity and identity in translation. The decision to use this methodology was inspired by the
experiences shared by the collectives here studied and analyzed.
The outcome of such workshopping can be, for example, that a cisgender white woman is
not asked to translate a text written by a trans black woman. This is not something decided
at random, but is due to a precise choice about one’s own oppressions. The cisgender white
330
woman can obviously understand the life conditions of the transgender black woman but, at
the same time, the two are not living the same marginalization. For the former, understanding
specific oppression means taking a step back, giving the latter more space, giving her a voice.
For this reason, it may be better that the transgender black woman be translated by another
transgender black woman, by a person who can truly comprehend her identity. Though this
may sound discriminatory, the idea that empathy can fill gaps is in fact naïve and innocent. The
empathy of an ally can become a justification to talk in someone else’s place, or a paternalistic
excuse, an ideal instrument with which to silence those who are socially labelled as subalterns.
Further research could not only explore other militant queer transfeminist groups and col-
lectives, mapping their activities, their needs, theories and methods around the world – high-
lighting those realities in non-Western countries – but such research could also become less
elitist. Translation and gender studies are still, for many, unreachable areas of knowledge: only
people who can attend – and afford – universities have a chance to enter into contact with these
theorizations and discourses. Even if some translations are available online, shared through blogs
and platforms, their contents and even more the methodology used to produce them still remain
too specific, too obscure, and too hard to understand for too many people lacking an education
in these matters. This issue could be summarized as a class problem or a form of discrimina-
tion, a dilemma that queer transfeminist translation has to face. How can these precious lessons
be shared among others? Through which languages can such knowledge be made accessible to
the masses? How might this discourse on translation and transfeminism break its own barriers?
Finally, how can we overcome the problem of the ghettoization of specific oppressions? How
can we train a white cisgender woman to translate a black transgender woman’s text and avoid
the reproduction of prejudices, stereotypes and factionalisms? These are just some of the paths
that scholars, academics, intellectuals – with their comrades inside the political queer transfemi-
nist collectives – could explore, in the near future, perhaps generating new theories and new
practices for a more solid intersectionality.
Defeating ethnocentrism: other words

for other gender experiences
This chapter began with the description and discussion of collective realities involved in the
militant translation of queer transfeminist texts, writings, and contents in Europe. It has high-
lighted the existence of collectives that are explicitly working in this area. But little is known
about such organizations in other parts of the world – and this, of course, is not a surprise. One
important reason is the different categorizations that are used in Western countries to define
gender, transfeminism, and queer. As asserted by Shalmalee Palekar, “our understanding of the
term queer is primarily a western concept and theory has been translated and retranslated across
various cultural contexts to codify a kind of globalized queerness” (Palekar 2017, 8). However,
even if Serena Bassi in “Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives”
(Castro and Ergun 2017) has rightly recognized the existence of a global LGBTQI language,
mainly in English – both an imperialist and colonial language – other languages find many other
and different ways to categorize sexual and gender identities. Research (Mazzei 2007; Spurlin
2014a) has shown how languages resist the LGBTQI language globalization process. In Finn-
ish, the word transgender, for example, is usually translated as “sukupuoliidentiteetti” where the
first part of the compound means sex, gender and the second part identity. In Hindi, the same
term is rendered, generically, with hira although there are many more specific words for more
specific cases, varieties, identities such as catla (sari-wearing), kotis (effeminate men), and zenana
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Laura Fontanella
kotis (Muslim-associated women-men). In Chinese, the word “queer” is transliterated as “ku-

er”: “ku” means cruel, cold and extreme while “er” means child, son. (Castro and Ergun 2017).
These examples underline not only the fact that different socio-linguistic-geographical and
political contexts find their own ways of describing their realities and the identities embod-
ied by the people living in them (Gramling and Dutta 2016) but also that these differences in
categorizing gender experiences and identity constitute an obstacle in researching the realities
themselves, especially outside Europe.
All these difficulties, all these translations, transliterations, and local varieties represent a great
richness, the ultimate evidence for an abundance of jargons and differences outside the domi-
nant anglophone linguistic border. Discovering the existence of these diversities, recognizing
this multiplicity as legitimate and valid, is an important research objective that may help resist
the global power of the English language as well. However, this richness also represents research
difficulties in regard to transfeminist queer collectives that practice transfeminist queer and
militant translation, and this is due to the fact that ‘queer’ may not be the right keyword. Queer-
ness has always existed outside non-Western contexts and in non-Western languages but it has
been differently inscribed (Spurlin 2014b). Indeed, it is wise to ask if a term used for gender
and sexual identity in one language has an equivalent in other languages; that is what our trans
queer praxis should focus on.
Another research problem that has emerged centres on the difficulty in finding militant col-
lectives doing transfeminist translation, especially in non-Western countries. These groups may
not make themselves publicly available, and if they do this may be managed by the entire collec-
tive, which makes it difficult establish contact with anyone in particular. Moreover, groups often
insist on a collective decision before they establish contact with external researchers, which
takes time. Because their translations are not published using capitalistic mainstream tools, their
works are hard to find. This difficulty is made worse through censorship, marginalization, or
even illegality of the LGBTQI feminist and militant community. For this reason, transfeminist
and queer collectives are sometimes forced to act anonymously, preserving their identities and
their own safe space. For all these reasons we hope this chapter will lead scholars and researchers
to pay more attention to collective organizations aggregated on the basis of a common purpose:
to change the world’s narrative translation by translation.
Further readings
Epstein, B. J. and Robert Gillet. 2017. Queer in Translation. London: Routledge.
Epstein and Gillet’s book shows how queerness can be applied as an approach to translation and how
translators can respect the translation of queerness.
Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies – Local and Transnational Perspectives. Lon-
don and New York: Routledge.
Castro and Ergun bring the feminist translation of the 1970s to an intersectional level and consider
these practices as political activism.
Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Feminist translation with its interventionist approach wants to deconstruct patriarchal language, hamper
its repetition via translation; indeed, the main goal of feminist translation consists in sharing feminist
ideas, knowledge and the value of women’s empowerment in other languages.
Gramling, David and Aniruddha Dutta. 2016. Translating Transgender. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(3–4),
333–356, 462–484.
Assuming that gender transition as a process from a point A to a point B is limitative is like understand-
ing translation as a mere passage from a language X to a language Y; translation (and transition) is much
more and can escape from ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks.
332
Notes
1 ‘Trans*’ is the term used for people who define themselves as transgender and/or transsexual.
The other term ‘trans’ is for people who define themselves in transition, avoiding any specific destination.
2 The word ‘translator’ is used to refer to men and women who translate. Despite its usage and despite the
fact that English is generally misunderstood as a genderless language, translator is a masculine term that is
mainly used as a gender-neutral term. Actually, there existed, during the 15th century, a term ‘translatress’
that was the feminine form. Using ‘translatxr’, Isabella Gerini tries to construct with that middle ‘x’ a real
gender-neutral term, able to indicate both genders.
3 ‘Ideadestroyingmuros’ is a term made up of three other words: ‘idea,’ ‘destroying,’ and ‘muros.’ Two of
three are in Spanish: this is because the collective is mainly based in Spain. The word ‘destroying’ has
been left in English since the collective translates from English to other languages. With this name, the
collective aims to destroy the cis-hetero-white-patriarchal borders – or walls – that choke our society
and identities.
4 Plumas Traidoras means ‘traitorous feathers.’ This expression refers to a sexist metaphor ‘les belles infi-
dels,’ invented by philologist Gilles Ménage in 1654 to describe translations: if the translation adhered to
the original, it was faithful but ugly. If it was beautiful, however, it was also unfaithful – supposedly like
a woman. The members of this collective have decided to claim back their infidelity as translatresses.
5 ‘LesBitches’ is the name chosen by this collective. It uses the English word ‘bitches’ but it also creates
a word pun by manipulating the Italian term ‘lesbiche’ [lesbians]. Moreover, because this collective is
involved in translation, they have chosen code switching as a tool for suggesting their interests in lan-
guages: ‘Les’ is a French definite article while ‘Bitches’ is an English term
6 www.monoskop.org/Laboria_Cuboniks
7 “Bla, bla, bla” is widely used as an onomatopoeia in comics bubbles to refer to an indistinctive chatting
among characters. BLA, as a translation collective, has decided to use this onomatopoeia to refer to their
ability to talk in other languages.
8 Collective for the self-management of the interpreting technologies.
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25
Translating queer
Reading caste, decolonizing praxis
Introduction
In April 2018, a Botany professor in the southern Indian state of Kerala, commented: “a woman
who dresses up like a man. What will be the character of the child this woman gives birth to?
The name of these children is ‘transgender’ or ‘napumsakam’ ” (Entertainment Desk 2018). The
incident garnered significant attention in press, and the state government subsequently filed
legal action against the professor. However, the emphasis on the word “transgender” instead of
“napumsakam” relayed in the press, speaks to the linguistic complexities in the context. The
Malayalam word “napumsakam” is derived from the Sanskrit word “napumsak” – which can
be variously translated as genderless, third gender, impotent, hijra, eunuch. Needless to say,
transgender is not napumsakam; these are two very different words rooted in different linguistic,
cultural, and historical genealogies. Reflecting on violence against queer and trans peoples, and
the limits of language and translation in understanding queer and trans experiences, this chap-
ter theorizes inescapable incommensurabilities of translating queer, trans, hijra, and other gender
non-conforming identities in India.1 We do so by centring on anti-caste and decolonial theo-
retical frameworks, especially in view of the caste structures and the past and ongoing colonial
and postcolonial processes in the making of the Indian nation-state.
Centring on these contradictions and tensions, in this chapter we ask:2 How are processes
of homophobia and transphobia shaped through colonialism and caste structures in postco-
lonial India? Are words like “queer” and “trans” applicable in the Indian context or are they
impositions of the global north? How does brahminical supremacy shape all queer and gender
non-conforming identities? If English functions as the imperial language in India, how can
the corpus of available translations support a decolonial praxis in the queer Indian context?
Furthermore, given the pertinent and crucial critiques from Dalit feminist and queer writers
(Pawar and Moon 2008; Kamble 2009; Pawar 2009; Kang 2016; Moulee 2016; Angayarkanni
2017; Jyoti 2017) what enunciations does queer articulate with respect to caste-ism? Why do
caste structures and violence remain de-activated within the study of India? These questions are
central to theorizing queer and trans subjectivities in India in order to partially unpack the pos-
sibilities of “the geopolitics of queer studies and the sexual politics of Dalit studies” (Ramberg
2016, 223).
336
Translating queer
Scholars and activists continue to debate if words like queer and trans can be translated
in the Indian context (Dutta and Roy 2014; Arondekar and Patel 2016), and in the legal and
bureaucratic structures of the Indian state as evident through recent judgments on queer, hijra,
and trans rights. Building upon the im/possibilities of translating queer into Indian languages,
this paper adds to these debates to argue that understanding and translating queer and trans
experiences needs to foreground anti-casteist and decolonial praxis. We argue that without an
anti-casteist praxis, decolonial praxis within the Indian context is incomplete and limiting.
In her seminal work on the hijras of India, Serena Nanda, presents the challenges of translating
the term “hijra” into English, averring that cultural definition and significance inhabit elusive
terrains (Nanda 1999, xix–xxi). In contemporary times, hijra and transgender movements are
simultaneously parallel and contrarian despite the global impact of discourses on genders and
sexualities. In the Indian context, “trans” has occasionally acquired an dominant-caste elite space
with access to global products in the form of English, whilst hijras have been relegated to the
non-English/“vernacular” non-modern category (Ahmad 2017; Hossain 2017). Similar complex
articulations of translating gender and feminism have emphasized transnational and global(-ized)
interaction in general (Flotow 1997; Santaemilia 2005) and local specificities of caste and Eng-
lish/other hierarchical language binary in India in particular (Patel 1997; Rege 2006; Sen 2017).
In the contexts stated previously,‘queer’ becomes peculiarly embedded in histories of linguis-
tic intersections in India, whereby multiple regional and national languages including English
contest a singular narrative/narration/translation of its meaning. Whilst the translation of the
term through its realignment to the Palestinian movement as an instance of “diversity of experi-
ence” (Maikey in Alsaafin 2013) becomes an example of its relentless multiplication globally,
the conceptualization of queerness in Italian demonstrates the challenge of translatability as a
rugged terrain (Ross 2017). Additionally, given the counter-hegemonic historical production of
the term ‘queer’ and its continuous connotative shifts, it functions as a ‘crossing’ into the realm of
unbounded meaning in the Anzaldúan sense (Anzaldúa 1987, 70). Recent research in translation
studies of queerness therefore attends to the evolving versions of queer both globally and trans-
nationally, highlighting the similarities between translation of language/cultures and translation
of experience (Bauer 2015; Gramling and Dutta 2016; Dominguez-Ruvacalba 2016; Epstein
and Gillett 2017; Baer and Kaindl 2018).
In the Indian context, translation historically operates in multiple sites due to the presence of
plural language communities. Whilst queer scholars, such as Naisargi Dave (2012) and Shalmalee
Palekar (2017), have noted the hegemonic self-referential position of English in translation
studies “to make explicit a certain kind of globally accessible queerness” (Palekar 2017, 18), we
attempt to locate translation(s) of queerness as a pluralistic political formation akin to Tejaswini
Niranjana’s (1998) formulation of the “already-translatedness” feminist conceptualization in
India, whereby it functions as “a space in which one simultaneously holds on to and negotiates
different sorts of languages, conceptual as well as linguistic” (134).
In the 1980s, new vocabularies pertaining to queerness emerged specifically in the Hindi-
speaking North India with the words such as samlingik, which roughly translates as same-sex
loving. Propelled in part by NGOs and activists, this crossing created a category of gay people
in local contexts by translating disparate terms such as gay, queer, homosexual as samlingik. This
coinage originates in the attempts by Indians living abroad, the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs)
as they are labelled, to find equivalence for homosexuality in Indian languages. This particular
term came into use through the US-based organization Trikone, San Jose, California in the
337
1980s. Critiquing the recent theorizations of postcolonial queer experience in the works of
Ruth Vanita and Devdutt Pattnaik, the blogger B, a queer Indian academic, contends that the
“dangerous subtext of this emerging genre is, queerness can exist in [a regional language], but
has to be rescued by English” (B 2012). However, cultural translations of queer in India need to
encompass caste as one of the most significant fractures in India. Caste, as we argue later, shapes
and structures all forms of social identities, structures, hierarchies, and violences. Thus, caste is
central to understanding queer and trans formations in contemporary India.
Critical topics and issues I: anti-caste critiques

Caste structures in India are derived from the Hindu ideologies of brahminical supremacy,
with brahmins (priest caste) at the top of the caste hierarchy. Caste supremacy predates white
supremacy and European colonialism by centuries, making it one of the oldest forms of oppres-
sion. According to Bhim Rao Ambedkar, architect of the Indian constitution, “Inequality is the
official doctrine of Brahmanism and the suppressions of the oppressed classes aspiring to equal-
ity have been looked upon by them and carried out by them without remorse as their bounden
duty” (1990, 215). Intertwined with socio-religious notions of “purity” and “pollution,” and
endogamic cis-heteropatriarchy, caste is an everyday lived reality, not only in India, but across
South Asia and the diasporas. Caste, however, remains mostly unanalyzed, as Chinnaiah Jangam
notes, “within South Asian studies, the subject of caste remains neglected, both as a subject for
analysis and as a lived reality of daily existence for millions. Generally, there is widespread igno-
rance and denial of caste-based oppression and violence in academic disciplines and also by the
political elites of India” (2017, 4).
Dalit, a word derived from Sanskrit, means “ground down,” “broken into pieces,” and
“crushed.” The term is widely used in South Asia as a self-chosen political identity by commu-
nities erstwhile recognized as “untouchables” or avarna (without caste) communities. According
to Arjun Dangle, one of leaders of the Dalit Panthers, Dalit is: “not a caste but a realization and
is related to the experiences, joys and sorrows, and struggles of those in the lowest stratum of
society. It matures with a sociological point of view and is related to the principles of negativity,
rebellion and loyalty of science, thus finally ending as revolutionary” (Dangle qtd. in Mukherjee
2007, xiii). Dalit feminists have theorized important and critical intersections between caste,
gender, and sexuality. They have shown how heteropatriarchy is fundamental to the broader
ideologies of caste. Caste structures are maintained through heteropatriarchal endogamic repro-
duction practices, controlling women as well as sexual and gender non-conforming peoples.
Endogamy controls both oppressed caste and dominant caste women’s sexualities, albeit in dif-
ferent ways, and the latter are complicit in violence against Dalit and oppressed caste women.
Academic scholarship has bestowed scant critical attention on the intersections of caste and
sexuality. However, outside mainstream academia, there is a growing assertion of Dalit queer,
trans, and hijra identities critiquing brahminical dominant caste queer, trans, and hijra movements
in India. Focusing on the intersections of caste, gender, and, sexuality, Dalit queer, trans, and
hijra writers argue that sexual/queer/trans liberations are impossible without the annihilation of
brahminical heteropatriarchal caste structures. They have shown how queer and trans movements
in India have maintained dominant caste hegemony by focusing on urban, upwardly mobile,
dominant caste, queer cis-men identities and issues, invisibilizing all Dalit, Bahujan (oppressed
caste peoples), and Adivasi (indigenous peoples) queer, trans, and hijra peoples. At the Delhi
Queer Pride in November 2015, Dhrubo Jyoti declared: “We bring caste up because caste is
everywhere and in my everything. Caste is in my shirt. Caste is in my pant. Caste is in my sex.
Caste is in my being and caste is in every part of you too!” ( Jyoti 2015). Living Smile Vidya says:
338
Translating queer
“Our gender identity is linked to caste in such a way that it is impossible to separate the two
at all. We talk about the difference in our caste and class background. [. . .] We also critique
Brahmanism and vegetarianism which is linked similarly in inseparable ways in India” (Ahmad
2015). These critiques demonstrate how structures of caste, gender, and sexuality are not only
interconnected but also how caste plays a key role in reproducing hegemonic caste structures and
dominant caste privilege in queer, trans, and hijra spaces and movements. Endogamic practices
are central to brahminical cis-heteropatriarchy that seek to maintain caste boundaries through
gender and sexuality.
Critical topics and issues II: decolonial critiques

The knowledge industry as it appears today is a regimented, controlled, and highly reproduc-
tive epistemological field. The reproduction of the white/Western/global north canon through
self-perpetuation and linking to the modernity/coloniality binary operates as its safeguard and
as gatekeeping (Mignolo 2002; Wynter 2003, 261). Commencing in the early 1990s, scholars of
decoloniality offer robust critiques of this particular system of knowledge production that sub-
tends through universities and institutional validation. Decolonial praxis in this context includes
the conceptualization of crucial ways of resistance that translate as re-existence of local histories,
oral archives and memory through an almost “wrenching out from” the system of coloniality of
power set by hegemonic structures. It invariably conceives of decoloniality per se as a reposses-
sion of history, language, and knowledges from enduring systems of colonial pasts. In this sense,
it incorporates a practice of healing from colonial wounds in order to enact a re-existence and
a re-emergence.3
Any configuration that locates the Western (often elitist and white male) perspective at
the centre of discourse on same-sex rights and marriage, queer kinship, and decriminalization
of homosexuality in parts of the global South de-privileges existing cultural manifestations of
same-sex intimacy and by extension queerness, and appoints the global North as the arbiter of
what constitutes queerness, thereby maintaining a coloniality of power over it. The critiques that
materialize from the relational consideration of queer and transnational frameworks implicate
queer discourses in novel formations that confront other pervasive structures of racial, class, caste,
or national privilege.
The reiteration of caste as the over-arching floating signifier in the Indian context points to
its erasure ad infinitum in savarna (or dominant caste) theorization of same-sex representations
of ancient Hindu cultures or in queer enunciations of contemporary Bollywood. The absence
of caste-based analysis maintains the coloniality of power of brahminical queerness in India.
In her articulation of the hijra/kinnar/transgender paradigm, the celebrated hijra of Brahmin
descent, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi argues for the caste-lessness of hijra clans in her interaction
with local transgender groups in South India. Recently, her wilful determination to uphold the
Hindu claim to build a temple at the site of the destroyed mosque in Ayodhya, India, has led
to a condemnation by the queer community (The News Minute Staff 2018). Tripathi’s claim
emanates from her dominant caste status in Indian society. The myth of a post-caste society
embedded in Tripathi’s claim, akin to post-race adumbrations in the West, serves to reinforce
the discourses of modernity and its concomitant liberal framework of progress. However, deco-
lonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano demonstrate the inherent failure of
linking modernity to progress and development. Instead they reflect upon the “darker side of
modernity” that coloniality exemplifies (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). Tripathi’s effacement
of caste operates as a coloniality of power that inevitably suppresses Dalit voices in formulations
of queerness. Translating the term “queer” therefore implies taking cognizance of not only the
339
linguistic complexities that undergird the multiple languages of India but concurrently shifting
the discussion to decolonially accounting for the silence around caste. Grounding these colonial
complexities, in the next section, we provide a quick overview to understanding the intersec-
tions of caste, gender, and sexuality.

In their essay “Decolonizing Transgender in India” (2014), Anirruddha Dutta and Raina Roy,
instructively allude to the possibility of assessing (even repositioning) the co-imbrication of
globalized transgender categories and local transgender categories in Eastern India. They sug-
gest that through the implication of NGO-speak and narratives of development, transgender
as an analytic category in Eastern India in particular and by extension in the global south in
general, runs the risk of being condensed “as merely ‘local’ expressions of transgender identity,
often without interrogating the conceptual baggage (such as homo-trans and cis-trans binaries)
associated with the transgender category. As scholars before them have argued, this reproduces
“colonial forms of knowledge production” that promote transgender as “the” universal category
with local translations (2015, 321; see also Stryker and Aizura 2013). Building upon these heu-
ristic departures in transnational transgender studies, we contend that decolonial praxis for the
category of queer should consist of a set of enabling methods engaging with how queer (1)
insists on its global applicability and therefore its replication, as does the Western canon and (2)
maintains local versions of queer as a self-referential translation, a version of itself.
In this critical evaluation, along with decolonial theories we attempt to underscore the read-
ing of Dalit and anti-caste thinkers who deploy strategies of vernacular narratives to overcome
the stultifying effects of casteist epistemic violence, for as Jangam argues, brahminical knowledges
impose “epistemic violence while enforcing material and social deprivation in order to crush
Dalits’ sense of self and to dehumanize their existence” (2017, 5). Further, in their book Dalit
Studies (2016), Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana emphasize the significance of Dalit
vernacular narratives functioning alongside and in opposition to struggles for independence in
colonial India. The schism (“opposition”) and continuation (“alongside”) of the two approaches
is vital to form an understanding of decolonial praxis. The double-oppression faced by Dalits
in British India instantiates the coloniality of power maintained by a Western-educated liberal
elite, often the caste of Hindus (including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other dominant-caste
independence activists) over Dalit populations in India.
In her study of the English language in colonial India, Shefali Chandra (2012) highlights
the intersections of caste, gender, sexuality, and coloniality in the spread of English education
amongst the native elites. She argues that “The normative gendered subject . . . [was] produced
in a crucible of caste-based desires that provide[d] coherence to the English-education project”
(23). As subjects of English education, dominant caste heteronormative elites were able to solidify
their positionalities within the colonial state, further marginalizing oppressed caste and religious
communities, and thereby actively partaking in the colonial processes. As British rule progressed,
Jangam notes, colonial powers were forced through Dalit assertion to make education acces-
sible for oppressed caste peoples in British India (2017). While dominant caste elites were the
initial beneficiaries of English education, the native elites’ monopoly was broken down. Thus,
Jangam argues: “Despite the many contradictions, colonialism may be regarded historically as an
enabling factor in the complex processes of articulation and emancipation of untouchable com-
munities in different parts of India” (2017, 141). This positivist approach to colonialism does not
efface colonial violences; instead, it demonstrates the complexities of colonial processes and how
they shaped, and were shaped through, caste structures in colonial and casteist India.
340
Translating queer
Given the intersections of caste and coloniality in colonial and postcolonial India, the lack of
attention paid to anti-caste and decolonial praxes is indeed unsettling. Critiquing postcolonial
and subaltern studies scholars, Chandra asks: “What are the real politics of these silences, and
why do some Indian historians defer to colonial power as the point of origin while rendering
caste heterosexuality as natural, inevitable, and anticolonial?” (2012, 25). Similarly, Jangam argues
that scholars have “failed to provide critical framers to unravel the epistemic violence ingrained
in Hindu Brahmanical ideology” (2017, 108). Rupturing the dominant caste temporal and
spatial parameters of coloniality and anti-coloniality, Jangam asserts that Dalit anti-caste episte-
mologies challenge the ideas of an “ideal” precolonial Hindu past, and draw from precolonial
anti-caste struggles to the “postcolonial” present. Dalit and anti-caste critiques problematize
the binaries of colonizer vs. colonized and show how caste/class/gender created complex hier-
archies of power, whereby native caste elites worked in tandem with colonizers. Further, they
demonstrate that there was never a “true” decolonial moment, and that caste ruptures any easy
categorizations of precolonial/colonial/postcolonial frameworks.
Chandra’s work demonstrates how ideas of heteronormativity were enforced through the
convergences of brahminical caste violences and British colonialism. These confluences become
visible when looking at the struggles against homophobia in India. Any translation of key terms
in queer activism including “queer,” “transgender,” “homophobia” or “lesbian” and “gay” would
inexorably defer to caste hierarchy through recourse to English. In this regard, popular Indian
magazines in languages other than English offer no translation per se of the aforementioned
terms. A complex concept-term such as “homophobia,” for instance, remains untranslatable in
Indian languages. In other words, the appropriation of English terms for defining concepts of
queer theory and mobilization uncovers two critical fissures in the Indian context: the primacy
of English and the coloniality of the power this exercises over other Indian languages, which
illustrate the postcolonial continuation of colonial linguistic hierarchy. Given the transnational
circulation of the English language, its position is further strengthened in India. More impor-
tantly, it points to the exclusion and alienation of queer Dalit subjectivity, which often has lit-
tle to no access to English. Decolonial praxis in this context therefore adheres to what Walter
Mignolo and Catherine Walsh consider a reflection and analysis “in continuous movement,
contention, relation, and formation” (2018, 19).
Thus, without foregrounding the convergences of caste and colonial violences, queer and
trans struggles in India remain necessarily incomplete. Within mainstream movements of queer
equality, in the struggle against section 377 to decriminalize homosexual acts in India until Sep-
tember 2018 when same-sex sexual acts were finally decriminalized, the translation of “queer”
and “equality” remains elitist in general and casteist in particular. The long-established queer
movement in India remains very urban, dominant caste, and English-centric. Queerness is artic-
ulated primarily through caste logics. The queer activist scene in Delhi, for instance, – the epi-
centre of the legal struggle against the criminalization of homosexuality – is predominantly led
by cis dominant caste upwardly mobile English-speaking North Indian men. These dominant
caste activists have colonized queerness through their caste privilege, and even though there is a
growing assertion of Dalit queerness in these spaces, the tensions around their activism remain
fraught ( Jyoti 2015, 2017, 2018; Kang 2016, 2018; Moulee 2016; Tellis 2013).
Recently, in a piece on the logics of love, Dhrubo Jyoti wrote, “I had been trained to know
what good looks are (Brahmin) and what good queerness is (English-speaking)” (2018, n.p.).
This painfully captures the caste(ness) of queerness in India. Translating queerness in such a
fraught context therefore becomes a nearly impossible task that will involve uncovering the
intelligibility of queer cultural memory encoded and embodied in languages other than Eng-
lish, and this will only become accessible through recourse to a pluriversal approach without a
341
centre or epistemological pivot. Akin to savarna feminist movements, caste in queer mobiliza-
tion results in the erasure of caste privilege and casteist violence. In other words, queer narratives
often enact the effacement of caste supremacy. This is recurrent as with the aforementioned
example of the hijra celebrity Laxmi N. Tripathi who takes pride in her Brahmin lineage. Thus,
we contend that without an anti-casteist praxis, decolonial praxis within the Indian context is
incomplete and limiting.
Further reading
Dutta, Aniruddha and Raina Roy. 2014. Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections. TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(3), 320–336.
This essay is an important text in transgender studies in the Indian context and its intersection with
decolonial studies. It foregrounds the shift in perspective on reading transgender through the decolonial
lens rather than conventional mainstream interpretations of the transgender frames.
Jangam, Chinnaiah. 2017. Dalits and the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jangam’s book offers a consolidated view of the range of Dalit studies in contemporary times. It provides
a nuanced cultural critique of grand narratives of postcolonial engagements with the independence
movements making space for the significance and centrality of Dalit labour in social justice movements.
Palekar, Shalmalee. 2017. Re-mapping Translation: Queerying the Crossroads, in B.J. Epstein and Robert
This article elaborates on the critical conceptualization of translation and queer studies as converging
fields of inquiry. It orients translation studies into new directions engaging them in a novel enterprise
with queer thinking in the Indian linguistic landscape.
Related topics
Dalit studies, queer mobilization, decolonial theories
Notes
1 The term hijra has received considerable critical attention from queer scholars. Incorporating a con-
tinuum of non-conventional man/woman binary identities, they live in hijra communities in South Asia.
However, self-definition by hijras overrides academic accounts and descriptions and, as Serena Nanda
suggests, they perceive themselves as neither man nor woman.
2 We want to begin by locating ourselves in the knowledge continuum. I (Nishant) am a brahmin (domi-
nant caste), gender non-binary, English-speaking, uninvited guest Indigenous territories, stolen by the
US. I acknowledge the territories I live and work on to position my presence on those lands as complicit
in ongoing colonization of Turtle Island. As an “Overseas Citizen of India” I also recognize how the
Indian state continues to colonize Kashmir, North East of India, and Adivasi lands. This is not just a
token list, but rather a daily reminder of how these violences are central to the colonial projects that our
work seeks to “decolonize.” I (Sandeep) am an dominant caste, i.e., brahmin, queer, English-speaking,
citizen of the global north. My position enunciates alongside the queer and non-queer Dalits, who like
the Kashmiris live under occupation by the Indian brahminical state. Whilst I do not claim to speak for
the Dalits, I choose to speak alongside, with them.
3 As one of us (Nishant) is a settler scholar based in North America, we also take from the theorizations
of Indigenous scholars who center on land in conceptualizing decolonization. Eve Tuck (Unangax) and
K. Wayne Yang remind us: “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012). From Indig-
enous perspectives, there is no decolonization in the Americas without returning Indigenous lands to
Indigenous peoples. We extend this theorization to the Indian context, where caste and occupation
play a central role in the formation of the postcolonial nation-state and those “with land” or without
land. Decolonization in the Indian context would mean not only decolonizing the ongoing legacies of
European colonization but also dismantling caste along with de-occupation of Kashmir, North East of
India, and Adivasi lands.
342
Translating queer
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26
Sinicizing non-normative
sexualities
Through translation’s looking glass
Wangtaolue Guo
Introduction
In his seminal book Method in Translation History, Anthony Pym (2014b) suggests a new trans-
lational framework known as interculture, a concept which he defines as “beliefs and practices
found in intersections or overlaps of cultures” (177). Although Pym, at the time of writing,
called his act of “smuggl[ing] a symbolic translator (Tr) into the intercultural space” a “hypoth-
esis” (ibid.), such an undertaking has incited researchers to examine the role of translation
in facilitating “the merging of information and sentiments across societal and national bor-
ders” (Baldo and Inghilleri 2018, 296). Regarding the circulation of knowledge between the
Sinophone and the Western world, previous scholarship1 has acknowledged that translation
was instrumental in bringing Euro-American/Japanese experience of technology, culture, and
science to the Chinese-speaking regions in the 20th century. Dynamics of cultural transmis-
sion between the Chinese and the non-Chinese, however, have been frequently depicted as
an unequal, colonial exchange, implying a unilateral relationship between Chinese translators
and Western sources. Yet, as new research on sinicizing non-normative sexualities repositions
translation in an intercultural network, the multiple and diverse purposes of translation prac-
tices appear in a new light, suggesting both a sensitivity to localization and an awareness of
transnational contacts.
In this chapter, I examine various attempts at sinicizing Western/Euro-American non-
normative sexualities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the first part of the chapter, I offer
an overview of scholarship on male homoeroticism in pre-modern China, which may be
deemed “sedentary” (Pym 2014b, 180) but sets the foundation for ensuing investigations into
translating Western/Euro-American non-normative sexualities. In the second part, I examine
the critical issues and current contributions in historicizing and scrutinizing translational dis-
courses of contested sexualities. By highlighting the question of translation, I discuss how Sino-
phone cultures have been tackling old and new concepts, such as homosexuality, gay, lesbian, and
queer, which have been used to refer to contested sexualities in Western/Euro-American dis-
courses. The diversity manifested in translated materials attests to the possibility of intercultural
understanding and coalition.
345
Wangtaolue Guo
Translation and sinicization of Western/Euro-American non-normative sexualities has not
been regarded as a serious academic subject until recently. Male homoeroticism in pre-modern
China, however, has attracted much scholarly attention. In 1984, 小明雄 Xiaomingxiong2
(one of the pseudonyms used by 吳小明 Ng Siu-ming), a Hong Kong gay rights activist,
published 中國同性愛史錄 Zhongguo tongxing’ai shilu (History of Homosexuality in China), one
of the earliest comprehensive historical studies of Chinese homosexuality. The book presents
an extensive array of documented evidence of homoeroticism in pre-modern China, ranging
from literary productions in the spring and autumn period (770 BCE–476 BCE) to histori-
cal records in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Given the author’s idiosyncrasies and political
agenda, Xiaomingxiong’s work has been criticized for its historiographical rationale, scant dis-
cussion of female homoeroticism, and lack of in-depth analysis. Yet, Xiaomingxiong’s meticu-
lous work in combing through literature and historical records written in classical Chinese
makes his study a critical sourcebook that other scholars have constantly resorted to and built
their work on.
One such researcher is Bret Hinsch, whose study provides “a valuable service in laying to
rest several common modern Chinese and Western misconceptions” (Kretschmer 1993, 594).
In Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Hinsch (1990) not only
provides English translations of original sources, which delineate homosexual tradition in China,
but also categorizes the social manifestations of Chinese (male) homosexuality into four rela-
tional forms: “trans-generational,” “trans-genderal,” “class-structured,” and “egalitarian” (11).
Based on Xiaomingxiong’s collection as well as his own, Hinsch presents to the audience an
alternative representation of homosexual behaviours and relationships that does not completely
align with conventional Eurocentric perceptions. He is also aware of the specificities one has
to pay attention to when comparing and contrasting cultural phenomena transtemporally and
transnationally. Although hailed as a pioneering work written in English on homosexuality in
China, this monograph has caused a few controversies. For instance, Hinsch’s explication of the
origins of homophobia in pre-modern China is rather ambiguous. In the middle of the book,
he argues that it was “theoretical disapproval of sensuality by Neo-Confucians and Buddhists”
(ibid., 97) that enacted a uniform hostility to homosexuality, suggesting a religion-based homo-
phobia that was similar to that of the West. Yet in his epilogue, he attributes such intolerance
to the reproductive unit, known as 家 jia [family], in the Chinese tradition. On a macro level,
Charlotte Furth also points out that Hinsch’s largely anecdotal examples contribute to “the kind
of romantic Western valorization of indigenous Asian erotic mores associated with Orientalism”
(1991, 911). Informative as Hinsch’s book is, the multiple layers of homoeroticism in dynastic
China need further explanation.
Acknowledging Hinsch’s exploration of homosexual tradition in China, Wu Cuncun3 adds
her discreetly crafted perspective to the discussion of same-sex unions in pre-modern China. In
Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China, Wu (2004) looks into three major forms of homo-
sexual relationship in the Qing dynasty: “between upper-class men (literati, officials and mer-
chants) and dan (boy-actors),” “between affluent men and their boy servants,” and “between men
of equal status” (8). Since Wu has been trained in universities in and outside China, she is more
rigorous than Hinsch in her employment of analytical vocabulary. Unlike Hinsch, who argues
for a middle ground between essentialists’ and social constructionists’ views towards homo-
sexuality, Wu frames sexuality as a “cultural system” (ibid., 23), a term borrowed from Clifford
Geertz (see, e.g., Geertz 1973). Additionally, her interpretation of 男風 nanfeng – homosexual
“aesthetic and behavioural preferences that found expression in cultural life” (ibid., 6) – is much
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Sinicizing non-normative sexualities
less embellished than Hinsch’s. Through careful scrutiny of homoerotic representations in 筆

記 biji (miscellaneous literati writings) and 花譜 huapu (guidebooks to the famous 旦 dan of
the entertainment quarters and their nightclubs), she argues that the homoerotic sensibility
illustrated between literati and boy actors was a mode of male bonding and a manifestation of
masculinity that depended on those boys as passive sex objects.
Another scholar who has been working on the interplay of Chinese male homoeroticism and
masculinity is Giovanni Vitiello (2011). His nuanced study The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality
and Masculinity in Late Imperial China also focuses on literary representations of male homosexu-
ality in pre-modern China. Citing a wider array of primary fictional sources from vernacular
novels like 水滸傳 Shuihu zhuan [Stories from the Water Margin] to pornographic stories in 品
花寶鑒 Pinhua baojian [Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers] than his predecessor Sophie Volpp
did, Vitiello claims that sexual encounters between an adult man and a boy actor and the desire
for male beauty in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties were deemed norma-
tive, in contrast to Volpp’s statement that male homoerotic culture was marginalized and not
tolerated (2001). Further, one of the future directions for research laid out in Wu’s book – “a
comparison of the homoerotic sensibilities with the qing [romantic love] aesthetic” (2004, 158) –
is extensively addressed by Vitiello in his monograph. He identifies the different ways in which
fictional manifestations – romantic scholar, chivalric hero, wise man, sexy libertine, etc. – and
their historical evolution contribute to “the generic concept of romantic love, irrespective of
the gender of the lovers involved” (2011, 7). The book not only introduces new primary sources
for research but also expounds on the intertwined histories of homosociality, homoerotic love,
and masculinity.
Although the aforementioned scholarship may not directly relate to the interactions and
exchanges between Western/Euro-American and Chinese standpoints on the shifting dynamics
of non-normative sexualities, it is, because of the intercultural nature of translation studies, still
fundamentally necessary to form a basic understanding of same-sex erotics and construction of
sexual awareness in pre-modern China. On the one hand, multiple existing studies on homoe-
roticism in dynastic China contest (modern) perspectives on ways of explicating the specificities
of a pre-modern (but transtemporal) phenomenon, an intertemporal modality of analysis that
can be appropriated for intercultural studies. On the other hand, those scholarly works, in one
way or another, address one of the initial causes for translation (Pym 2014b) – a source/target
context – which constitutes the epistemological prerequisite for describing norms and estab-
lishing networks. Moreover, a few researchers, such as Hinsch and Vitiello, end their respective
monographs with epilogues that briefly describe the shifting perceptions of same-sex desire/
identity in Republican (1912–1949) and Communist (1949 onwards) China, Hong Kong, and
Taiwan. Hinsch offers an indiscriminate cultural imperialist view on Western-Sinophone inter-
actions in the 20th century by arguing that “Christian missionaries and other Western moralists
had championed a realignment of Chinese sexuality along Western European ideals” (1990,
167). Vitiello, in contrast to Hinsch who has been criticized for lack of evidence and overgen-
eralization in his argument, presents a more sophisticated account of same-sex desire and gay
activism in modern China, illustrating negotiations between the traditional and the contem-
porary (2011, 201–204), the local revolutionary and the global postmodern (ibid., 208–210).
Regardless of differences, both Hinsch and Vitiello have set the foundation for understanding
the changing dynamics of contested sexualities in the Sinophone world. Meanwhile, a new
gap – how Chinese and non-Chinese discourses on non-normative sexualities interacted with
each other in the 20th century and the new millennium – is being established, and transla-
tion can be a critical site in understanding the circulation of sexual awareness and identity, and
expounding the intersection of erotics, politics, activism, and culture.
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Critical issues and current contributions

Sexuality studies, as Vera Mackie and Mark McLelland (2015) observe, has become “a distinc-
tive field of academic inquiry” (1) over the last few decades. As cultures change, perspectives on
human (hetero-/homo-)sexuality have shifted from the paradigm that situates sexuality in the
network of biology, psychology, and sexology (Weeks 2017) to the one that associates sex and
sexuality with “cultural meanings, imaginaries, and identities” (Mackie and McLelland 2015, 1).
Given the plasticity and intersectionality of sexuality as an academic discipline, there is no
wonder that it has also become an analytical keyword in translation studies, shedding new light
on not only “the linguistic representations of sexual practices” (von Flotow 2009, 122) but also
cultural trappings in the form of symbols, contexts, and ideologies.
The development and transformation of sexual awareness in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
during the 20th century and the new millennium suggest that the contemporary, diversified
Sinophone discourses of non-normative sexualities, affected by several waves of translation,
no longer support what Michel Foucault calls “ars erotica” (1978, 57), nor do they constitute
a derivative of “scientia sexualis” (ibid., 58), represented by Western/Euro-American sexology.
For instance, according to the report on China in Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over,
China’s adoption law “specifically identifies partners that adopt children as being husband and
wife” (Simon and Brooks 2009, 121), reinforcing a heteronormative regime even though there
are no laws criminalizing homosexual activity between consenting adults. In post-martial law
(1987) Taiwan, however, homosexual-themed literature and publications have been in mass
circulation, with 同志 tongzhi (one of the Chinese translations for queer) discourse occupy-
ing a central discursive position for same-sex sexuality and identity politics (Lim 2008). The
transnationality/transculturality of Sinophone sexual awareness and its multifarious manifesta-
tions have attracted a number of scholars to examine the intersection of translation and non-
normative sexualities. Current research in sinicizing contested sexualities coalesces around four
topics: translation of European sexology; sinicizing LGBTQ identities in Hong Kong and Tai-
wan; queering Sinophone cultures through translation sociology; Sinophone queer literature in
translation. All three research directions that Luise von Flotow summarizes in Routledge Ency-
lopedia of Translation Studies – “macro-analyses of translation phenomena . . . micro-analyses of
translated texts . . . [and] intersection of translation theories and praxis” (2009, 123) – are dem-
onstrated in the existing scholarly works.
Translation of European sexology and Chinese modernity

Western/Euro-American sexology started to enter the Chinese public discourse through trans-
lation from the 1920s onwards. In the epilogue to his book, Giovanni Vitiello (2011) has already
mentioned two prominent figures – 張競生 Zhang Jingsheng and 潘光旦 Pan Guangdan –
who introduced Western/Euro-American (hetero-/homo-)sexual theories into Republican
China during that time. In addition to Pan’s Chinese translation4 of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology
of Sex: A Manual for Students, other Euro-American sexologists translated into Chinese included
Magnus Hirshfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Edward Carpenter. The translations (some-
times in the format of rewriting or adaptation) appeared not only in medical manuals for sex
education but also in urban journals and magazines that promoted anti-feudal perspectives
on sex, relationships, and education. An investigation into those locally reconfigured materials
would reveal that Chinese modernity is a translational modernity (Liu 1995).
One of the earliest scholars who looks into the translational discourse of homosexuality
in Republican China is Tze-lan Deborah Sang. In Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of
348
Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949), Sang (1999) departs from a long line of traditional
scholarship centring around Chinese male homoeroticism exclusively and argues for a discourse
of alternate modernity, which includes female experience and “mirror[s] women’s greater par-
ticipation in social and public life” (297). Surveying five critical, yet less discussed, journal articles
on 同性愛 tongxing’ai [same-sex love] over the period from 1911 to 1927, translated respectively
by 善哉 Shan Zai, Shen Zemin, 晏始 Yan Shi, 薇生 Wei Sheng, and 謝瑟 Xie Se, Sang show-
cases a spectrum of shifting views on (female) homosexuality in Republican China at a time
when different European sexologists’ works were intentionally selected, introduced, or even
rewritten by Chinese translators. The translators’ complementing or competing standpoints5,
as Sang claims, demonstrate “a fascinating mixture of liberalism and conservatism” (ibid., 292).
Those Chinese translators’ agency, although never uncircumscribed, refuted “the whole-scale
Western cultural . . . imposition in the name of universality” (ibid., 276–277). She further points
out that the translational tongxing’ai discourse in Republican China signified “an intersubjective
rapport rather than . . . a category of personhood, that is, an identity” (ibid., 292–293), a modality
in contrast to the Western/Euro-American essentialist paradigm of non-normative sexualities
which was usually credited to European sexology. Another key feature of this new discourse, as
Sang concludes, is “a supplement of interiority and emotionality to pre-existing Chinese termi-
nology for same-sex intercourse and erotic pleasure” (ibid., 297). The main arguments made in
this article became an integral part of a later monograph by Sang (2003), The Emerging Lesbian:
Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, in which she explores how global currents shaped
the Sinophone discourse on (female) homosexuality throughout the 20th century. Extend-
ing her discussion from female same-sex desire in the May Fourth and New Culture period
(1915–1937) to post-martial law Taiwan, where a number of identity-based social movements
and battle cries of feminist and queer theorists have emerged, Sang aims for a resignification
of the word lesbian in the Sinophone world. Her attempt at reconstructing this cultural/social/
sexual identity, which is heavy with geography-/period-specific meanings, will be discussed in
more detail in the next section.
In addition to Sang’s groundbreaking work on female homosexuality, male same-sex desire
in Republican China has also attracted scholarly attention. Wenqing Kang (2009), in Obses-
sion: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950, analyzes the changing cultural significance
of male same-sex desire and relations in an era of transition. Complementing Sang’s argument
about female homoeroticism and femininity is Kang’s explication of male same-sex love and
masculinity by presenting a wider range of primary sources, including literary works, tabloid
newspapers, and translated sexological writings. In the eponymous chapter on sexology, Kang
lays out a series of heated exchanges between Chinese intellectuals and tabloid writers, who had
contrasting ideas about tongxing’ai during the 1930s and 1940s. By evaluating writings of 楊憂
天 Yang Youtian, who frequently translated sexological terms coined by European sexologists
such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs for his readers, Kang differs from
Sang’s overgeneralizing claim that translating homosexuality as tongxing’ai highlighted “romantic
love between people of the same sex” (Sang 2003, 104). When addressing the central difference
between Yang’s stance on the Western/Euro-American concept of homosexuality and that of
his peers like 胡秋原 Hu Qiuyuan, Kang contends that “Yang emphasized the dimension of
physical sex, whereas Hu highlighted the aspect of emotional love” (2009, 42). He even links this
interpretative difference to translation, arguing that it was “caused as much as by the confused
usage of the term “love” in Western sexological writing as by its Chinese translation ai and
lian’ai, in which the meaning of love was often conflated with that of sex” (ibid.). In the second
half of the chapter, Kang touches upon the issue of homophobia in Republican China. Unlike
Hinsch, who attributes the Chinese intolerance of homosexuality to a “stringent application of
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Neo-Confucian rhetoric regarding the family” (1990, 162), Kang reworks Hinsch’s social state-
ment6 and speculates that the long tradition of stigmatization of Chinese male same-sex relations
is rooted in May Fourth Chinese intellectuals’ understanding of pathologized homosexuality
as social deviance. Influenced by Western/Euro-American theories of eugenics and Darwinist
evolutionary thinking, they deemed male same-sex relations detrimental to social reformation
and nation building.
Admittedly, both aforementioned scholars, in their respective studies, offer a resounding
opposing response to Frank Dikötter’s claim that early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals did
not grasp the European concept of (hetero-/homo-)sexuality (1995). Their shared agenda of
treating homosexuality exclusively as a social problem, however, remains questionable to other
scholars. Howard Chiang (2011), for instance, calls that modality “an oversimplification” (104).
In “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Chiang rejects the
idea that homosexuality was only a social problem in the May Fourth era, nor does he agree
with Sang and Kang who categorize the translation of Western/Euro-American sexology as “a
condition of modernization” (ibid., 105). Instead, Chiang proposes a concept called “epistemic
modernity” (ibid.), which concerns an “epistemological history” in the Foucauldian sense that “ ‘is
situated at the threshold of scientificity” ’ (ibid., 108). Zhang Jingsheng’s and Pan Guangdan’s
differing views on the aetiology and significance of same-sex love and respective attempts at
promoting their treaties, according to Chiang (2011), reflected not a social history of homosexu-
als in translation in Republican China but two levels of truth production: the object of scientific
knowledge and the cultural indicators of authenticity and modernity. In a later essay, Chiang
(2015) makes it clearer that the translated homosexuality was “a by-product of a contested his-
torical process” (78). Therefore, the cultural transmission of Western/Euro-American scientia
sexualis constituted not an alternate modernity, as was brought forward by Sang, but a “productive
historical moment” (ibid., 80) in which intellectuals-cum-translators like Zhang Jingsheng and
Pan Guangdan domesticated the Western/Euro-American psychiatric style of reasoning and
argumentation.
Current scholarship, such as Sang’s, Kang’s, and Chiang’s, has revealed different aspects
of historiographical significance of Chinese translations of Western/Euro-American sex-
ology. Tongxing’ai discourse – as a cultural/social/scientific product of such a translation(al)
phenomenon – proves to be a critical tool to be employed when one decides to dissect the his-
torical formation of contested sexualities, gender/sexual liberation, and nationhood in Republi-
can China. Issues concerning gender/sexual awareness, heteronormative hegemony, and cultural
transformations that have arisen from scholarly debates on this topic can also help us understand
old and new discussions about Sinophone translations of LGBTQ activist theories/discourses
in the late 20th century.
Sinicizing queer in Hong Kong and Taiwan

In contrast to their flourishing status over the May Fourth and New Culture period, intel-
lectual translations and public discussions regarding non-normative sexualities diminished sig-
nificantly after the 1940s due to China’s unceasing conflicts with Japan, the political catfight
between the KMT7 and the Communist Party, and prevalent conservatism under Mao’s regime.
Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003) observes that, in socialist China, “there are practically no artistic
representations touching on it [homosexuality] from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Nor did the
official sex-advice material make any mention of homosexuality” (26). Similarly, homosexual
representations in the public sphere dwindled in Taiwan, as the KMT enforced martial law from
1949. It was not until the 1980s that dispute over gender/sexual awareness resumed a position
350
in Sinophone society. Resurfacing in post-Mao China, however, were “outdated medical theo-
ries of homosexuality as [. . .] psychic pathology” (ibid., 27). Meanwhile, in Hong Kong and
Taiwan, the post-martial law era has witnessed new translational discourses on philosophizing,
theorizing, and utilizing non-normative sexualities. Drawing examples from Sinophone queer
practices, current research on sinicizing queer discourse in Hong Kong and Taiwan investigates
the multifarious dynamics of translation, language, identity politics, and interculturality.
One prominent characteristic that distinguishes the sinicization of queer from that of homo-
sexuality is the nomenclatural quibbles sparked by different translations of the term queer. Unlike
the May Fourth and New Culture period, when Chinese intellectuals shared one translated
Chinese term for homosexuality,8 the 1980s and 1990s have witnessed three different Chinese
translations – 同志 tongzhi [kindred soul], 酷兒 ku’er [cool kid], and 怪胎 guaitai [bizarre fetus] –
for queer in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Cultural implications and political agendas manifested in
those translational acts soon became a scholarly interest for some researchers.
In his seminal book Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, Chou Wah-shan
(2000) traces the etymology of tongzhi and analyzes its cultural/political resonance as being one
of the Chinese equivalents to queer. According to Chou, tongzhi, appropriated by the organizers
of Hong Kong’s first gay and lesbian film festival in 1989, embodies a rejection of “essentialism
and behaviourism” (ibid., 3), which aligns with the semantic clout and resistance to definition
of the word queer. Yet, Chou also points out that when queer – together with its cultural and
political discourses – was translated into tongzhi in the Sinophone world, an indigenous under-
standing that individual legal/social rights had to be interpreted within the context of personal
relationships (to be more exact, personal relationships within the family) was added to evoke
local solidarity. Although his monograph is path-breaking, Chou’s reasoning in it proves to be
partial, if not biased, due to the purview of his study. For instance, he vigorously promotes the
adoption of tongzhi discourse in Hong Kong by highlighting only its positiveness – “cultural
references, gender neutrality, desexualization of the stigma of homosexuality, politics beyond the
homo-hetero duality” (ibid., 2). Nevertheless, he ignores the dynamics of competing discursive
terms and long-existing local epithets in the Sinophone world.
Adopting Chou’s etymological approach, Jens Damm and Song Hwee Lim describe the
multiple attempts at sinicizing queer in Taiwan, which Chou fails to present in his book. When
examining the reception of postmodernist theories of gender and sexuality in 1990s Taiwanese
publications, Jens Damm (2003) notices the emergence of another translated term for queer.
He briefly mentions that, in addition to tongzhi, which was introduced to Taiwan from Hong
Kong in 1992, ku’er was first coined by a group of young writers and scholars at the National
Taiwan University as an alternate translation of queer, since the new term was “not restricted to
the more political meaning/interpretation of ‘tongzhi,’ [but] was considered to be the ‘other,’ the
non-mainstream” (ibid., 207). His failure to support his own observation, however, has resulted
in later criticism. For instance, Song Hwee Lim (2008), who conducts comprehensive research
on the development of discursive terms in Mandarin Chinese for queer, offers an alternate expli-
cation in “How to Be Queer: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer
Identity in Taiwan.” Differing from Damm’s unscrupulous claim, Lim traces the first appearance
of ku’er in Taiwan back to 1994, when 島嶼邊緣 Daoyu bianyuan [Isle Margin] – one of Taiwan’s
avant-garde cultural publications in the 1990s – featured an issue titled “酷兒 QUEER.” At the
same time, he points out that tongzhi (the Chinese translation of queer in Hong Kong) and guaitai
(an local term in Taiwan describing eccentricities) also had their places in the discursive land-
scape, in that the special section titled “Queer Nation” in the June 1994 issue of 愛福好自在報
Aifu haozizai bao [Love News] – a Taiwanese lesbian journal – was referred to respectively as 同
志國 tongzhi guo and 怪胎族 guaitai zu in Mandarin Chinese by the journal’s editor-in-chief. In
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Wangtaolue Guo
addition to his historiographical scrutiny, Lim looks into both the translators’ preferences and the
material context in Taiwan upon which the circulation of tongzhi, ku’er, and guaitai depended.
Reviewing 小小酷兒百科 Xiaoxiao ku’er baike [“A Pocket Encyclopaedia of Ku’er”], co-written
by 紀大偉 Chi Ta-wei, 但唐謨 Tan T’ang-mo, and 洪凌 Hung Ling who translated queer as
ku’er, he argues that the translation could be seen “as a form of competition between publica-
tions for readers’ attention and thus in terms of market segmentation” (ibid., 239). Nevertheless,
its emergence “had the effect of complementing, complicating, and even confounding [other
terms like tongzhi and guaitai]” (ibid., 240). Lim, however, also acknowledges the limited circula-
tion of both ku’er and guaitai in the public sphere, as both were considered academic and radi-
cally political discourses.
Apart from the aforementioned nomenclatural debate, current scholars are interested in the
dynamics of cultural translation and glocalized gay/lesbian/queer discourses. The 1980s AIDS
crisis and the political liberalization after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan gave new local
visibility to marginalized communities, such as aboriginals, homosexuals, and women. In the
meantime, the influx of queer discourse from the Western/Euro-American world became ame-
nable to such identity politics. Multiple researchers have looked into how this translational/
transcultural flow inspired a new (non-)sexual awareness.
Following his own research on the development of translated non-normative sexual ter-
minology in Taiwan, Song Hwee Lim (2009) addresses the question of translation, translat-
ability, and postcoloniality in a later essay where he writes about the travel/translation of queer
theory from the U.S. to Taiwan. Building on Edward Said’s ideas in “Traveling Theory,” Lim
deals with “the translingual aspect of [such a] transcultural flow” (ibid., 257) and analyzes the
“issues of cultural production and institutional practices” (ibid.) that came after queer theory’s
travel to Taiwan. In the first half of his essay, Lim problematizes translatability as “a precondition
of . . . travelling [queer] theory rather than as mere effects brought about by the transcultural
exchange” (ibid., 258), given Taiwan’s messy historicity. By doing that, he rejects the idea of
describing queer theory’s travel to Taiwan in a McDonaldization style. Instead, translation of
queer theory into Taiwan allowed the host culture to appropriate the translated theory to its
own purposes. In the second part, Lim is discerning to point out that multiple translations of the
term queer epitomized the indeterminacy of its referents. He observes that queer theory meshed
with lesbian and gay studies in Taiwan and produced a new non-normative sexual politics. Fur-
thermore, it “joined forces with other travelling theories” (ibid., 265) to foster an oppositional,
non-sexual politics that centered around nativist nationalism and transnational queer Sinophone
cultures.
Scholarly works that illustrate Lim’s first claim – a new non-normative sexual politics was
established by translating and introducing queer discourse – can be traced back to as early as the
beginning of the 21st century. Chong Kee Tan (2001), when examining the rise of gay, lesbian,
and queer discourses in the 1990s Taiwan, claims that this translational movement demon-
strated not a unidirectional but a mutually interacting relationship “between theory and lived
experience, as well as between different cultures” (125). By analyzing three events – a public
hearing on human rights for homosexuals, the publication of Taiwan’s first gay and lesbian
magazine G&L, and the establishment of ku’er BBS – Tan concludes that those legal/cultural/
political exchanges exemplify a process of non-Bhabhaist hybridization, a “double resistance to
American inclusiveness and indigenous hetero/homo interpellation” (ibid., 131). Such transla-
tion opened up space for creative negotiation and cultural agency, which shed a new light on
the ways in which cultures hybridize.
In a similar vein, Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003), in the second half of her book The Emerg-
ing Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, reflects on the translated literature about
352
lesbian and other queer desires in the 1990s and explores the gender and sexual politics within
the lesbian community in post-martial law Taiwan. In the chapter titled “Lesbian Activism in the
Mediated Public Sphere” (225–274), Sang examines the debate between 魚玄阿璣 Yuxuan’aji –
editor of a Taiwanese lesbian magazine – and other feminist activists over the exclusion of
lesbian and gay rights in Taiwan’s feminist movement. To do so, Sang looks into five articles on
the relationship between lesbian activism and feminism in the July 1995 issue of 婦女新知 Funü
xinzhi [Women’s New Knowledge]. New concepts like Radicalesbianism, performance, and coming
out, as Sang notes, were, for the first time in Taiwan, introduced by authors of those essays and
translated respectively as 激進女同性戀 jijin nütongxinglian, 扮裝 banzhuang, and 出櫃 chugui.
Furthermore, multiple voices in the Taiwanese feminist camp, including scholars-cum-activists-
cum-translators 胡淑雯 Hu Shu-wen, 張小虹 Chang Hsiao-hung, and 古明君 Ku Ming-chun
used their localized experience and translated progressive vocabulary to confront mass media’s
homophobic gaze.
One of the latest additions to literature on sinicizing new non-normative sexualities is Chi-
nese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy, whose author, Travis S. K. Kong
(2011), is a sociology professor from Hong Kong. Kong’s approach in rendering complement-
ing/competing discourses on contemporary Chinese male masculinities and homosexualities
can be described as “translation sociology” (Pym 2014a, 149), an analytical paradigm that has
been gaining popularity over the last few years. According to Joachim Renn, in culturally
fragmented societies, translation is “the best model of the way the different groups can com-
municate with each other and ensure governance” (2006 cited in Pym 2014a, 151). This new
modality of translation is manifested in Kong’s analysis, in which he takes on an anti-essentialist
stance and scrutinizes the transnationality in the life of Chinese male homosexuals in Hong
Kong, London, and China. By systematically examining the rising tongzhi movement in Hong
Kong, the intersectional landscape of race and sexuality brought forward by Chinese migrant
gay men in London, and the queer infrastructure of consumer venues in Beijing, he argues that
“the numerous queer flows [. . .] of capital, bodies, ideas, images, commodities” (Kong 2011, 8)
can be summarized by four trans- tropes: transnationality, transformation, translation, and trans-
gression. What distinguishes him from many of his predecessors, who have also explored such
transnational flows, is that he emphasises the moment when translations failed, or in his own
words, “when Chinese queer identities and politics [did] not follow the same paths as those of
the West” (ibid., 9). The incongruities between global gayness and Sinophone gayness open up
new spaces for research.
As I have demonstrated above, queer discourse has engendered multiple translations/trans-
formations of itself due to its deconstructive nature, oppositional reaction to gay hegemony, and
connection with political activism. Along with those translations, a new non-normative sexual
awareness has become a critical site for scholars to reflect upon canonized issues like hybridity
and diversity.
Queering Sinophone cultures through translation sociology

As Kong’s project shows, recent scholarship on translation and non-normative sexual politics in
the Sinophone world has joined the bandwagon of translation sociology, a paradigm of cultural
translation that aims to reconstruct sexual, social, and cultural boundaries. Cultural translation,
in its metaphorical sense, is associated with “the way differences are maintained and negotiated
within complex societies” (Pym 2014a, 151). The hybridization of sexual, cultural, and national
citizenships, as some researchers argue, mimics a translational position, or to borrow Emily Apt-
er’s term, “translational transnationalism . . . from within” (2013, 43), in that this new discourse
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Wangtaolue Guo
exposes the relations between sociocultural groups and multiple acts of border-crossing within
a culture that was previously deemed homogeneous.
One of the pioneering scholars before Kong to adopt this sociological method was Lisa
Rofel. In “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities” (85–110), a chapter in her seminal
book Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Rofel (2007)
claims that the Chinese queer culture neither represents a homogenous, global one, nor high-
lights a radical difference from Western/Euro-American discourses. Her definition of gay cul-
ture in China is a desexualized one, in that she argues that gay identities in China emerge “with
[. . .] desires for cultural belonging” (ibid., 89). Intricately tied to the articulation of gay identities
is cultural citizenship, which is delimited by a set of modes of inclusion and exclusion like “gay
kinship” (ibid., 97) and “linguistic appropriations of affinity” (ibid., 102). Cultural citizenship, to
some extent, replaces “legal subjectivity or theories of psychological personality” (ibid., 95) in
establishing an in-between site for discussing Sinophone queer culture.
Building on Rofel’s statement that same-sex identities in China are attached to cultural
citizenship, Loretta Wing Wah Ho (2010) explores how non-normative sexualities have been
shaped by new politico-economic discourses – state ideologies, cyberspatial articulations, and
local class narratives – that arose during China’s opening up. By expounding 素質 suzhi [qual-
ity], a language of social stratification within gay and lesbian communities in China, she brings
to the fore urban/rural and class divisions and enunciates how language contributes to the crea-
tion and exclusion of a communal identity.
In contrast to Rofel and Ho’s approach – incorporating cultural/national citizenship into
non-normative sexualities – Taiwanese researchers tend to “translate” queer awareness into
national identity, in order to reconceptualize Chineseness as “multiple, contradictory and frag-
mented” (Martin 2015, 35). Their attempts bring into the spotlight what Fran Martin calls
“transnational queer Sinophone cultures” (ibid., 36). For instance, Li-fen Chen (2011), in
“Queering Taiwan: In Search of Nationalism’s Other,” does not center her analysis on delineat-
ing the shifting notion of Sinophone non-normative sexualities per se, but on characterizing an
intellectual movement that relies on the translational/transnational figure of contested sexuali-
ties to highlight a cultural politics of fragmentation. Her interpretation of 孽子 Niezi [Crystal
Boys], a canonical gay-themed novel by 白先勇 Pai Hsien-yung, is not confined to the tradi-
tional realm of reconceptualizing homosexuality. Instead, she focuses on “a series of linked issues
that are at the centre of contemporary Taiwan’s critical debate: ethnicity, historical and spatial
memory, and cultural identity” (ibid., 387). Thus, what is manifested by the rent boys in Niezi
is both a contested sexuality and a non-normative national/cultural identity. More importantly,
Chen’s translation sociological reading deconstructs the conventional national border, as she
considers the gay cruising place, known as New Park in the novel, to be a symbolic trope for
a queer post-nation, a culturally diasporic territory within Taiwan itself. In addition to Chen’s
work, the latest attempts at illustrating the transformations of minoritized subjects in the Sino-
phone rubric can be found in Perverse Taiwan, an anthology edited by Howard Chiang and Yin
Wang (2017). Topics ranging from plural representations of homosexuality in Taiwanese litera-
ture to patrilineal kinship and transgender awareness in Taiwan are explored by various scholars.
The excavation of non-normative sexual/(trans-)national cultures demonstrates how established
agents have been controlling inter- and intra-cultural exchanges.
Translation sociology, as is manifested previously, proves to be an intersectional domain,
which welcomes interdisciplinary projects that focus on social agents, ideological actors, and
cultural negotiations involved in the (literal or metaphorical) translation/transformation process.
Yet, as a few translation theorists have warned us, unregulated adoption of the term translation
as a metaphor may result in “a sociology of translation . . . without translation” (Wolf 2007, 27).
354
Therefore, researching on queer Sinophone cultures through translation sociology requires con-
scious reassessment.
Sinophone queer literature in translation

In a world marked by increasing literary and cultural mobility, Sinophone queer literature
and film have been garnering international acclaim. Consequently, another subject of interest
for translation scholars is the reception and circulation of Chinese queer-themed texts in the
Anglophone world. Investigations into how Sinophone literary texts are translated and brought
back into the global circulation of queerness can shed new light on translation praxis issues, such
as translation ethics, textual/thematic equivalence, and canon formation.
Interestingly, this research stream was inaugurated not by institutional scholars but by practic-
ing translators. Sylvia Li-chun Lin (2000), co-translator of 朱天文 Chu T’ien-wen’s canonical
queer novel 荒人手記 Huangren shouji [Notes of a Desolate Man], reflects on translators’ responsi-
bility for rendering a Chinese text that is full of cross-cultural allusions into English. Lin claims
that it will be unethical if the translator fails to verify the cultural references and allusions made
by the author. Drawing from her own experience of translating Huangren shouji (with How-
ard Goldblatt), she demonstrates that, in a novel with a plethora of Western/Euro-American
cultural allusions, discrepancies between Anglophone/Francophone sources and Sinophone
renditions can be found in direct quotes, excerpts of lyrics, and queer adaptation of Western
mythologies. It is, therefore, necessary for the translator to first conduct extensive research on
the already translated elements in the original text and then double-check with the author of his
or her intention. In a similar vein, Fran Martin (2003) discusses the critical issues in translating
Taiwanese tongzhi and ku’er fiction in the preface to Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from
Taiwan, a collection of queer-themed stories edited and translated by herself. Martin summarizes
three features that she highlighted when translating those stories into English: “metamorphos-
ing characters” (19), “playful narrative strategies” (19), and “highly committed political critique”
(19). Such characteristics, as Martin reveals, allowed her to rethink “the place and effects of queer
sexualities” (22) and compelled her, in her translation, to bring to the fore the unsettling desires.
Encouraged by translators’ self-reflective pieces, translation scholars have realized the poten-
tiality of using translated Sinophone queer literature as case studies to re-examine dichotomous
concepts in translation studies. For instance, Issac Ting-yan Hui (2016) compares Pai Hsien-
yung’s Niezi with its English translation Crystal Boys and points out that Goldblatt’s domesticat-
ing strategy fails to transmit “the image of darkness and the concept of emptiness in the Chinese
text to Western readers” (34), even though the translation has a high level of readability. By
studying examples like 失心瘋 shixin feng [no-heart crazy] and 把我的大腦一下子挖掉了
一般 ba wo de da’nao yixiazi wadiao le yiban [it felt like my brain was dug out], Hui insists that
Pai skilfully links the sense of emptiness with emotional instability and loss of memory. Thus,
Goldblatt’s translations of those two phrases as “love crazy” (Bai (Pai) 1990, 79 cited in Hui
2016, 38) and “as though I’d had a lobotomy” (Bai (Pai) 1990, 41 cited in Hui 2016, 39) may
require further revision. Hui suggests, through a comparative study of Niezi and The Symposium,
that if translators use foreignizing strategies appropriately, they can “create a sense of familiarity
through de-familiarization” (2016, 34). In the case of Niezi, the image of emptiness, which could
have been brought forward by literal translation, clearly correlates to the image of void in The
Symposium. Therefore, even with the presence of a linguistic disconnection, a thematic connec-
tion can still be established.
Lastly, the circulation of Sinophone queer texts has also emerged as a scholarly interest from
the intersection of translation studies, comparative literature, and world literature. In her doctoral
355
Wangtaolue Guo
thesis Negotiating Culture Space and Identity: The Translation and Analysis of Tongzhi and Ku-er Fic-
tion, Michelle Ming-chih Wu (2014) adopts the sociological concept of framing and argues that
translation of queer literature from Taiwan signifies a linguistic/cultural/political (re-)framing,
which transforms and brings the local expression of contested sexualities into the global land-
scape. Instead of focusing on the gain and loss in translation, she highlights “the cross fertilisation
of ideas” (2014, 162) and new forms of creative expression of non-normative sexualities. Andrea
Bachner’s observation of Sinophone queer texts in translation, however, is less optimistic than
Wu’s. In “Globally Queer? Taiwanese Homotextualities in Translation,” Bachner (2017) points
out that “queer-themed Sinophone texts still find their place in the very limited market of
Chinese literature in English translation” (84). Nonetheless, she believes that Sinophone queer
texts’ journey to a Western/Euro-American context will raise non-Sinophone awareness of
“(in)visibility of certain world literary contexts” (84) and open up a transcultural queer space.
As is highlighted above, various attempts at analyzing the translated Sinophone queer liter-
ary texts indicate that non-normative sexual representations can serve as a lens for understand-
ing and evaluating individual translations. Moreover, comparative studies, which link literary
productions with translation criticism and transcultural practices, give localized, minoritized
expressions a new visibility.
Future directions
Over the last two decades of social and cultural changes in major Sinophone places like China,
Hong Kong, and Taiwan, gender and sexual diversity have become more visible and generated
heated discussions. Academic and public debates about taxonomy, translingual implications, and
transcultural ramifications of contested sexualities in the Sinophone world, as Tze-lan Deborah
Sang (2003) notes, make sex “one of the most prominent discursive formations and commercial
enterprises” (168) in the post-Mao era. As those ongoing conversations start to intersect with
less studied history, textual features of queer literature, and new media, new research areas will
emerge accordingly.
One of the fields for future research is translation history. I am not referring to the translation
of homosexuality in the May Fourth and New Culture period, which has been studied quite
thoroughly by Tze-lan Deborah Sang (2003), Wenqing Kang (2009), Howard Chiang (2011,
2015), and, most recently, Ting Guo (2016). Instead, the few decades between 1949 and the
1980s, during which “public mention of homosexuality was extremely rare in mainland China”
(An 1995 cited in Sang 2003, 167), need further examination. Possible research questions
include: What kinds of social factors ended the burgeoning translation of European sexology?
How was the public discourse of (hetero-/homo-)sexuality changed by Communist party-
mobilized campaigns? Which acts could be considered as gender transgression and how were
they criminalized? How do we historicize or contextualize this era of non-translation in the
new millennium? Other research topics may also emerge from the intersection of cultural trans-
lation and contemporary Sinophone queer activism. Primary accounts and case studies collected
in Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Culture (Engebretsen
and Schroeder 2015) – including organizing cultural events, creating new media platform, pro-
ducing documentary archives – can appeal to translation scholars when they attempt to describe
and comment on the very recent translation(-al) activities between the Sinophone and the
Western/Euro-American world.
Translated Sinophone queer literature, as Hui (2016) and Bachner (2017) have illustrated, is
an arsenal for translation scholars. In addition to the traditional literary and stylistic approaches
that can be used to dissect a text, verbal camp – an aesthetic and affective concept used by Keith
356
Harvey (1998, 2000) when he analyzes American gay novels in French translation – can be
adopted to examine the semiotic representation of queerness in Sinophone gay and lesbian litera-
ture and how it may be reproduced/distorted in English translation. Research questions include:
What are some of the new connotations of queerness when it is appropriated in the East Asian
context? Are there new semiotic manifestations in the Chinese-language queer writing that can
be added to the repertoire of gay men’s speech, or even contribute to the establishment of a
national identity? How does translation as an activity and translated texts as products operate with
interlingual textual elaboration?
Finally, since digital technology has considerably changed the landscape of audio-visual trans-
lation, translation activities of Sinophone LGBT fansub groups can also be an area of study
for researchers. As more and more Western/Euro-American queer films – subtitled by fansub
groups like QAF – appear in China’s cyberspace, the dynamics of technological democratiza-
tion, activist translation, and knowledge transfer should be called into attention. Possible research
questions include: What strategies are employed by Chinese activist translators in translating for-
eign queer films? How does translated queer cinema promote the discussions on LGBTQ rights?
I have, in this chapter, mapped an intersectional and intercultural field that straddles transla-
tion and (trans-)formation of non-normative sexualities in the Sinophone world. The scholar-
ship that I have reviewed either demonstrates the transcultural practices of sinicizing contested
sexualities or explores the hybridization of queer and (trans-)national identities in China, Hong
Kong, and Taiwan. It is clear that translation, as a transcultural movement, an intercultural
product, and a multi-functional trope, facilitates the establishment of a paradigm that aims to
showcase the multiplicity of non-normative sexualities.
Further reading
Baer, Brian James and Klaus Kaindl, eds. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice,
Activism. New York and London: Routledge.
This anthology, following Queer in Translation that came out earlier, continues to focus on the queer
aspects of translation studies. Featuring chapters on queer theorization, queer translation case studies,
and the interplay between translation and queer activism, it presents various attempts at scrutinizing the
intersection of queer sexualities and translation.
Bao, Hongwei. 2018. Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China. Copenhagen:
NIAS Press.
In his latest publication, Bao explores the transformation of gay identity and queer activism in contem-
porary China, where the socialist spectre and the neoliberalist ideology both negotiate and compete
with each other. In addition to textual analysis of queer fiction and personal narratives, the book also
presents Bao’s ethnographical research on Chinese urban gay communities.
Huang, Hans Tao-Ming. 2011. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press.
In this book, Huang connects literary and social representations of contested sexualities with the politics
of national/state culture in post-1949 Taiwan. Adopting Stuart Hall’s history-culture-power rubric,
Huang offers an in-depth analysis of Taiwan’s homosexual oppression history, which is intertwined
with prostitution and feminist movements.
Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. 2008. Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong. Vancouver: UBC
Press.
In this book, Leung demonstrates queer theory’s immense potentiality in examining complex cultural
productions from Hong Kong. Embedded with discussions about Hong Kong’s queer and postcolonial
spaces, cinematic representations of sexual relations, establishment of an Asian queer icon, and queer
self-writing/-translation, the book expands the geopolitical contour of queer studies.
Martin, Fran. 2003. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
357
Wangtaolue Guo
Martin’s groundbreaking monograph offers a detailed account of a transnational Taiwanese queer cul-
ture. Drawing examples from canonical Taiwanese queer novels and films, Martin demonstrates the
impacts that shifting economic and political powers have had on the cultural understanding of non-
normative sexualities in Taiwan.
Related topics
Translation history, translation sociology, translation and politics, queer activism, transcultural
practices
Notes
1 See Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth, eds. 2012. Translators Through History. Rev. ed. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
2 He was also known as Samshasha.
3 In this chapter, I use Pinyin to spell words, names, and phrases in Mandarin Chinese, except when a
different conventional or preferred spelling exists, as in Cantonese and Taiwanese names (for instance,
Chong Kee Tan and Chou Wah-shan) and other proper names. The ordering of Chinese names follows
their conventional forms: surname/family name first, except for people who are known by their angli-
cized names (for instance, Tze-lan Deborah Sang) or prefer to be addressed in the anglophone tradition
(for instance, Wenqing Kang).
4 It was first published in 1946.
5 The five essays all recognized female same-sex attachment. Yet, two conceptualized homogenic love as
perversity; two acknowledged its crucial role in refining young female students; the remaining one was
relatively neutral.
6 In the epilogue to his book, Hinsch briefly mentions that, in Hong Kong, people used to believe
that homosexuality constituted a social perversion, which went against the traditional Chinese moral
concepts.
7 It is also known as the Nationalist Party.
8 As Sang’s article has shown, the translated term was tongxing’ai. However, its variant – 同性戀愛
tongxinglian’ai [same-sex love] – was shared by May Fourth intellectuals as well.
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Part IV
Gender in grammar,
technologies, and
audiovisual translation
27
Grammatical gender
and translation
A cross-linguistic overview
Grammatical gender as an abstract system

“Gender” is a polysemous term, often considered slippery and ambiguous, since it can be seen in
both sociocultural terms and in terms of language as an abstract system. In this chapter, gender
will be addressed as a grammatical category, diversely conceived across different languages.
The traditional categorization, on the basis of descriptive linguistics, is between languages pos-
sessing grammatical gender and languages possessing natural gender. Some studies report that 56%
of the world’s languages do not have grammatical gender or noun-class systems (Trudgill 2011,
quoting Dahl 2004; Corbett 1991): “grammatical gender” and “noun-class system” are here used
synonymously in the wake of Corbett 1991 (see Dixon 2002). This formal feature implies that any
noun pertains to a certain class, generally masculine, feminine, or neuter (if present) and this deter-
mines gender agreement, i.e. parts of speech such as determiners, adjectives, and pronouns will
take the same gender. In natural gender systems, like English, nouns (and related pronouns) may
express the sex (or animacy) of the referent, but other parts of speech are not modified by gen-
der agreement. Such natural gender systems display many different criteria: human/non-human,
male/female (like English), animate/inanimate (like most Algonquinian languages), count/non-
count (as in Caucasian languages) are some possible examples (Corbett 1991, 2014; Wagner 2005).
Canonically, these two language systems are best represented by the Indo-European languages of
Europe and Asia on the one hand (examples are Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian; Hindi,
and Urdu among the Asian languages), and, on the other, by those languages which do not express
gender through agreement (different macro-families such as Austronesian, Finno-Ugric, Bantu,
Sino-Tibetan, and others as well as English, the best known in the Indo-European family).
Gender as a linguistic category is viewed either as a “marginal grammatical category” (Trudg-
ill 2011, 162), “totally non-functional” (Trudgill 1999, 148), not marking “any real-world entity
or category” nor serving “any communicative need” (McWhorter 2001, 129), or it is seen as
possessing (an albeit partial) relevance in terms of meaning-making, also in those languages pos-
sessing natural gender (Deutscher 2011; McConnell Ginet 2014). The first position perceives
the noun-class system as a “useless” throwback to the past which can be justified historically,
since “We know that languages drag along with them a certain amount of ‘unnecessary’ histori-
cal baggage” (Trudgill 1999, 148. Also in Trudgill 2011, 162). As an example, a few instances
363
of gendered nouns for inanimate objects still persist in English, as is the case of the much-cited
ship, treated as a “she” in the maritime world. The second position – i.e. the view of a semanti-
cally relevant role of gender in any language – is represented by studies in the field of histori-
cal linguistics that foreground the presence of grammatical gender features in many languages
now said to express gender according to “humanness” and the “biological sex of the referent”
(Romaine 1999, 73); in English, for instance, some minor traces of the Old English case sys-
tem survive (Curzan 2003) as in the gender concord expressed by anaphoric pronouns such as
third person personal – e.g. he (m.) vs. she (f.) vs it (n.) –, possessive – his (m.) vs. her (f.) vs. its
(n.) –, and reflexive pronouns – himself (m.) vs. herself (f.) vs. itself (n.). English morphology also
expresses gender through the use of some feminine suffixes like -ess to form derivative nouns:
binary couples of nouns, e.g. hostess (m. host), actress (m. actor), comply with the criterion of
human/non-human when referring to human males and females. Feminine suffixes can also be
employed in relation to certain animals (e.g. leopardess; lioness) and in some cases, the personal
pronouns “he” or “she” can be used as if they were human beings.
From a semantic point of view, English vocabulary hosts some masculine/feminine com-
pound nouns, such as chairman/chairwoman, policeman/policewoman; and binary couples of
lexemes whose antonymy is generally seen as related to the sex of the referent (like man/woman,
bachelor/spinster, brother/sister). As in many other languages, nouns categorized as masculine in
English have conventionally been used as “generic,” thus referring both to men and women, as
in “The relationship between man and his dog,” where man stands generically for “human being”
thus comprising women as well. Such generic or unmarked uses of masculine forms are present
in many languages, and have been increasingly considered forms of sexist language. Alternatives
like neutral nouns (for instance, in English humans instead of mankind, people instead of men), or
reference to both pronouns as in the spelling s/he or to the unmarked plural they are increasingly
preferred (more on this point will be added in the following sections of this chapter).
Generic, unmarked, sex-indefinite language items – such as the preceding examples humans
and people – have caused linguists to distinguish between a covert (on the basis of Whorf ’s 1956
definition) gender of nouns and an overt gender of pronouns (although these taxonomies have
been criticized due to lack of clarity. See, for example, Wagner 2005 referring to Quirk et al.
1985): the English term friend is “covert,” for example, because it does not carry a gender marker
while the Italian terms amico/amica, which mark gender, are not. However, if a pronoun is used
to refer to the nouns friend/amico/amica, such use will necessarily be overtly gendered (e.g. “She
was a good friend/Era una buona amica”).
The option “notional gender” proposed by McConnell Ginet (2014), based on previous
work by Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1994), seems particularly appropriate to refer
to the impact of concepts, ideas and ideologies on speakers’ choices regarding third person
pronouns in languages such as English, and other personal pronouns in Japanese, for instance.
McConnell-Ginet argues that in languages based on natural gender, the speaker’s choice of third
person pronoun is as dependent on sex itself as it is on concepts and ideas (notions) about sex.
It is, in fact, easier to understand the way gender “assignment” via pronouns shifts over time
and over space (as the same language may present regional variations) if we move beyond the
dichotomy of natural vs grammatical gender and look at social context. A case in point are alter-
native pronouns proposed precisely to overcome the gender binary, which are discussed later.
This description of gender in the English language, though merely outlined, is hopefully enough
to show that gender in the grammar of languages is (1) multifaceted because even in languages
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Grammatical gender and translation
which do not possess a noun-class system it can “lurk” in a covert manner; and (2) variable from
a diachronic point of view like any other aspect of a language, therefore giving rise to debate
and theorization, either aimed at explaining changes from a historical perspective or trying to
sketch synchronic patterns of the category, ranging from the more prescriptive to the more
descriptive ones.
For instance, the theoretical discussion regarding the nature and structure of gender systems
in Proto-Indo-European languages (PIE) dates back to the 19th century (Luraghi 2011) – when
a shift from a two-gender animacy-based system to a three-gender sex-based categorization
seems to have taken place (Brugmann 1891) – ; but it is mainly in 20th-century descriptive
linguistics that gender is definitively singled out when morphologically marked. However, since
both the structural approaches of post-Saussurean schools in Europe and American distribution-
alism showed little interest in contrastive methods of language analysis and translation theory,
gender long continued to be a marginal issue when describing language structures. Indeed,
scant attention is paid to the issue in seminal works such as those by Leonard Bloomfield and
Louis Hjelmslev. In his voluminous Language, Bloomfield (1933) treats gender in the context
of selection and concordance between taxemes specifying that genders are “arbitrary classes,
each of which demands different congruence-forms in certain kinds of accompanying words.”
Bloomfield also briefly deals with grammatical gender in Chapter 16, “Form-classes and Lexi-
con” (1933, 271–272), but only to restate that “The gender-categories of most Indo-European
languages [. . .] do not agree with anything in the practical world, and this is true of most such
classes” (271).
The Danish linguist Hjelmslev expressed an almost identical (and equally generic) view in
his textbook Sproget written in the 1940s (but published in 1963): when discussing the number
of elements displayed by different languages in specific categories, he noted that there are lan-
guages (Danish, for example) with up to four genders, and other languages (such as those of the
Bantu family) which present up to 16 genders. Jakobson departs from the aforementioned views
arguing that “even such a category as grammatical gender, often cited as merely formal, plays
a great role in mythological attitudes of a speech community” ( Jakobson 1959, 237), and then
quotes a number of lexical cases in which “the symbolism of gender” was particularly relevant
despite the equivalence in “cognitive values” of words (237–238). His position can be attributed
to his strong literary (and critical) interests, and the consequent focus on translation, which led
to contrastive analyses and inevitably focus the linguist’s attention on differences between lan-
guage systems.
Such a broader, intercultural perspective is still present today and manifest in the cross-
fertilization of multiple disciplinary fields (including literature and literary criticism) prompted
by postcolonial studies and translation studies, on the one hand, and the rise of the cognitive
paradigm in linguistics on the other. This has modified the widespread attitude towards the topic
(though, still not significantly in theoretical linguistics), finally bringing the issue of gender to
the fore. For instance, in a review of contemporary literary production in Yiddish – a language
usually displaying a three-gender system, and some regular patterns in gender assignment –, Katz
(2004) records a transition from one standard – “The pre-war middle-of-the-road standard that
encompasses many religious as well as secular publications” – to what he defines as the “literary
Yiddish of mid-twenty-first century Hasidism worldwide” (389). Among the changes he detects
in written production, Katz mentions a process of grammar simplification, “with a minimum
of gender and cases” (389). This phenomenon may be framed within a more general process
involving experimental uses of language, grammar and spelling due to the mutual exchange
and intermingling between dialect and standard language, which evolved into a new standard
Yiddish due to the use of the Internet by young people, as well as by members of the Hasidic
365
community. Experimental uses of language, also through (and thanks to) new forms of computer
mediated communication, are indeed all factors which influence gender usage.
Critical issues
When investigating gender as a possible source of connotative associations, one should always
take into account the multiple dimensions of language-specific categories, such as the “classical”
noun classes in Bantu languages previously alluded to (Demuth 2000; Nurse 2006) and labelled
by linguists with conventional class-numbers. For example, an intrinsically ‘masculine’ word such
as the Swahili mboo (“penis,” plural miboo) belonging to the so-called class 3 for singular form
(and class 4 for plural) is a member of a class which includes the following nouns: (1) names
of trees, (2) names of plants, (3) body parts, and (4) other inanimates. It could be inferred that
even if a Swahili native speaker is partly unaware of the fact that mboo has the same class prefix
[m-] as, say, mtofaa “apple tree,” mmea “plant, vegetable,” mji “city,” mlango “door” ( Johnson 1955),
mental associations between the various members of this class may well occur, and be exploited
by speakers in discourse.
The lively intercultural and interlinguistic debate within the field of feminist studies, makes
connections between this overlap of concepts – formal and semantic – and the partial equiva-
lence of forms and meanings across languages (see for example Flotow 1997). Joan Scott aptly
observes that: “in many European languages the binary [sex and gender] did not exist; instead,
the same word was used for sex and gender. In other instances, the biological and the social ref-
erents carried so many other connotations that feminists looking for a linguistic equivalent had
to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives” (Flotow and Scott 2016, 361). Thus, the intro-
duction of the English neologism “gender” had the consequence of confusing received notions
of sex, gender and sexuality. Such issues related to biological sex and social gender are cleverly
captured in the expression “sociosex” invented by Kornelia Slavova (Flotow 2019; and Slavova
in this Handbook) and reported by Kathy Davis (2007) as a neologism present in the Bulgarian
translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves (see also Bogic 2017).
Suzanne Romaine’s view of the grammatical gender of languages like Italian as carrying
“syntactic consequences throughout the grammar” (Romaine 1999, 73), while the natural gen-
der of languages such as English has consequences only at a semantic level, may seem simplistic.
However, it clearly foregrounds an aspect that is very relevant from the translator’s point of
view: the passage from a grammatical gender system to a natural gender system and vice versa
may have a decisive impact on the expression of meanings related to the biological sex/gender
of the referent(s) and to other connotative meanings of the source text expressed through witty
uses of language and the evocative power of some referents. Examples abound and will be given
in the following section (for an overview of feminist attitudes towards grammatical gender and
meaning across languages see Leonardi 2007, esp. chapter 4, 95–99).
Gender in translation: general issues

On the basis of the preceding considerations, it is possible to agree with Bonnie McElhinny
(2003) when she argues that one can consider the categories employed in a language to express
gender grammatically as arbitrary and ruled by convention only if the relationship between
gender and sex remains unacknowledged. But this cannot be the case in translation processes
or, more generally, when languages and their gender systems are compared as they move from
one language to another. The fact of being gendered or ungendered necessarily foregrounds
the differences between the grammatical systems of the language pair involved and forces the
366
translator to make informed gender selections: for example, the Italian translation of “My friend
was late” inevitably obliges the translator to opt either for the masculine equivalent amico or
the feminine equivalent amica (see also the examples in the preceding sections). This is in line
with McConnell-Ginet’s preference for the concept of notional gender mentioned earlier with
reference to English third person pronouns: in languages like English which possess a natural
gender system, pronominal usage can be understood only considering “the ideas about sex
and sexuality current at a given time” (Mc Connell-Ginet 2014, 6). Such positions are further
confirmed by the current trend which views the gender pronouns conventionally referring to
men and women (like the personal pronoun he/she in English) as inadequate, because unable to
refer to those who don’t identify with this gender binary. In English the use of the singular they
has been offered as an alternative gender neutral and/or gender inclusive pronoun (also defined
as “unisex they,” “common-gender,” or “epicene” pronoun). Though criticized by grammar-
ians because incorrect, its use has a long-established tradition dating back to 1375 (Baron 2018
provides a quick but revealing diachronic excursus on such use. For an exhaustive review of the
use of “singular they” see Wales 1996, especially 5.3.). Love in The Cambridge Companion to Gay
and Lesbian Writing (2011) also lists other gender-neutral alternatives such as s/he (pronounced
“shuhee”), ze (pronounced “zhee”), but it is sufficient to surf the Web to discover many others.
Other attempts to degenderize discourse to meet a new conception of identity are also common
in languages possessing grammatical gender. For instance, the French Écriture inclusive movement
proposes the use of ille, ul, ol as ungendered subject pronouns (Haddad 2017, 5), among many
other changes.
The example of pronoun use illustrates how languages react differently to sociocultural
change, and in the case of gender the reaction depends both on the differing categorization
of gender at a grammatical level and, especially, on sociocultural attitudes towards such issues.
Translation particularly highlights such differences between languages. The volatility in the per-
ception of gender due to all these connotations – be they sociocultural or linguistic – is not easy
to deal with: this is why the all but neutral process of translating between languages with differ-
ent gender systems might be seen as one instance of the limits of translatability. Without reach-
ing such an extreme viewpoint, what is certain is that translation strategies must somehow also
account for the presence in the source text of what Sherry Simon would define as “psychologi-
cal” or “metaphorical” gender (1996, 17–18) and Luce Irigaray (1985, 281–292) as “sexuation
du discours,” i.e. an intentional device through which the reader is led to infer covert meanings
and implications. The perspective offered by Nadia Louar (2008) is quite intriguing: as a speaker
of French, she wonders how to express the difference she feels between the English gender and
the French genre. These supposedly synonymous terms refer to two different constructions: “De
gender à genre, nous passons, en effet, non seulement d’une langue à une autre mais aussi d’une
réalité à une autre. Le genre en français s’inscrit dans une construction linguistique; gender en
anglais, nous le savons, est avant tout une construction sociale. [From English gender to French
genre we move effectively not only from one language to another but also from one form of real-
ity to another. Whereas genre in French pertains to a linguistic construction, gender in English,
as we well know, is above all a social construction]” (Louar 2008, 3; our translation). This is true
of many different pairs of languages engaged in translation processes.
Gender markers may indeed be used to create special effects or to express hidden meanings
in languages with natural gender, and it is occasionally puzzling to understand if and why an
author resorts to a deliberate, particular, use of them, thus specifically recalling and/or stress-
ing the semantic and cultural import of gender. A few examples of gender issues mostly taken
from literary works, from both source and target texts, may be useful here to illustrate the sig-
nificant gender choices and their outcomes in the translated text. For instance, gender may be
367
foregrounded in absentia: in literary texts authors resort to a lack of gender marking to create
a sense of mystery. Gender is not revealed in some first-person narratives like Edgar Poe’s The
Tell-Tale Heart (1843), where the author succeeds in avoiding all gender markers (there are no
revealing nouns or pronouns), thus making it impossible to establish whether the narrator is
male or female. Interpretations and commentaries on the text have generally assumed that the
narrator is male (artist Bill Fountain being an exception, since he features a female character as
the narrator of the title story in the 1995 collection of graphic versions of Poe’s stories by Mojo
Press entitled The Tell Tale Heart.) For a translator, the question of gender ambiguity cannot be
ignored. Avoiding gender marking may be difficult in English, but it becomes even more dif-
ficult in a language with gender agreement; for instance, gendered participles and adjectives in
Italian definitively disambiguate the gender of the narrator unless specific translation solutions
are sought out. The incipit of Poe’s story and the renowned Italian translation by Elio Vit-
torini and Delfino Cinelli (1937), which genderizes the narrator, is enough to elicit this point:
“TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that
I am mad?”/“Sul serio! Io sono nervoso, molto nervoso, e lo sono sempre stato. Ma perché
pretendete che io sia pazzo?” “Nervoso” (“nervous”), “stato” (“been”), “pazzo” (“mad”) all carry
the masculine inflection, which implies that the narrator is male.
The subversive and deconstructive narrative device of maintaining the indeterminacy of the
narrator’s gender has been used, more recently, in several works by postmodernist British female
writers, for example in Ali Smith’s Erosive (2004) and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
(1992). An analysis of the latter’s Italian translation (by Giovanna Marrone) in relation to the
problems posed by the need to maintain the narrator’s ambigendered nature throughout the
novel, attests to the many creative solutions adopted by the translator: important among them
the use of epicene adjectives and epicene nouns, nominalization, paraphrasing, impersonalizing
personal forms and making passive forms active. Some pertinent examples are: “unreconstructed
as I am” (97), which becomes “un essere assolutamente destrutturato” (101 in the Italian trans-
lation; thus avoiding the choice between the masculine form of the adj. destrutturato and the
feminine form destrutturata); “Had I never been kissed before” (81), which becomes “Avevo mai
ricevuto un bacio?” (84), thus avoiding the choice between the masculine form baciato and the
feminine baciata. (Further examples can be found in Cordisco 2011; Cordisco and Di Sabato
2010, and a similar analysis of the French translation of Written on the Body is found in Fort
2008). Indeed, as gender operates at a semantic level well beyond the mere respect for gram-
matical rules it continues to serve as a device often exploited in narratives, especially in LGTBQ
contexts.
Gender throwbacks are also significant in the aforementioned case of personified animals
in fables and other types of narratives. The English version of the Italian fable by Leonardo Da
Vinci Il ragno e l’uva (The Spider and the Grapes) is particularly odd in this respect: the spider is
personified as a ‘she’ in the English translation (“It seemed to her that she had found a most
convenient spot to spread her snare, and having settled herself on it”). In Italian ragno is mascu-
line but, of course, the use of the masculine marker in a language which possesses a gender case
system does not imply the spider in question is male at all: the Italian reader is led to perceive the
spider as being of indeterminate sex since its grammatical gender does not explicate the animal’s
natural gender. Thus, by choosing the feminine among the three possible alternatives (the others
being the masculine or the neuter), the English translator adds semantic meaning to the target
text while the neutral pronouns it/its would have weakened the story’s anthropomorphic appeal
for the English reader (Dawes and Di Sabato 2014).
Such considerations are also relevant in the field of multimodal translation: the localization
of advertisements, for instance, may also determine changes in the non-verbal component, i.e.
368
requiring an intersemiotic translation indispensable to obtain the same effect on the target audi-
ence. It goes without saying that the visual component remains most frequently unchanged thus
obliging translators to find appropriate solutions for the verbal component, a test of creativity
for all those working in the field. A case in point is the Italian translation of the German slogan
used at the end of the 1960s by the petrol company Esso for TV commercials and ads – Pack den
Tiger in den Tank, ‘Put the tiger into the petrol tank’ (the UK version was Put a tiger in your tank).
The masculine gender of the German der Tiger corresponds to the Italian feminine la tigre (f.).
Contrary to what has been suggested by Hartwig Kalverkämper (1979), the German word was
not substituted, in the target headline, by the Italian masculine il leopardo; rather, the advertisers
decided to creatively switch the gender of the Italian la tigre (helped by the morphological end-
ing of tigr-e, the suffix being devoid of any explicit gender mark). The slogan, then, became Metti
un tigre nel motore, with the male determinant un before tigre taking the place of the feminine una.
Now, in order to understand the rationale behind this translation one needs to take into account
the visual component: both in the German and the Italian commercials the tiger is depicted in
cartoon form, though it undergoes an anthropomorphic transformation in order to resemble
an athletic man, standing up and flexing his muscles. The “grammatically transgressive” Italian
translation was doubtless fostered by the need to preserve the ideological stance expressed by the
images, whose power and distractive content is seldom touched in translation practices (Flotow
and Josephy-Hernández 2019). A more recent linguistic strategy follows the direction of a “de-
genderized” advertising language, which often resorts to the generic, unmarked, sex-indefinite
uses of English mentioned earlier: for example the catchy slogan of the 2016 Benetton cam-
paign – Clothes for humans – is kept in English in the Italian and French versions since in Italian
and French the noun form corresponding to human (umano, humain) is used less frequently and
the generic formula would be gli esseri umani/les êtres humains – thus also calling into play a more
formal register (as well as a masculine class noun). By using one single English slogan across all
their markets, the advertisers were able to show real people of all shapes and sizes and in so doing
they “queered” the binary heteronormative gender implications that would have come out of
the grammatical constraints of some target languages.
Indeed, any form of translation, be it from a diachronic, synchronic, interlingual or interse-
miotic perspective, illustrates how the effects of a translator’s work in identifying gender aspects
of a source text, and in determining the ideological impact of gender connotations in both the
source and target text, are all but neutral. Gender switching along a timeline is exemplified by
Nissen 2002 with the emblematic example of secretary, denoting an occupation which would
have been perceived as male in the 19th century but which today is widely perceived as female.
In grammatically gendered languages, a masculine/feminine alternative may exist (for instance,
secretary corresponds to the Italian masculine segretario or feminine segretaria): the translation of
nouns denoting occupations and/or institutional roles is another instance of the semantic and
ideological consequences of a translator’s choices when passing from one linguacultural scenario
to another. Sociocultural biases have always influenced gender-related language production and
nowadays provide fertile ground for debate at a social and political level in many national and
international contexts.
Gender in translation: future directions

Hopefully, the aforementioned considerations have illustrated that any occasion of language
contact – in translation or any other type of communicative event – will inevitably increase
awareness of the many gender-bound associations in actual language use: the phenomenon
of “genderization,” which emerges both in languages with grammatical gender and in those
369
without, therefore necessarily calls for a deliberate expressive choice. The following points illus-
trate some of the possible future trends of studies in the field of gender as a grammatical category
in combination with translation theory and practice:
1 Research in the field of grammatical gender and/in translation will benefit from a closer
attention to constructivist and anthropological approaches to gender, thus going beyond
the basic overlap between gender as a linguistic category and “biological gender,” namely
the referential assignment of a gendered identity to anatomically sexuated beings on the
basis of their physical morphology (Bucholz 2001).
2 Assuming that both in non-gendered languages and in gendered languages ‘natural/bio-
logical’ or referential gender is a social construct (also perceived as ‘psychological’ or ‘meta-
phorical,’ Simon 1996; cf. also Schiller 2014), contrastive translation studies may shed new
light upon different ways of conceptualizing gender across languages and therefore cultures.
For instance, the debate on the use of nouns denoting occupations and/or professional or
institutional roles in institutional and official documents has recently re-emerged in many
countries, with different outcomes. One of the most eloquent examples is the aforemen-
tioned French movement “Écriture inclusive” which promotes changes in the orthography
of French (Haddad 2017, 5). Language generally “resists” any imposed change, but such
initiatives are evidence of an open debate which cannot be ignored: all over the Anglo-
American/European world, professionals working in a plurilingual dimension are having to
make choices related to gender agreement on the basis of sociocultural contextual features.
In this contemporary and multilingual environment most speakers know more than one
language. In some cases, bilingual speakers operate between languages with different gender
systems, which doubtless increases their awareness of sex and gender as language categories.
3 Therefore, investigations from the perspective of bilingualism could complement research
work on translation and gender seen as an abstract system of language. This is already the
case with a number of studies on the “gender interference effect” of L1 on L2 in the field
of picture naming and comprehension tasks when the gender of nouns or noun phrases
do not match (see Bordag 2004; Bordag and Pechmann 2007 and the unpublished works
quoted therein). Further studies (Bordag and Pechmann 2008) illustrate, however, that
interference factors affecting gender retrieval are not present in the field of translation thus
advocating the need for further experiments on processes occurring when moving from
one language to another. Extensive future investigation is thus required in this field through
an interdisciplinary lens.
Related Topics
Feminist translation, gender and language, translation and gender, feminist linguistics, gender and
grammar, intersemiotic translation, morphology and semantics.
Further readings
Hellinger, Marlis and Hadumod Bußmann, eds. 2001/2002/2003. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic
Representation of Women and Men, vol. 1, 2, 3. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins.
Hellinger, Marlis and Heiko Motschembacher, eds. 2015. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representa-
tion of Women and Men, vol. 4. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins.
This four-volume reference work (the first three published between 2001 and 2003, and a fourth
volume added in 2015) provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical,
lexical, referential, social) in 42 languages of diverse genetic, typological, and sociocultural backgrounds.
370
Corbett, Greville G., ed. 2014. The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
An edited volume by an expert and prolific author in the field of gender which shows the many diffe-
rent perspectives of this issue, from the morphosyntactic to the psycholinguistic; from the main to
minority languages.
Deutscher, Guy. 2011. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Lon-
don: Arrow Books and Random House.
Cross-linguistic issues related to gender are lightly presented in Part 2 of this witty volume.
Titjen, Felicity. 2018. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
One of the many possible readings on gender in English: Titjen aptly shows how English can mark
words for gender in ways other than the use of pronouns – i.e. by adding suffixes, by asymmetry or by
associating job roles with a particular gender.
Audring, Jenny. 2016. Gender, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Available at: http://linguistics.
oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-43?
mediaType=Article Online Publication Date [Accessed Jul. 2016].
The entry ‘Gender’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia represents an exhaustive first reference easy to consult,
accessible online.
Note
Antonio Perri is the author of the first section of this text, up to the segment entitled “Gender in Translation:
General Issues” and Bruna Di Sabato is responsible for the second half of the chapter. (LvF).
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Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
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Bordag, Denisa. 2004. Interaction of L1 and L2 Systems at the Level of Grammatical Encoding: Evidence
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28
Le président est une femme
The challenges of translating
gender in UN texts
Enora Lessinger
Introduction
Feminist thought and translation studies both emerged in the 1970s and became recognized
research fields in the 1980s, at a time that “gave strong prominence to language” (Simon 1996,
8), a factor that is likely to have contributed to the overlap between the two. A central argument
in the fight against linguistic androcentrism from the 1970s onwards was the belief that lan-
guage influenced thoughts, and therefore formed part of the problem of discrimination against
women (Lomotey 2015, 168), an idea reflected in Judith Butler’s denouncing “[t]he power of
language to subordinate and exclude women” (1990, 26). The potentially performative dimen-
sion of language described by John Langshaw Austin (1975) informed Butler’s (1990) argu-
ment that gender itself is brought into being through the performance of activities perceived
as gendered. For instance, Robin Lakoff ’s study of ‘woman’s speech’ (1975) – characterized by
insecurity, powerlessness and triviality – shows how speech forms part of the process of acquir-
ing a gender.
With the advent of third-wave feminism came a shift towards a more discursive analysis of
gender in language through third-wave feminist linguistics (Mills 2003). Third-wave feminist
translation “encourages the examination of not only literary texts (as has been the case almost
exclusively up till now both from the Canadian school and from later approaches) but also all
kinds of text types” (Castro 2009, 13). As a consequence, the focus of feminist translation studies
is no longer limited to literary texts but extends to pragmatic ones as well.
There is still no consensus today on the exact nature of the link between language and gen-
der and on whether, or to what extent, the former influences the latter. However, feminist schol-
ars agree that language at the very least reflects the power dynamics between men and women,
and that “conventional and prescriptive ‘patriarchal language’ [has] to be undone in order for
women’s words to develop, find a space and be heard” (Flotow 1991, 6). The “inherently socio-
political connections between gender and language” (Flotow 2009, 122) are particularly relevant
to pragmatic texts such as legal and institutional texts, in which language is a doubly political
matter: for example, ambiguity deriving from the use of the generic masculine can lead to
juridical loopholes. Moreover, since the beginning of research on gender and language, one
key aspect of it has been the role of language in the marginalization of women in the public
374
sphere and institutions (Cameron 2005). Sylvia Shaw’s study investigates the influence of 100
new female MPs entering the British Parliament in 1997, in order to determine whether this
had any effect on the infamously aggressive style of parliamentary debates (2000). Her results
showed that the rules designed to guarantee equal participation were frequently violated, and
that women’s interventions only amounted to two-thirds of men’s in relation to the respective
numbers of the two groups.
The corpus of this study similarly explores pragmatic texts from the public sphere: it is
composed of eight texts in English and their Spanish and French translations, all related to the
United Nations’ four World Conferences on Women. The specificity of these texts is that they
are aimed at fighting sexism, which one would expect to entail a greater awareness of linguistic
sexism and a conscious effort to avoid using sexist language. The goal of this article is to explore
whether and to what extent these texts testify to such a writing and translating strategy, and to
determine how the use of gender-related language evolved between 1975 and 2015. While the
results do show an increasing awareness of the centrality and sensitivity of the linguistic dimen-
sion of gender issues, they also point to the lack of a coherent strategy both across languages and
within individual ones.
Linguistic sexism
Although the question of whether languages in themselves can be sexist is a highly debated one,
there is no doubt that the use of sexist language can and does reflect, and probably feeds, the
existence of a metalinguistic sexism.
Sexist language has traditionally been described as language that makes invisible, stereotypes
and/or denigrates one sex, typically women (Henley 1987). Within sexist language, Álvaro
García Meseguer (1994) distinguishes between lexical sexism at the word level, and grammatical
sexism at the syntactic level. According to him, grammatical sexism is the most resistant form
of linguistic sexism, being the expression of a sexism deeply rooted in society. As pointed out
by Elena Teso, “most studies have focused on lexical sexism as it has been argued that sexism
at the word level can be eliminated” (2010, 15). Moreover, “three potentially responsible agents
of linguistic sexism have been identified: speakers and their mental context, listeners and their
mental context and the language as a system” (García Meseguer 1994).
This last point is particularly relevant to the translation of natural versus grammatical gender.
As Sherry Simon points out,“[w]hile grammarians have insisted on gender-marking in language
as purely conventional, feminist theoreticians follow Jakobson in re-investing gender-markers
with meaning” (1996, 17). Thus, Deborah Cameron speaks of “metaphorical gender” (1992, 82)
for words that are apparently neutral but carry a gender-specific connotation. Similarly, Pierre
Zoberman makes a strong case against the “fallacy of inclusiveness,” and unlike Cameron who
advocates total feminization (generic feminine) he claims that “[t]he translation process renders
the underlying focus on man explicit – or should do so” (2014, 244). Choosing to keep the
sexist language of a text in its translation can indeed serve the purpose of exposing and thus
implicitly denouncing the original text’s linguistic sexism.
Anti-sexist or gender-inclusive language, conversely, involves using language in a way that
avoids gender bias, usually through a conscious effort, and/or serves a feminist agenda. There
are two main strategies of gender-inclusivity. Gender-neutralization, or degendering, involves
“the use of one term to refer to both sexes” and “reducing or abolishing terms that connote one
sex to the exclusion of the other” (Teso 2010, 41). Gender-specification, or feminization, is “a
strategy used to achieve linguistic equality by making the ‘invisible sex’ (in most cases, women)
visible in language through systematic and symmetrical marking of gender” (Pauwels 2000, 141).
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Enora Lessinger
The former strategy is often better suited to languages that only have natural gender, while the
latter is often used in the case of languages with grammatical gender.
Language reforms
Anne Pauwels underlines the fact that in terms of language change, women have traditionally
derived a form of authority from their role as norm-enforcers (2003, 550). However, it is men
that have played the central role of norm-makers and language planners, particularly through
typically male-dominated language academies.
Thus, the insistence of the Académie française (French Academy) that the masculine being
the unmarked form in French is a purely grammatical matter, and that the masculine must
prevail over the feminine in word agreement, has played a key role in the strong resistance to
reforms promoting inclusive writing in France.1 Anne-Marie Houdebine (1998) claims that the
difficulty of feminizing the French language is a social and ideological problem rather than a
linguistic one. This view is supported by Marie-Marthe Gervais-Le Garff ’s comparative study
(2007), which shows that feminizing reforms were implemented earlier and more successfully
in Canada and Belgium – where no institution plays a role equivalent to that of the Académie
française – than in France.
Similarly, the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) continues to champion the
generic value of the masculine, in spite of ongoing debates since the 1990s. It has also spoken
both against the use of abstract nouns such as ‘ciudadanía’ (citizenry) to avoid gender-marking,
and against more informal and innovative forms such as the symbol @, which is being increas-
ingly used as a way to represent both the ‘o’ of the masculine and the ‘a’ of the feminine, espe-
cially on social media. A 2013 study by Uwe Kjær Nissen showed that the use of anti-sexist
language in the Spanish press remained sporadic and inconsistent, and that its most widespread
manifestations were split-forms such as ‘él o ella’ [he or she], abstract nouns and unmarked forms
such as ‘persona.’
Even in the absence of such influential and prescriptive language institutions, the likes of
editors and grammarians – such as Fowler in the English language – can play a similarly pre-
scriptive role. However, phenomena such as the now widespread use of ‘they’ as a gender-neutral
pronoun for a singular referent, or the existence of the title ‘Ms,’ which does not give away the
marital status of the referent, point towards a greater flexibility in English than in both French
and Spanish. As pointed out by Pauwels, the studies on the use of non-sexist nouns and pro-
nouns in English led, among others, by Robert Cooper (1984), Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King
(1994) and Pauwels (1997, 2000), all report “a decrease in use of masculine generic nouns and
pronouns in favour of non-sexist alternatives both in forms of written discourse and in public
speech” (Pauwels 2003, 563). The greater flexibility of the English language, as opposed to the
version of French spoken in France for instance, testifies among other things to the lower preva-
lence of linguistic purism among English speakers.
Teso’s (2010) study on four European countries aims to ascertain the extent to which national
and international recommendations for gender-inclusive writing were being applied, through
comparison of a natural gender language (English) and three grammatical gender one (Spanish,
French and German) in institutional texts. The results show only a limited attempt at gender-
inclusivity, with for instance two occurrences of the word ‘chairperson’ in English, against 60
for ‘chairman’ in Spanish, all the occupational terms were in the masculine, even those with a
generic meaning, presumably to improve readability. Languages’ natural preference for linguistic
economy is indeed a recurring argument in the opposition to inclusive writing.
376
Case study
Context: the UN and gender equality

The 1945 Founding Charter of the United Nations is known for being the first global treaty
for gender equality, defining “the equal rights of men and women” as a “fundamental human
right” in its very first paragraph. However, this founding text already contains the germs of the
gender-related translation issues that occupy us here: the French and Spanish translations men-
tion respectively “les droits fondamentaux de l’homme” and “los derechos fundamentales del
hombre,” which both translate literally as “man’s fundamental rights.” In that pre-feminist era,
such was the accepted wording, but more surprising is the fact that it still largely is the case in
French, as shown later.
The United Nations reaffirmed the principle of equal rights in the 1979 Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which encourages mem-
ber states to take measures to fight stereotypes and prejudice against women. This marked the
beginning of the use of inclusive language in text drafting. The UN’s ambition to fight gender
discrimination also manifested itself in the choice to make the 1975–1985 years the Decade
for Women. This decade was marked by three major World Conferences on Women in 1975,
1980, and 1985, which led in turn to a fourth one: the landmark 1995 Beijing Conference.
The corpus of this study comprises the texts of these four conferences and of the four reports
issued between 2000 and 2015 on the outcome of the Beijing Conference. It covers a period of
40 years, from the first conference in 1975 to the last report in 2015.
Methodology
Between the English, French, and Spanish versions, the corpus is comprised of 24 texts.
Originally, the Arabic translations were also meant to form part of the corpus. However, two
of the earlier texts turned out to be unavailable despite repeated attempts to secure them, to
the point that one may wonder if the translations exist at all. This might reflect “the cultural
authority of language, and of the position of the speakers within dominant codes” (Simon
1996, 127), and brings to mind what Lynn Penrod describes as “the most fundamental deci-
sion of all: whether or not to translate a given text at a given time” (1993, 39). It is all the
more unfortunate as the existing literature on gender and translation already focuses largely
on European languages.
It is worth pointing out that the different texts of the corpus do not officially follow the
traditional original/translation divide. Multilingualism is defined as a core value of the United
Nations, and in theory every UN text is issued in the organization’s six official languages, with
all six texts enjoying the status of authentic, original text2. Although the English version was
written first in the texts under study (and in the majority of cases), as is clearly perceptible in
some passages3, there is no hierarchy between source language and target language. This raises
interesting questions in terms of translation studies, by giving every translator – or team of
translators –, at least in principle, full responsibility for the text. Therefore, according to this
particular approach to translation within the UN, the translators/authors of all three versions
of the texts under study are to be held equally accountable for the use of both sexist and non-
sexist language.
A quantitative study was carried out on the English, French and Spanish texts to determine
the extent to which both sexist language and gender-inclusive language were used. A discursive
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Enora Lessinger
analysis of the use of about 60 key words and expressions was then conducted. The choice of
these words and expressions was made both on the basis of the UNESCO guidelines, described
later, and on an ad hoc basis – i.e. including any expression of sexist or anti-sexist language in the
texts that were deemed to be significant.
The goal of this study was to answer two questions. What is the prevalence of sexist and anti-
sexist language in the corpus for each of the three languages? And is there a writing/translating
strategy for the expression and translation of gender? For both questions, the diachronic dimen-
sion was considered in the analysis.
It must be noted that in general, translational choices made within an institution are not
solely the work of individual translators. Even in the absence of an institution-wide policy
across languages, or within individual languages – as suggested by the present study – standard-
izing translation tools are increasingly at the heart of translation practice within most major
organizations, including the United Nations. In the last decade in particular, computer-assisted
translation (CAT) tools have become a central component of translation within the UN. In
particular, the translation interface eLUNa was developed in-house specifically for this purpose
and has been used systematically since 2014. Among other functionalities, it identifies terms in
the source text and links them to equivalents from a terminology database, the UN TermPortal,
also dating back to 2014. eLUNa also matches up segments in the source text with previously
translated segments in the target language, a process that is bound to foster homogeneity across
translations. However, at the beginning of the time period under study – and probably during
most of it – these tools were still largely underdeveloped, so that in 1980 there was still no com-
puterized terminology bank in the organization. It is unclear to what extent CAT tools were
used between 1980 and 2014, but the very absence of information on the subject tends to sug-
gest that their use was at least limited. In the absence of any conclusive data, however, the exist-
ence of an institution-wide policy cannot be excluded. It is therefore difficult to determine to
what extent responsibility for sexist and anti-sexist language lies with the institution as opposed
to the sum of the individual translators’ voices.
UNESCO guidelines
In 1989, at a time when linguistic sexism had already emerged as a central feminist con-
cern, UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, one
of the UN’s main agencies – published the first edition of a booklet entitled ‘Guidelines on
Gender-Neutral Language.’ Its aim was to tackle “the issue of sexist language,” in the context
of “a growing awareness that language does not merely reflect the way we think: it also shapes
our thinking” (1999, 3–4). This line of thinking, sometimes described as a milder version of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1929), denotes a bold stance on the part of the institution. The
guidelines, which were published in English, French and Spanish, give definitions of the main
terms involved and examples of sexist language, as well as alternative non-sexist expressions.
Because each language poses a different set of problems, the examples and strategies provided
differ. These recommendations were meant to lead to a revision of formerly published texts
and to serve as guidelines for the avoidance of sexist language in the United Nations systems
in general.
The three sets of guidelines show different overall strategies for English on the one hand, in
which gender-neutralization prevails, and the two Romance languages on the other, in which
gender-specification is dominant. However, the three sets have in common the importance
given to an empowering strategy in the use of occupational titles.
378
Analysis and results
Sexist language
Generic masculine: general use

Generic masculine corresponds to the first kind of sexist language described by Henley: making
one sex invisible. In the corpus, outside of occupational titles and words related to ‘man’ – which
will be treated separately – generic masculine is relatively rare. It happens most in Spanish, with
a total of 41 occurrences, and least in French, with only three occurrences.
In example 1, drawn from the 1995 Beijing Conference, the speaker uses the word ‘citizen,’
which is an unmarked form in English but must be translated either as a masculine or feminine
noun in both French and Spanish (emphasis mine throughout the examples):
1.a. We now need a sea change: women will no longer accept the role of second-rate citizens
(1995, 213).
1.b. Necesitamos un cambio inmediato y definitivo: las mujeres no aceptarán más el papel de
ciudadanas de segundo orden (227).
1.c. Ce qu’il faut maintenant, c’est un changement radical, car les femmes n’accepteront plus
le rôle de citoyen de deuxième classe (234).
The more logical choice here would be to use the feminine form in the translations, since
the referent is ‘women’ (‘femmes’ – ‘mujeres’), and it is indeed the case in Spanish with ‘ciu-
dadanas’ [citizens-female]. However, the French translation resorts to the masculine form of
the noun (‘citoyen’ as opposed to ‘citoyenne’ or ‘citoyennes’), presumably regarding ‘citoyen’
[citizen-male] as the generic, default form. The fact that the noun is also in the singular, in spite
of having a plural referent, is consistent with this hypothesis. This choice reveals that the generic
value of the masculine form was, at least for the French translators of the 1995 conference,
strong enough to trump semantic gender agreement.
Occupational terms: generic masculine

Within occupational terms, generic masculine is widely used in the earlier texts in all three
languages. Although it does decrease over time, the use of generic masculine for job titles per-
sists in all four conferences, particularly in French, as seen in example 2, from the 1975 Mexico
Conference:
2.a. “The Conference shall elect the following officers: a President, 46 Vice-Presidents
and a Rapporteur-General as well as a Chairman for each of the main committees provided
for in rule” (1975, 42).
2.b. “La Conferencia elegirá a las siguientes autoridades: un Presidente, 46 Vicepresi-
dentes y un Relator General, así como a un presidente para cada una de las comisiones
principales a que se refiere el artículo 42” (148).
2.c.“La Conférence élit les membres des bureaux suivants: un président, 46 vice-présidents
et un rapporteur général, ainsi qu’un président pour chacune des grandes commissions pré-
vues à l’article 42” (148).
The indefinite singular masculine pronoun ‘un’, common to French and Spanish, leaves
no doubt as to the gender used in these two versions, and neither does the term ‘chairman’
in English. The use of generic masculine is thus consistent in this example.
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Enora Lessinger
By 1995, however, the lack of a unified language policy had become apparent, as shown in
example 3:
3.a “Opening of the Conference and election of the President” (1995, 138).
3.b. “Apertura de la Conferencia y elección de la Presidenta” (149).
3.c. “Ouverture de la Conférence et élection du président” (147).
Here we are presented with a problem typical of the translation of gender, which Olga Castro
describes as “the translational [problem] produced by words that, depending on the discourse,
can have women and/or men as their referents” (2009, 14). However, the following paragraph
makes a clear reference to the election of a woman: “[T]he Conference elected, by acclamation,
as President of the Conference, Her Excellency Madame Chen Muhua, Vice-Chairperson
of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of
China” (1995, 138). The ambiguity of the English word is therefore not enough to explain why
the French text should refer to a male president and the Spanish text to a female one.
Furthermore, while English uses the gender-neutral ‘president’ and ‘chairperson’ and Spanish
the gender-specific ‘presidenta’ [president-female] and ‘vice-presidenta’ [vice-president-female],
the French translation mixes masculine and feminine in a surprising way, using respectively
‘président’ [president-male] and ‘vice-présidente’ [vice-president-female]: “À la 1re séance plé-
nière, le 4 septembre, la Conférence a élu président, par acclamation, S.E. Mme Chen Muhua,
Vice-Présidente du Comité permanent de l’Assemblée populaire nationale de la République
populaire de Chine” (146). With the masculine and feminine form of the word co-existing in
the same sentence for one and the same referent, it is unclear whether the former is meant as a
generic masculine or reflects the conservative approach that recommends using the masculine
form of such job titles for women. In any case, such an awkward combination of masculine and
feminine is certainly more damaging to the text’s readability than any version of inclusive writ-
ing might be.
Occupational terms: masculine form for female referent

This phenomenon occurs in all three languages, but most commonly in French. In the 1990s,
the election of the first (and to date only) female Prime Minister of France, Edith Cresson,
sparked a debate in the national press. It pitted supporters of the conservative ‘Madame le pre-
mier ministre’ [Madam the prime minister-male] against advocates of the feminized version,
‘Madame la première ministre’ [Madam the prime minister-female], and was eventually resolved
in favour of the latter (Teso 2010).
As far as occupational terms go, the English texts only comprise two occurrences of a mas-
culine form (‘chairman’) for a female referent, in the 1980 and 1985 texts. The Spanish transla-
tions contain five instances, also occurring between 1980 and 1985. The French texts, on the
other hand, present no less than 96 occurrences, including words that can easily be feminized,
such as ‘président’ [president-male], ‘secrétaire general’ [general secretary-male] or ‘administra-
teur’ [administrator-male]. Moreover, the feminine forms of these words (‘présidente’, ‘secré-
taire générale, ‘administratrice’) are all used at other places of the corpus, including in the earlier
texts. There seems to be no significant evolution towards avoidance of the masculine generic.
In the last two reports from 2010 and 2015, however, this phenomenon is limited to the words
‘chef ’ [chief] and ‘professeur’ [professor], whose feminized forms (‘cheffe,’ ‘professeure’) remain
controversial even today. According to Patricia Niedzwiecki (1993), the resistance to the adop-
tion of feminine forms for women holders is partly due to women’s awareness of the associa-
tion of the masculine form with prestige, and to their fear that a feminine form might devalue
their title.
380
A particularly striking example of the use of a male-for-female title can be found in the 1995
Beijing conference:
4.a.“priority should be given to the creation of a new post of Deputy Secretary-General in
charge of women’s affairs. Needless to say, this post must be occupied by a woman” (1995, 203).
4.b. “dar prioridad a la creación de un nuevo puesto de Secretaria General Adjunta
encargada de los asuntos de la mujer. Ni qué decir que ese puesto debería ser ocupado por una
mujer” (216).
4.c.“il conviendrait d’envisager en priorité la création d’un nouveau poste de secrétaire général
adjoint aux affaires féminines. Il va sans dire que ce poste devrait être occupé par une femme” (220).
Beyond the fact that both French and Spanish translate the assertive ‘must be’ rather timidly
(‘devrait être occupé,’ ‘debería ser ocupado’ [should be occupied]), it is interesting that French,
unlike Spanish, chooses to translate ‘Deputy Secretary-General’ with a masculine form instead of
the expected ‘secrétaire générale adjointe.’ This is all the more perplexing as the feminine form
‘secrétaire générale’ [general secretary-female] appears as early as the text of the 1985 confer-
ence, ten years prior to Beijing.
Occupational terms: asymmetry

The third form of sexist language analyzed here is the use of asymmetrical linguistic forms for
male and female referents, in which the term designating women typically evokes a more vul-
nerable or powerless position than that designating men. Asymmetrical forms occur in all three
languages of the corpus – 17 times in English, 8 in Spanish, and 43 in French. Examples of such
asymmetrical pairs include ‘girls’ – ‘men’; ‘las jóvenes’ – ‘los hombres’ [young women] – [men];
‘jeunes filles’ – ‘hommes’ [young women] – [men], or the androcentric pair ‘jeunes filles’ –
‘jeunes gens’ [young women]– [young folk].
Their distribution across the texts shows no sign of diminution, and in fact peaks in the 2005
report for English and French. The 2010 report, however, shows an interesting case of correction
of the asymmetry of the English text in both Spanish and French:
5.a.“Young women are more susceptible to HIV infection and in many countries they have
a higher HIV prevalence rate than men” (2010, 39).
5.b. “Les jeunes femmes sont davantage susceptibles d’être infectées par le VIH et dans de
nombreux pays le taux de prévalence du VIH est plus élevé chez les femmes que chez les
hommes” (44).
5.c. “Las mujeres jóvenes son más propensas a la infección por el VIH, y en muchos países
la tasa de prevalencia de este virus es superior entre las mujeres que entre los hombres” (45).
By inserting in the second part of the sentence a new subject (‘les femmes’, ‘las mujeres’
[women]) that is the equivalent of the masculine referent, the two translations erase the sexism
of the English wording. This case remains exceptional, however, and although Spanish generally
stays clear of asymmetrical turns of phrase, they abound in French – particularly through the pair
‘garçons’ – ‘fillettes’ [‘boys’ – ‘little girls], in which the ‘-ette’ diminutive suffix is a clear illustra-
tion of the vulnerability associated with females.
Anti-sexist language
Gender specification
The strategy of gender specification is mostly represented in the French and Spanish texts –
respectively 266 and 354, against a total of 12 in English. This can be explained by the fact that
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Enora Lessinger
French and Spanish are grammatical gender languages, and it is therefore morphologically easier
to decline a given word both in its masculine and feminine forms.
A first form of gender specification is the avoidance of generic masculine in general, in words
such as ‘worker’ or ‘citizen.’ This phenomenon turned out not to be relevant in English apart
from a few words including ‘-man’ in their morphology. In French and Spanish, it represents
a fairly small proportion of all occurrences of gender-specification but is very present in the
earlier conferences. Arguably, the feminine forms of ‘worker’, for instance, (‘travailleuse,’ ‘traba-
jadora’) are bound to be less controversial and meet less social resistance than the feminine forms
of ‘president’ or ‘general secretary.’
Strikingly, the French translators of the 1980 conference explain in a note their alleged deci-
sion to use a generic feminine throughout the text for the translation of the words ‘representa-
tives’ and ‘participants’:
6. “* Faute de précisions à cet égard, on a utilisé, pour plus de commodité, dans tout le texte
français du rapport, le substantif féminin (représentante, participante) pour désigner les orateurs”
(1980b, 149).
[For lack of instructions on this matter, for greater ease, throughout the French text of the
report the feminine substantive (representative-female; participant-female) was used to refer to
the speakers.]
This note, which appears twice in the report, serves as a justification for the use of femi-
nine as the default gender in the translation of the English gender-neutral ‘representatives’ and
‘participants,’ the translators being presumably not in a position to determine the gender of the
referents. This use of generic feminine forms, also called visibility strategy, can be related to the
“total feminization” advocated by some feminists such as Cameron, who uses it systematically
in her books and sees it as “positive discrimination through positive language” (1985, 88). As
a translation strategy, the use of the generic feminine to translate gender-neutral words cor-
responds with what Luise Von Flotow calls ‘hijacking’, or a work of ‘correction’ through “the
translator’s deliberate feminizing of the target text” (1991, 79). However, in the present case
this translation choice seems to be an isolated phenomenon rather than a deliberate translation
strategy. Unlike what is announced in the note, the French text uses the form ‘participante’ as a
generic feminine only in the two passages that bear the note in question, and makes inconsist-
ent use of the feminine and masculine forms of the French for ‘representative’ throughout the
rest of the text.
Overall, the main manifestation of gender specification in the corpus lies in occupational
titles in French and Spanish. English has no instance of gender-specification for job titles: the
word ‘chairwoman,’ for example, is totally absent from the corpus. In the two Romance lan-
guages however, in spite of some inconsistencies, there does appear to be a diachronic evolution
of the translation of job titles in respect to gender. The 1995 conference appears to be a turning
point in Spanish, with the apparition of the feminised forms ‘profesora’ [teacher-female], ‘min-
istra’ [minister-female], ‘investigadora’ [investigator-female] and ‘jefa’ [chief-female]. However,
some generic masculine forms continue to co-exist with these until the end of the period under
study. The same goes for French, although there is no clear turning point in this language. Inter-
estingly, in the 2005 report, the masculine form ‘rapporteur’ is used in the generic masculine 12
times, and even once for a female referent, but the rather daring feminine form ‘rapporteure’
also features once. In the following two reports, though, the generic masculine has disappeared
and female referents are consistently referred to as ‘rapporteuse.’ This choice is also a bold one,
this time from a semantic point of view: the term ‘rapporteuse’ brings to mind another, informal
and pejorative meaning of ‘rapporteur’ – tell-tale. This tendency of feminine words to acquire
a derogatory connotation over time corresponds to Henley’s third type of linguistic sexism: the
382
semantic derogation of women. Francine Frank (1985) argues that the difficult acceptance of
feminine forms, making them seem unsuitable for new social titles, is linked to this phenom-
enon. However, the use of words this type of as ‘rapporteuse’ could contribute over time to
fighting this type of negative associations.
Gender-neutralization
The gender-neutralization strategy is, conversely, difficult to implement in languages with a
grammatical gender. In the corpus, gender-neutralization is a scant phenomenon in Spanish,
and even more so in French. It mainly appears through the use of abstract nouns – a strategy
also called gender abstraction – such as ‘administration’/‘administración’ [administration], or
‘présidence’/‘presidencia’ [presidency]. Towards the end of the 2010 report, for instance, the
gender-neutral ‘Chair’ is translated in Spanish as ‘el Presidente’ [the President-male], but the
French translation uses the abstract noun meaning ‘presidency’, ‘présidence’: ‘La présidence a
formulé des observations finales’ (67).
In the English texts, gender-neutralization is mainly relevant to occupational titles. For
instance, the term ‘chairperson’ first appears in the 1995 Beijing Conference, and co-exists with
‘chairman’ in later texts. However, its distribution in the corpus seems to endorse the suggestion
made by feminists such as Cameron (1992) that the term ‘chairperson’ is in practice used exclu-
sively for female referents. Throughout the 2005 report for instance, ‘chairperson’ systematically
refers to females and ‘chairman’ to males:
7. “[I]ntroductory statements were made by the . . . Chairperson of the Committee on
the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Chairman of the Commission on
Human Rights” (2005, 32).
The question does not arise in the French and Spanish translations, which use the femi-
nine form in the first instance (‘présidente,’ ‘presidenta’) and the masculine form in the second
(‘président,’ ‘presidente’).
Key gender-related words and expressions
Gender
The term ‘gender’ itself appears in 1985 but becomes widely used only in the 1995 Beijing
conference, which is likely to be connected with the development of a certain type of feminist
thought and theory in the early 1990s. Its adoption in English was met with a degree of resist-
ance, with some countries expressing the fear that differentiating between a natural sex and a
constructed gender might endanger the institution of marriage and implicitly condone homo-
sexuality and other sexual practices perceived as deviant (Adolphe 2012). Conversely, some
feminist participants feared that too vague a definition of the word might lead to a mistaken
assimilation of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ (ibid., 19). Sure enough, the definition that was settled on was
imprecise enough to explain the confusion perceptible in the subsequent translations. It was
worded as follows: “the word ‘gender’ as used in the Platform for Action was intended to be
interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage” (1995, 218).
In Spanish, the systematic translation of ‘gender’ with ‘género’ starts in the first 2000 report, but
the French texts betray a greater reluctance. At first, the French translators use ad hoc paraphrases,
with for example “rôles dévolus par la société aux hommes et aux femmes” (1995, 21) [roles
attributed to men and women by society] for ‘gender roles.’ In some cases, the word is even left out
of the translation altogether, with for instance “la division du travail” [labour division] (1995, 14)
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Enora Lessinger
for “the gender division of labour” (12). In the following French reports, however, ‘gender’ is
almost systematically translated with ‘sexe’ [sex], which bears witness to a confusion between sex
and gender. Similarly, while the expression ‘gender mainstreaming’ coined at the 1985 confer-
ence is translated as ‘perspectiva de género’ [gender perspective] in Spanish, the French translation
again reflects a perceived equivalence between sex and gender by using ‘perspective sexospéci-
fique’ [sex-specific perspective]. It must be noted, however, that the French translators’ inclination
to use terms derived from the word ‘sex’ also extends to the words ‘sexisme’ [sexism] and ‘sexiste’
[sexist], which appear a total of 59 times in French against six in English and eight in Spanish.
The French reports even use the neologism ‘antisexiste’ [antisexist] in their translation of ‘gender,’
a surprisingly bold choice given the otherwise conservative tendency of the French translation.
The translators’ reluctance to adopt the direct French translation ‘genre,’ which appears
only four times in the whole corpus (in 2005 and 2015), is most obvious in the translation of
the English definition of gender at the Beijing conference (see above). The French translators
chose to borrow the English word ‘gender,’ but only in the paragraph containing this definition,
thereby making the explanation obscure as well as pointless for French readers: “le terme ‘gen-
der’ [est] couramment employé dans son sens ordinaire, conformément à l’usage généralement
admis dans de nombreuses autres instances et conférences des Nations Unies” (1995, 239). On
top of being rather confusing for the reader, this translation strategy is bound to undermine the
alleged equality of status between the source and target languages.
Empowerment
Similarly, the term ‘empowerment’ starts being used at the Beijing conference and subsequently
becomes a key concept, but here again the French and Spanish translations take longer to
adjust to its innovatory aspect and to accept its centrality. Spanish uses paraphrases on a case by
case basis until 2005, when it starts using the straightforward translation ‘empoderamiento.’ The
French texts, on the other hand, keep alternating between a few options such as ‘autonomisa-
tion’ or the paraphrastic ‘renforcement du pouvoir d’action’ [reinforcement of the power of
action], without ever settling on a systematic translation.
Ms.
The use of the terms ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs,’ which specify the marital status of the referent and have no
masculine equivalent, corresponds to Henley’s second type of linguistic sexism: a narrow defini-
tion of women, here in terms of their relationship to men. The English texts give precedence to
the appellation ‘Ms.’ rather than ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ The term ‘Miss’ appears in the 1985 Conference
only, and both the French and Spanish translators use equivalent terms: ‘Mlle’ and ‘Srta.,’ short
for ‘mademoiselle’ and ‘señorita’ [miss]. Overall, the French and Spanish translations also follow a
similar pattern to English in later texts: even though there is no exact equivalent to ‘Ms’ in those
languages, the terms used – ‘madame,’ ‘señora’ – are usually regarded as the default option rather
than the indication of a marital status. As such, they are not analyzed here as sexist language.
Man
At the heart of the debate on inclusive writing is the ‘Male-As-Norm Principle,’ also known as
MAN (Friederike Braun 1997, 3), which Castro sums up as the fact that “if the sex of the refer-
ent is not known, the masculine will be chosen for the translation unless there are stereotypes
to the contrary” (2009, 13). As pointed out by Zoberman in his study of the translation of ‘man’
384
(‘homme’) in Pascal’s work, the definition of the word in the 1694 dictionary of the Académie
française is a clear illustration of this phenomenon: “An animal endowed with reason. In this
sense, it comprises the whole human species, and is used for both sexes” (2014, 235). Similarly,
Simon claims that “the apparent gender neutrality of English is constantly belied by the identi-
fication of the species (mankind) with the male of the species” (1996, 18). This implicit identi-
fication is often more explicit in translation, especially in languages with a grammatical gender.
In the present case, however, the use of ‘man’ as a generic noun is almost completely avoided
in all three languages. In English, derived words such as ‘mankind’, ‘manpower’ or ‘man-made’
feature only a handful of times in the conferences. The Spanish and French texts also use the
generic masculine ‘man’ (‘homme,’ ‘hombre’) very sparingly, but not always in the same places
as in the English text, which goes towards confirming the absence of a well-defined policy on
the subject. The French and Spanish equivalents of nouns such as ‘human beings’ or the abstract
noun ‘humanity’ are widely-used alternatives to generic masculine.
A noteworthy exception is the French expression ‘droits de l’homme’ [man’s rights]. Its
being a set phrase presumably makes it more difficult for the gender-inclusive alternative ‘droits
humains’ [human rights] to become accepted, but there is no sign of any shift taking place over
time: in spite of the growing social acceptability of ‘droits humains’, this phrase and close varia-
tions on it, such as ‘droits de la personne humaine’ [rights of the human person], only appear a
total of 34 times, against 390 ‘droits de l’homme.’ This insistence on using a blatantly androcentric
expression forms a stark contrast with the English texts, which exclusively use the gender-neutral
‘human rights’ or gender-specific alternatives such as ‘women’s rights,’ as well as with the Spanish
texts, in which ‘derechos del hombre’ [man’s rights] features only four times, and exclusively in
the first three texts. Given the norm-creating potential of the UN as an influential institution, it is
regrettable that this opportunity to further spread the gender-inclusive alternative was not seized.
Latest developments
With the overall growing visibility of gender-related issues and the systematization of CAT tools
within the United Nations, the translation of gender has already evolved since 2015 within the
organization and is likely to change even more in the coming years. Even though it was not in
use for most of the timeframe of this study, the terminology bank UN TermPortal gives a good
overview of the difficulties and latest evolutions linked to the translation of gender.
At the entry for ‘gender,’ under the heading ‘UNHQ [United Nations Headquarters] Human
rights (general) Gender issues’ we can read the following definition: “Refers to the attributes
and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women
and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men.”
The non-committal dimension of this definition, and in particular the vagueness of the term
‘attributes,’ brings to mind the definition adopted at the Beijing conference.
The remark that follows this definition denotes at first sight a firmer stance on the difference
between sex and gender than in the texts of the corpus: “These attributes, opportunities and
relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes. They are
context-specific and changeable.” The absence of reference to biology seems to imply that the
more feminist approach has prevailed. However, this remark is followed by another one further
down that shows that the blurring of the distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘women’ (Adolphe
2012, 4) is still topical: “there may be situations in which a proper translation of ‘gender’ would
be an equivalent of the English ‘women’ (e.g. femmes).”
Interestingly, the corresponding Spanish entry only gives ‘género,’ a straightforward transla-
tion of ‘gender.’ This unique option and the absence of any comments tends to underpin the
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Enora Lessinger
notion that the translation of ‘gender’ was not as controversial in this language as it was in the
other two.
By contrast, the corresponding French entry shows a clear ambivalence on the subject. Thir-
teen different translations are listed for ‘gender’ that have been used over time and in different
contexts by the UN:
genre
condition de la femme
condition féminine
problématique femmes-hommes
identité de genre
sexe culturel
sexe social
égalité des genres
problématique hommes-femmes
égalité des sexes
identité sexuelle
sexe
sexospécificités
The crossed-out translations, several of which are used in the corpus of this study, appear as
such on the website and are the ones that are described as ‘superseded.’ A note next to the first
one, ‘genre’ [gender], specifies that this translation must be used whenever possible. Nevertheless,
the definition provided under the translations shows that the equivalence between ‘genre’ and
‘gender’ is still not taken for granted: “Le terme anglais ‘gender’ ne renvoie pas normalement
aux catégories biologiques (homme et femme, mâle et femelle) mais plus souvent aux catégories
sociales ‘masculin’ et ‘féminin’. [. . .] Pour traduire ce terme, il existe donc plusieurs solutions,
en fonction du contexte, du point de vue, des connotations etc.”4 By defining the English word
‘gender’ rather than the French ‘genre’, the translators appear once again to be taking refuge
behind the English language. The reference to ‘several solutions’ shows a reluctance to adopt
‘genre’ as a systematic translation, while the mention of biological categories perpetuates the
traditional confusion between gender, women and biological sex. From this example we can
see that despite undeniable progress, the meaning of ‘gender’ is still not quite fixed within the
context of the UN, and that its translation into French continues to be problematic.
Conclusions
In total I identified 53, 96, and 198 occurrences of sexist language in the English, Spanish and
French texts respectively. This excludes the specific terms discussed in the previous section.
Overall there appears to be a real effort towards gender-neutralization, and even more so towards
the feminization of occupational titles and forms of address. However, the generic masculine in
job titles keeps appearing alongside gender-inclusive alternatives. This is consistent with the fact
that throughout the period under study, the use of sexist language does not decrease in the same
proportion as the use of gender-inclusive language increases, so that both co-exist in the texts.
Overall, the French translation is the most problematic one when it comes to the translation
of gender. However, determining whether this simply reflects a persistent social and institutional
resistance to gender-inclusive writing or also contributes to the problem of sexist language in
French is beyond the scope of this study.
In the case of sexist language, the divide between a natural gender language (English) and
grammatical gender languages (Spanish and French) appears to be less significant than that
386
between English and Spanish on the one hand and French on the other. However, the divide
between grammatical and natural gender is more perceptible in antisexist language. Accord-
ing to my analysis, there are only 123 occurrences of antisexist language in English, for 506
in Spanish and 413 in French. Unsurprisingly, English is the language that most resorts to
gender-neutralization in the corpus. The French and Spanish translations tend to use gender-
specification instead.
As for gender-related terms, the 1995 Beijing Conference seems to be the turning point
for the introduction of new, key concepts in relation to gender. However, Spanish and French
both appear to be lagging behind, often favouring paraphrase over straightforward translations.
This strategy reveals the translators’ interpretation of the concepts at hand, as seen in the French
translations’ absence of discrimination between sex and gender. It also shows the translators’
reluctance to make the necessary adjustments that would ensure that these new concepts enter
their language. The most striking difference between Spanish and French is that the Span-
ish translators, once they begin to adopt a direct translation, tend to use it systematically. The
French translators, however, tend to keep using different translations, even when they are not
using paraphrase.
There seems to be limited diachronic evolution in the use of sexist and/or anti-sexist lan-
guage, and the pattern of evolution of each language does not appear to be correlated to the
other two in any consistent way. Rather than a global, institution-wide policy on the use of
sexist and anti-sexist language, there seem to be mainly text- and language-bound strategies.
Further research on a more recent corpus could help to determine whether the recent boom of
CAT tools, such as eLUNa and the UN TermPortal in the UN, has resulted in a more coherent
strategy.
Further readings
Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Language, Gender, and Sexuality: Current Issues and New Directions. Applied
Linguistics, 26(4), 482–502.
This article introduces the changes in sociolinguistic research on gender and sexuality at the turn of the
century, and in particular the shift from a binary concept to a focus on diversity. It describes the ‘post-
modern turn’ and outlines the main differences between second- and third-wave feminism.
Castro, Olga. 2009. (Re-)examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave.
Translated by Mark Andrew. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 1, 1–17.
The aim of this article is to acquaint the reader with the relationships between the fields of translation
studies and gender studies, and to discuss new translation practices within third-wave feminism. The
article exists both in Spanish and English.
Zoberman, Pierre. 2014. “Homme” peut-il vouloir dire “Femme”? Gender and Translation in Seventeenth-
Century French Moral Literature. Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2), 231–252.
This article explores the translation of the word ‘homme’ in texts by 17th-century French philosophers,
and the presuppositions and consequences of the translators’ choice. It denounces the “fallacy of inclu-
siveness” as hiding the original text’s violence against women rather than mending it.
Notes
1 The Académie française eventually decided to condone the feminization of a number of job titles such
as ‘docteure’ [female doctor] or ‘écrivaine’ [female writer] instead of insisting on the generic masculine.
This long-awaited decision was made public on 28 February 2019.
2 Article 111 of the founding text of the UN Charter specifies that “The present Charter, of which the
Chinese, French, Russian, English, and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall remain deposited in the
archives of the Government of the United States of America.” This statement, or close variations on it,
is a staple of UN conventions. Available at: www.un.org/sg/en/multilingualism/index.shtml
387
Enora Lessinger
3 See section on the translation of the word ‘gender,’ in “Key gender-related words and expressions.”
4 “The English word ‘gender’ does not normally refer to biological categories (man and woman) but
rather, in general, to social categories: ‘male,’ ‘female’ [. . .]. It follows that there are several options for the
translation of this word, depending on the context, point of view, connotations etc.” (my translation).
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29
Identifying and countering sexist
labels in Arabic translation
The politics of language
in cleaning products
Sama Dawood
Introduction
The interaction between feminism, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and translation studies
has given rise to new lines of thought in the two disciplines: feminist critical discourse analysis
(FCDA) and feminist translation (FT). These two young fields share the same objective of mak-
ing women seen and heard in and through language, but the number of studies that have tried to
open a dialogue between them is still limited, especially beyond the Anglo-American purview.
In Arab society, for example, where Arab women may be making advances when it comes
to rights and equality, certain aspects of the culture rarely reflect any kind of change in the lin-
guistic stereotyping of women. In many social environments, women are still labelled as either
attractive objects or housewives. In this chapter, we study a very pragmatic form of transla-
tion where this perspective becomes clearly visible – the translation from English to Arabic of
household cleaners. These instructions gender the cleaning products, implying that cleaning and
laundry are strictly the domains of women, while safety precautions are the domain of men.
This chapter lays out an interdisciplinary framework between feminist critical discourse analysis
and feminist translation to analyze the sexist Arabic translations of English labels on household
cleaning products available in the Arab market; it challenges the feminization strategies used in the
translations and suggests other translation strategies that would liberate women from this cliché. The
proposed combination between feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist translation makes
the discourse analysis more dynamic and political, and provides feminist translation with a frame-
work of analysis that is a point of departure for further theory-based practices. The chapter postu-
lates that changing the way language works is a very effective means of leading to a different reality.
Critical issues
The convergence between language, thought and women

The relation between language and thought has long attracted the attention of linguists.
The controversy over whether thought determines language or vice versa has resulted in the
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Sexist labels in Arabic translation
emergence of two opposing hypotheses. The first one is termed linguistic determinism: its pro-
ponents believe that language determines the way we speak and act in the real world. Edward
Sapir describes users of a language as victims “at the mercy” of their language as it forces them
to see social reality in a certain way (1929, 209). This premise is still favoured by some modern
linguists such as Lera Boroditsky (2001, 1) who thinks that speakers of a language that uses dif-
ferent linguistic forms for males and females take for granted the existence of such a distinction
in the real world. In the same vein, Efrén Pérez and Margit Tavits (2016, 1) hold the view that
languages determine the way societies perceive gender equality. By contrast, other linguists
believe in so-called linguistic relativism. Those in favour of this concept say that language affects,
rather than determines, the way we see the world. Wouter Beek (2004, 5), for instance, thinks
that language influences only some limited aspects of our way of thinking.
A relevant dichotomy in the relationship between language and women is highlighted by
Luise von Flotow. She distinguishes between two feminist schools: the reformist and the radical.
The reformist school considers language a manifestation of society and it is, therefore, corrigible.
The radical approach, on the other hand, sees language as the reason behind gender discrimina-
tion in the real world, and argues that, therefore, changing sexist language is a necessity that will
improve the social status of women (2016, 8).
This polarization, with the determinist-radical approach on one end and the relativist-
reformist approach on the other end, has a strong theoretical basis, but may not be of immedi-
ate practical help to feminist translators. Hiroko Furukawa (2017) points out that although the
determinist-radical approach is espoused by certain feminist translators, it may backfire in socie-
ties that are not yet ready for it (81). Therefore, these binary viewpoints need to be conceived
not as absolute positions, but rather as two ends of a continuum along which feminist translators
move according to the target context and the expected response of the target audience.
Critical discourse analysis and translation studies: common goals

The relation between critical discourse analysis and translation studies can be traced back to
1985 when the feminist linguist Deborah Cameron published her Feminism and Linguistic Theory
in which she argued that language could be used as a tool either to oppress women or to liber-
ate them (227). A few years later, the feminist translator Barbara Godard noted that the transla-
tions of feminist theorists needed to be analyzed within the framework of the theories of both
discourse and translation (1989, 43). It is this belief in the power of words that has motivated
scholars and practitioners of critical discourse analysis and translation studies to criticize and
resist sexist use of language in order to achieve social change. This has led to the emergence of
two parallel feminist approaches in the two disciplines, namely feminist critical discourse analysis
(FCDA) and feminist translation (FT), and they meet at more than one point in their pursuit
to make women visible in and through language. Michelle Lazar, who discusses feminist critical
discourse analysis in her 2005 article “Feminist critical discourse analysis: Articulating a femi-
nist discourse praxis” underlines five principles that constitute the basis of this approach to text
analysis. These same principles can be described as the foundation by which feminist translators
justify the use of feminizing strategies in translation.
The first principle that Lazar suggests is feminist analytical activism, where feminist critical
discourse analysis is concerned with exploring the types of gendered discourse that sustain current
social injustice towards women. It is part of academic feminists’ duty to raise public awareness of
such biased practices (Lazar, 146). This same objective is what feminist translators try to achieve,
though it is not always declared. Further, Emek Ergun (2010, 315) holds the view that feminist
translators sometimes leave sexist discourse in place in order to raise the awareness of the readers.
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Sama Dawood
The second principle of feminist critical discourse analysis is that gender discourse is an ideo-
logical structure that establishes and reinforces social discrimination between men and women.
Lazar maintains that the role of feminist critical discourse analysis is to criticize forms of gender
asymmetry where men are represented as the dominant group while women are relegated to
the subordinate one (147). It could be argued that feminist translation has emerged as a response
to this asymmetry, and feminist translated works provide a criticism of the hidden ideology that
favours men as the controlling group. Godard asserts that the power of feminist translation lies
in its ability to change “a form of subordination into an affirmation” in order to re-structure
society (1989, 46).
The third concern elaborated by Lazar is the need to analyze our daily written and spoken
discourse that implicitly promotes unequal power relations between men and women. Such
relations can take the form of using biased language or following conversation etiquette that
enhances the dominance of men over women (Lazar, 149). Feminist critical discourse analysis
can help feminist translators trace biased language contextually without making overgener-
alizations. That is, as Olga Castro (2009, 120) mentions, the context of discourse can make it
clear whether or not a given word is being used deliberately to discriminate between men and
women.
The fourth tenet of feminist critical discourse analysis is its focus not only on analyzing daily
gendered language, but also on finding a way to counter and change that language in an attempt
to transform the unjust social order it represents (Lazar, 150). This is exactly the aim of feminist
translators and the strategies they adopt are intended to offer alternatives to patriarchal language
(Ergun 2010, 310).
The last principle of feminist critical discourse analysis is that of critical reflexivity on the
question of how current social practices shape the future ones. Lazar asserts that it is the respon-
sibility of the researchers in this sub-discipline to get engaged in social and academic endeavours
to change the status quo (152). The same idea has been expressed earlier by Luise von Flotow
(1991, 81) who states that feminist translation has “revolutionary potential” and a continuing
impact on changing traditional stereotypes.
To sum up, feminist translators need feminist critical discourse analysis to analyze and coun-
ter the hidden ideologies of the biased texts they translate, and feminist critical discourse analysis
needs feminist translators to create the social change it seeks to achieve. On the one hand, femi-
nist translation can benefit from the solid theoretical framework of analysis provided by feminist
critical discourse analysis, and on the other hand, it can help expand the impact beyond merely
criticizing sexist use of language. It can take practical steps to change language both intra- and
inter-lingually.
This study attempts to find answers to the following research questions: How far can feminist
critical discourse analysis and feminist translation complement each other to counter patriar-
chal language use? Is feminizing a text always the best translation strategy to deal with a sexist
discourse? What are the translation strategies that can be listed under feminist translation other
than feminizing a text?
The study is concerned with the connections between feminist critical discourse analysis and
feminist translation as evident in the English and Arabic instruction labels present on a number
of household cleaners available in the Egyptian market.
Feminist translation in Arabic context: visible voices

Arab researchers have tried to examine the applicability of feminist translation from and into
Arabic, but the number of studies, as Hala Kamal (2016, 72) points out, is still limited. A review
392
of some relevant contributions in this regard mainly in the context of translation between Ara-
bic and English follows.
To begin with, Arabic has been criticized by Arab scholars for being a sexist language. Has-
san Abd El-Jawad (1989) believes that gender inequality in the Arab world has greatly affected
Arabs’ linguistic behaviour, turning Arabic into a biased language. In Women, Gender, and Lan-
guage in Morocco, Fatima Sadiqi (2003) argues that the everyday linguistic behaviour of the
Moroccan people reflects the subordinate role assigned to women there. In regard to the Quran
and its influence on perceptions of women in Arabic, Rim Hassen has examined four English
translations of the Quran by four women (2011), and detected the reproduction of patriarchal
language in their work. She discusses whether or not female translators prefer a feminist transla-
tion approach in their work on the Quran. The results of Hassen’s study show a huge discrep-
ancy between the language used by female translators living in Muslim countries compared
to the language of those living in the United States. Miramar Damanhouri (2013) explores
the relationship between women and language in Saudi society. She specifically criticizes the
generic use of masculine forms as this marginalizes women theoretically and practically. She
recommends equal and explicit reference to men and women in all kinds of documents (145).
Heba Nayef and Mohamed El Nashar (2014) reveal how Arabic humour is manipulated on the
Internet to sustain the subordinate status of women in Egyptian society. They show that the
spread of sexist jokes through the Internet can further reinforce the patriarchal nature of Arab
society (83). Abdunasir Sideeg (2015) analyses the English translation of selected verses of the
Quran using critical discourse analysis where he is mainly concerned with the way pronouns
are used in various contexts to refer to Allah. In her article “Translating feminist literary theory
into Arabic,” Hala Kamal (2016) reflects on her experience of translating a number of English
academic articles of feminist literary criticism into Arabic, discussing the issues that came up
during the process; these include the use of feminization strategies. Kamal stresses the active
role that feminist translators can play to raise awareness and empower women (72). Raidah Al-
Ramadan in her PhD thesis (2017) analyses the language used in ten Arabic novels and their
English translations. The findings of her study show that the translators adopt the same linguistic
pattern that the source texts use to portray Arab women as victims.
It may be true that, as Angeles Vicente (2009, 25) points out, the current changes in the
social status of women in Arab countries have positively affected the linguistic aspect, but there
is still need for much more to be done, and feminist translators are key players who can make a
positive difference.
Translation: a tool to ‘clean up’ language and society

This section analyses some examples from a typical Arabic gendered discourse to illustrate how
the principles underlying feminist critical discourse analysis can help feminist translators decide
on a feminist translation strategy. But first some key issues pertinent to the grammatical forms
used in Arabic and English languages to express gender need to be highlighted.
When it comes to gender structure, three types of languages can be identified: grammatical
gender languages, natural gender languages, and genderless languages. The first type refers to
those languages where there are masculine and feminine forms for nouns; Arabic is one such
language. Other parts of speech (e.g. verbs and adjectives) have gender markers (i.e. prefixes
or suffixes) that agree with the gender of the noun (such as ‫‘ قال‬he said’ vs. ‫‘ قالت‬she said’ and
‫‘ طالب ذكي‬intelligent male student’ vs. ‫‘ طالبة ذكية‬intelligent female students’). In natural gender
languages, like English, males and females are referred to with the same nouns (such as friend,
or lover) and gender is expressed by the use of pronouns. Genderless languages use the same
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noun and pronoun forms to refer to both sexes (Stahlberg et al. 2007, 164–166). This chapter is
concerned with the first two kinds of languages–Arabic and English.
Arabic and English differ in the use of verbs to refer to gender. In Arabic, verbs agree with
the gender of the subject whether masculine or feminine. This agreement is expressed by pre-
fixes and/or suffixes that are used with the root (masculine) verb (as shown in the preceding
example ‫ قال‬vs. ‫)قالت‬. In English, by contrast, no verb conjugation is required to refer to different
sexes. The same verb form is used to refer to both males and females. However, both Arabic and
English, as Muayad Shamsan and Abdul Majeed Attayib (2015, 148) point out, use the masculine
form generically to refer to all humankind, and they have passive forms that are gender-neutral.
Arabic passive voice is conjugated by changing the pattern of vowels (such as ‫‘ قال‬he said’, ‫قالت‬
‘she said’ vs. ‫‘ يُقال‬it is said’, whereas the passive voice in English is formed by a combination of
an auxiliary and the past participle form of the verb.
The set of data selected to show the interrelationship between feminist critical discourse
analysis and feminist translation consists of English and Arabic instruction labels on a number
of household cleaners available in the Egyptian market. Instructions on detergent labels are usu-
ally written in English and Arabic using the imperative form of the verb. But while this verb
mood is used in English to address men and women alike, in Arabic it has two different forms
depending on the gender addressed. User instructions written on most of the household clean-
ing products, including Clorox, Tide, Downy, Vanish, Mr. Muscle and Pledge, are written in English
using the imperative, genderless verb mood, but are translated into Arabic using the feminine
form of the verb. Cautions and warnings about using some of these same products, however, are
translated into Arabic using either the masculine or the passive form! That is, when instructions
about how to use the cleaning products are expressly addressed to women, the assumption is that
women are cleaners. When the cautions and warnings are addressed to men, it implies that men
are the ‘saviours’. This biased language is thought to be the result of ingrained stereotypes about
the role of men and women in Arab society. Following are some examples to further illustrate
the argument presented.
English text:
Apply Clorox Colors directly to stain, rub gently, let stand for five minutes and wash normally.
Arabic translation:
.‫ دقائق ثم اغسليه‬5 ‫ اتركيه لمدة‬.‫ ادعكي برفق‬.‫ضعي كلوركس لأللوان مباشرة على البقع‬
da‘ ī Clorox lil alwān mubāšaratan ‘alā al-bu‘qa, id‘akī bi-rifq, ȗ trukīh li-muddat 5 daqāʾiq tumma
iʾḡsilīh. la tatrukī al-muntaj yajif ‘alā al-aqmiša.
The English instructions on Clorox stain remover include four verbs: apply, rub, let, and wash.
They are all in the imperative form and address either men or women. The Arabic translation,
however, addresses only women by attaching the feminine marker (‫ )ي‬to the verb which is used
for the second person feminine singular. Such translation conforms to the social order that is
dominant in most Arab countries where women are the ones responsible for laundry.
A similar translation strategy can be found on the instruction label of Tide detergent.
English text:
Sort. Dose. Load.
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Arabic translation:
.‫ ضعي المالبس في الغسالة‬.‫ ضعي المسحوق في الغسالة‬.‫صنفي المالبس‬
sanifī al-malābis. da‘ ī al-mashuq fī al-ḡassāla. da‘ ī al-malābis fī al-ḡassāla
˘
The English label uses a very brief format with only three genderless verbs: sort, dose, and load.
The drawings on the product pack clarify what is meant. By contrast, the Arabic translation is
detailed and uses three imperative verbs with the suffix (‫ )ي‬to address females only. The transla-
tion instructs women to sort out the dirty clothes, put the detergent in the washing machine,
and then put the clothes in the washing machine. One may wonder whether such redundant
translation is due to the verbose nature of Arabic language, or to the fact that women are widely
stereotyped in the Arab world as inherently less intelligent and careful than men, and, therefore,
they need detailed directions.
The following two examples further reinforce the image of women in Arab society as a weak
and careless group.
English text:
Add Downy to the final rinsing water.
Arabic translation:
.‫أضيفي داوني لماء الشطف‬
aʾdīfī Downy li māʾ āš-šatf
English text:
Do not use this product on garments labelled as flame resistant.
Arabic translation:
.‫ال يُستخدم هذا المنتج على المالبس المصنفة كمقاومة لالشتعال‬
lā yustakdam hāda al-muntaj ‘alā al-malābis al-musannafa ka-muqāwima lil išti‘āl
¯ ¯ ˙
These two sentences appear on the label of Downy fabric softener. The first one tells the user
when the softener should be added, while the other is a caution at the bottom of the bottle. In
both places the genderless imperative form is used in English. In the Arabic translation, on the
other hand, two different verb forms are used. Add is translated into the feminine verb form
(‫ )أضيفي‬in the instructions part, whereas use is translated into the genderless passive form (‫)يُستخدم‬
in the warning. Such translation strategy promotes the image that women are inattentive and
absent-minded, while men are cautious and alert to potential harms. Arab females are expected
to clean, whereas males are the ones who direct and guide them.
The same goes for the following translation of the label on Vanish stain remover.
English text:
Pour Vanish with detergent into washing machine.
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Arabic translation:
.‫اسكبي فانيش مع مسحوق الغسيل الذي تستخدمينه في العادة في الغسيل‬
uʾskubī Vanish ma‘a mashuq al-ḡasīl alladī tastakdminahu fī al-‘āda fī al-ḡasīl
˘ ¯ ¯
English text:
In case of contact with eyes, rinse immediately with plenty of water and seek medical advice.
Arabic translation:
.‫في حالة مالمسته للعين يجب غسل العين فورا ً بالكثير من الماء وطلب المساعدة الطبية‬
fī hal mulāmasathu lil ‘ain, yajib ḡasl al-‘ain fauran bi-al-kat īr min al-ma‘a wa talab al-musā‘da
˙ ¯ ˙
al-tibbïīya
˙
The verb pour in the instruction part is translated into the Arabic verb (‫ )اسكبي‬with the femi-
nine marker. Rinse and seek in the caution, on the other hand, are translated neutrally using the
modal verb (‫ يجب‬literally means ‘must’) and the genderless infinitive forms of the verb (‫ غسل‬and
‫ طلب‬literally means ‘washing’ and ‘seeking’). Adopting two different translation strategies here
emphasizes the ideology of what women should be like in Arab society. Another point that
needs to be raised here is that the translator in the instruction part added a phrase that is not
there in the English text, namely, ‫( الذي تستخدمينه في العادة في الغسيل‬which literally means the deter-
gent that you usually use in washing clothes). This addition implies that women in Arab society
are expected to do the laundry, and rules out the possibility of men being responsible for it.
A more interesting example is found next where the feminine-marked verb is used for
instructions, while the male-marked verb is used for warnings.
English text:
Place a capsule to dispenser drawer and close immediately.
Arabic translation:
.‫ضعي كبسولة داخل درج الموزع واغلقيه على الفور‬
da‘ ī kabsȗ la dākil durj al-muwazzi‘ wa iḡliqīh ‘alla al-faur
¯
English text:
If in eyes: Rinse with water for several minutes. Remove contact lenses, if present.
Arabic translation:
.‫ إغسلهما بالماء لعدة دقائق وانزع العدسات الالصقة إن كنت تضعها‬،‫إذا دخل المنتج في العينين‬
idā dakal al-muntaj fī al-‘ainain iḡslhumā bi-al-ma‘a li-‘ iddat daqāʾiq wa inzi‘ al-‘adasat al-lāsiqa
¯ ¯ ˙
in kunta tada‘hā
This translation appears on the label of Finish dishwashing capsules. The translator followed
two different translation techniques: feminizing the instructions and masculinizing the warning.
396
The verbs place and close in the instructions are translated into (‫ ضعي‬and ‫ )اغلقي‬in Arabic with
the feminine marker (‫)ي‬, whereas the rinse and remove in the warning are translated into the root
verbs (‫ إغسل‬and ‫ )انزع‬which address males. It is worth mentioning here that the Arabic transla-
tion of removing contact lenses is directed to men although lenses are worn by both sexes.
Laundry and dish washing products are not the only place where sexist translation can be
found. Here is an example from the label on Mr. Muscle toilet cleaner. Again, the translation
reflects the society’s bias.
English text:
Lift toilet seat. Simply direct Mr. Muscle Liquid under the rim and squeeze evenly around
the bowl.
Arabic translation:
.‫ وجهي مستر ماسلز تحت الحافة واضغطي بانتظام حول التواليت‬،‫ارفعي غطاء التواليت ببساطة‬
irfa‘ ī ḡita al-tuwālēt bi-basāta wajhī Mr. Muscles taht al-hāffa wa id ḡatī bi-intizām hawl al-tuwālēt
˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
The three verbs lift, direct, and squeeze are all translated into gender-marked Arabic verbs with
the suffix (‫ )ي‬to address only women.
The same translation strategy is followed by the translator of the instructions label on Pledge
marble and ceramic cleaner in the following example.
English text:
Pour two cupfuls of Pledge in half a bucket of water. Apply using a cloth or a sponge.
Arabic translation:
.‫ إستعملي قطعة قماش أو إسفنجة‬.‫أضيفي مقدار غطائين من بليدج في نصف دلو من المياه‬
aʾdīfī miqdār ḡitaʾain min Pledge fī nisf dalw min al-myāh. ʾista‘milī qit‘at qimāš au isfanja.
˙
The feminine marker is again attached to the Arabic verbs (‫ أضيفي‬and ‫ )استعملي‬as equivalents
to the English ones pour and apply.
Now, referring to the first principle of feminist critical discourse analysis, which is ana-
lytical activism, the Arabic translation could be classified as a biased discourse that represents a
deformed social order where women are viewed as a group whose main task is to take care of/
clean for the privileged group (i.e. men). The role of feminist translation, therefore, is to look
for a translation strategy that can re-arrange the relationship between the two groups to mirror
a just social reality. In other words, if the task of feminist critical discourse analysis is to critique
gendered discourse (Lazar 2005, 146), it is the task of feminist translation to un-gender such
discourse through proper translation strategies.
Ideology is at the core of critical discourse analysis and, of course, its feminist branch. It
evaluates gendered discourse from a feminist perspective as a representation of an ideology that
classifies men and women according to their physical qualities and assigns them certain types of
work (Lazar 2005, 146). Translating English genderless imperative verbs into gendered Arabic
ones promotes the ideology of having dominant and subordinate classes in the Arab world rep-
resented by men and women. Avoiding the use of the gender-neutral form (i.e. passive voice) or
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even masculine verbs (i.e. the passive form) in Arabic when translating instructions on cleaning
products meets the gendered expectations of Arab men that cleaning is the duty of women only.
The selection of lexical items and sentence structure is among the fundamental levels of
analysis in feminist critical discourse analysis. Language is essential to maintain and also to
change social order (Lazar, 150). The sexist language used in Arabic translations reflects the type
of power relationships among members of most Arab families. The linguistic representation in
Arabic of ‘cleaning’ as a social practice done only by women fosters long-held stereotypes about
Arab women as submissive housewives.
Feminizing the translation of the instructions on household cleaners explicitly shows that
these products are tailored to women only, and strengthens an outdated labor division: women
are responsible for taking care of the house, while men are the breadwinners. Therefore, using
the passive voice in Arabic would be a more desirable translation strategy here as it is gender-
free. Masculinizing the translation by using the masculine form of the imperative verb generi-
cally could also be considered since it is quite common and mainstreamed in Arabic, though it
implies marginalizing women.
Of course, these two de-feminizing translation techniques alone will not erase the outdated
gendered stereotypes that are engraved in Arab society, but they may help inform men that they
are expected as much as women to play domestic roles.
Conclusion and future direction

This chapter has discussed the interrelationship between feminist thought and recent trends in
critical discourse analysis and translation studies. It has argued that feminist critical discourse
analysis and feminist translation have much in common and can benefit from each other.
Through criticizing and changing gendered discourse, an integrated approach has the power
to reshape perceptions and attitudes and change backward, fixed views, thus helping to create a
women-friendly social environment by rejecting the use of biased language. Analyzing biased
discourse within the framework of feminist critical discourse analysis helps feminist translators
decide on the most adequate feminist translation strategy. As has been shown in the examples
discussed, the feminization of detergent label instructions through translation unfortunately
contributes to reinforcing gendered discrimination. The study argues that feminist translation
does not necessarily mean feminizing the original text; in some grammatical gender languages,
such as Arabic, neutralizing or masculinizing can also be effective translation strategies that can
enhance women’s status in society.
This approach has also shown that the Arabic language, and perhaps all other languages, can-
not be described wholly as a sexist language. Arabic has both gender-marked and unmarked
grammatical forms, and Arabic speakers themselves prefer using one over the other. This is quite
evident in the language used on detergent labels. Therefore, and in this case, de-feminization
(i.e. using the passive voice or the generic masculine form) can be seen as an effective transla-
tion strategy that can help erase gendered stereotypes in Arab society. It can serve to establish
new social expectations that challenge the outdated division of household labor. Thus, the role
played by detergents can reach well beyond cleaning surfaces and clothes to also ‘clean’ minds
of sexist thoughts.
Strategies of feminist translation differ across languages and across contexts for any given
language. Feminist translation therefore, needs to expand to include feminizing, masculinizing,
and neutralizing. The underlying principle that is common to these approaches is that language
should be giving women their own voice in order to break down stereotypes and move the river
off its traditional course.
398
This research is a contribution to existing research that investigates the relationship between
language, women and translation in the context of English to Arabic translation. This is still an
under-researched area; however, with growing academic interest to explore this field, and with
more Arab universities offering gender studies courses to encourage relevant dissertations and
research, the intersection between the three elements is expected to yield new, innovative lines
of thought challenging the subordinate status of women in Arab countries.
There are high future possibilities for interdisciplinary research and projects that will allow
feminist translation to play a more effective role in promoting radical social change towards
gender equality. The practices of feminist translation should be expanded and applied to other
non-literary texts. The language of media is a rich area in this regard especially since it nowadays
affects a larger audience than literary texts do. Therefore, interdisciplinary academic projects in
collaboration with industry and social institutions are necessary and recommended to limit the
use of patriarchal language and drop deeply rooted portrayals of gender in different contexts,
thus painting a picture of a new social order.
Further reading
Bassiouney, Reem. 2009. Arabic Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
The author tackles key gender-related aspects in the linguistic behaviour of Arabs, including diglossia,
code switching, and use of biased language. The author resorts to various sociolinguistics theories to
analyze these phenomena. The book is a much-needed source for researchers who would like to gain
deeper insights into the societal implications of Arabic usage.
Castro, Olga and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, vol.
20. New York: Routledge.
The authors challenge the traditional, narrow definition of feminism by linking it to various other disci-
plines and cultures. With its special focus on feminist politics, this volume is a rich source for researchers
in translation studies.
Ringrow, Helen. 2016. The Language of Cosmetics Advertising. New York: Springer.
To date, this is the only book that extensively applies feminist critical discourse analysis in a cross-
cultural context. The author argues that the main principles of this sub-discipline could be effectively
used to analyze the way women are discursively represented in advertisements and media. The book
is useful for researchers who are interested to know more about the applications of feminist critical
discourse analysis.
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von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women. New York and London: Routledge, 76–89.
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guistic Analysis of Gender Stereotyping in Egyptian Sexist Internet Jokes. International Journal, 2(4), 69–84.
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Arab women’s feminist activism
in volunteer subtitled social media
Nihad Mansour
Introduction
Academic work on feminism and audiovisual translation (AVT) dates from the early years of
the 21st century (Flotow and Josephy-Hernandez 2018), and progress in this field has been
slow in contrast to the proliferation of feminist and gender-aware ideas in media and com-
munication studies since the 1970s (Carter 2012; cited in von Flotow and Josephy-Hernandez
2018, 296). In their recent overview of the situation, Luise von Flotow and Daniel Josephy-
Hernandez recommend several avenues for further development in the field, and state that
“translation beyond institutional control could provide a foil for the more official versions of
gender in AVT” (307). In other words, more research into the field of non-professional/volun-
teer translators – who escape institutional control – might render more insights into the field
of feminism and AVT. While translation and AVT have been shown to play a role in emerging
activist movements, the impact of translation, and of AVT in particular, as a tool of group soli-
darity remains under-explored in the Arab context. A recently published collection of essays,
Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (Baker 2016) engages with trans-
lation and how it shapes the space of protest from the concrete experiences of activists during
the Egyptian Revolution 2011, and while some of the contributors refer to subtitling in their
accounts of translation forging global networks of solidarity and building blocks of collabora-
tive protest movements, most do not address subtitling practices or discursive intervention in
the language of subtitling. Leil-Zahra Mortada’s contribution does focus on the interactions
between subtitlers and activist film-makers in the collective media project “Words of Women
from the Egyptian Revolution” which was conceived as a space of women’s empowerment in
which Arab women narrators voice their protest against the marginalization and the submis-
sive status of women in the Arab world. But questions about feminist subtitling strategies that
volunteer subtitlers might use in shaping an emerging movement of women’s activism in the
Arab world are not addressed.
The present chapter thus introduces a new aspect in regard to feminism and subtitling in
the Arab world. It contributes to a broader understanding of feminist subtitling practices as
rendered by non-professional/volunteer1 translators for new emerging modes of Arab women’s
activism. Feminist aspects of translation have not had much exposure in the Arab world and so
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this examination of the English subtitles produced for video clips of Arab feminism on social
network spaces may improve matters.
It is conceivable that the nature of audiovisual translation puts more constraints on feminist
strategies such as those identified by Flotow (1991, 74–84), namely, supplementing, footnoting,
prefacing and hijacking. Nevertheless, analyses of language in subtitling can reveal strategies such
as linguistic ‘intensification’ and meaningful interplay between verbal and non-verbal content in
certain instances where the feminist perspective is intensely constructed and projected. The dis-
cussion towards the end of the chapter addresses questions such as: do non-professional subtitlers
adopt a feminist approach in their linguistic renderings in order to intensify the content? And
how has language that is manipulated by translators affected an emerging movement of women’s
activism by making language ‘speak for women’?
Feminism in the Arab world: the case of Egypt

Many scholars have contributed to an understanding of the women’s movement in Egypt (Amal
Sobki 1986; Beth Baron 1994; Nadia Abdel-Wahab 1995; Nadje Al-Ali 2000; Hoda Elsadda and
Emad Abu-Ghazi 2001; Hala Kamal 2016). However, a brief overview of the history of women’s
movements in Egypt is pertinent here.
Women’s struggle for their rights culminated in the late 19th century when Qassim Amin
published his book tāhrir all Mār’h (1899) [The Liberation of Women] calling for women’s
rights and equality with Western women, based on turn of the century pioneering feminist
voices heard in the press and among the intellectual circles of the Egyptian national movement.
The first women’s demonstration took place in 1919 against the British occupation of Egypt.
However, the central point in women’s issues at that time, as Hoda Elsadda (2011) argues, was
to build an “imagined national community” and women’s rights were part of the political and
ideological struggles against colonization. During the 20th century, women’s issues remained in
the frontline of the nation’s agenda of development especially after liberation from colonization.
Since then, Elsadda (2011) explains, women have achieved considerable gains on the political
and economic levels, but remained subservient to male dominance in the private spheres, a situ-
ation which seems to be continuing in the 21st century.
In her discussion of the Egyptian feminist movement, Hala Kamal (2016) outlines four waves
of women’s movements in Egypt; the first wave, from the late 19th century to the early 1950s,
addressed women’s right to education and representation; the second wave, from the 1950s into
the 1970s, focused on constitutional and legal rights leading towards sociocultural change; the
third wave, from the 1980s to 2011, sought to enhance women’s conditions of life in society and
activism in the context of civil society. During this recent period, various women’s initiatives
emerged: women’s committees in political parties, independent feminist projects, the establish-
ment of independent focus groups of women activists (among them Nazra For Feminist Studies
Center), and a considerable number of diverse feminist groups and NGOs calling for women’s
rights and focused on issues of women’s sexual rights. They targeted the legal system, cultural
representation, and traditional practices such as honour-killing, female genital mutilation, vir-
ginity tests, and under-age marriage, and paid attention to domestic violence and sexual harass-
ment. The fourth wave, from 2011 onward, addresses issues such as violence and harassment
related to women’s bodies and sexuality. For the purposes of this chapter the third and fourth
waves of women’s activism in the context of civil society are more pertinent.
Rana Magdy (2017) argues that women in Egypt have long used informal activist networks
to make their voices heard: examples include Huda Sha‘rawi’s Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923,
Zaynab al-Ghazali’s Muslim Women’s Society in 1936, and Doria Shafik’s Daughter of the Nile
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Union (Bint al-Nil) in 1948. However, the end of the last century marked a clear shift towards
women’s rights voiced by a group of Egyptian non-governmental and independent entities
influenced by global interests in women’s rights, in an attempt to develop more influential
modes of operation than the outmoded ones of long-established women’s organizations. These
organizations developed international reputations, and include the Alliance of Arab Woman
AAW (1987), the New Woman Research Center NWRC (1984), the Center of Egyptian
Woman’s Legal Assistance CEWLA (1995), and the Women and Memory Forum WMF (1997).
To align with the progressive movement of the civil society organizations which championed
women’s rights, the National Council for Women (NCW) in Egypt was established in 2000
under the auspices of the First Lady at that time, the first state organism to support women’s
rights. However, this organism was criticized as being part of the privileged ruling regime, and
therefore considered not to represent free women’s voices. Gradually, independent women’s
societies and organizations replaced state-run women’s organizations. One factor which led
to an increase in independent societies was the state’s attempt to limit women’s political space
(Al-Ali 2000).
With women’s active participation in the ‘Arab Spring,’ women’s roles in their communities
became more visible, and more non-governmental organizations and a new generation of social
media initiatives emerged. United in their endeavours, a good deal of networking took place
amongst feminist communities. A good example is the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) which
was established in Egypt in 2011 (reviving the legacy of the Egyptian Feminist Union founded
in 1923) with the help of the Alliance for Arab Women (AAW) to bring together many differ-
ent NGOs and enable women to practice their human rights and take part in societal responsi-
bilities (www.efuegypt.org).
Arab feminism and digital media

Worldwide, feminism has been accelerated and promoted through media and amplified through
the language of women activists. According to Sherry Simon, in feminist work over the last 20
to 30 years, “there has emerged a clear sense of language as a site of contested meanings, as an
arena in which subjects test and prove themselves” (1996, 7). Currently, in Egypt, a new genera-
tion of individual and collective groups of Internet activists are using language in their single-
issue campaigns and initiatives to project more revolt and promote change. They are adding to
the informative language and professional subtitling of news and activities on women’s issues
propagated by institutional websites such as UN Women, and despite the fact that their abili-
ties to promote change have been questioned by long-established women’s organizations, their
struggles are receiving extensive responses and interaction on social networks. Furthermore, the
subtitles created in many different languages by volunteer translators for audiovisual material
that is made by and about Arab women’s activism is making contact with global activism net-
works. The new virtual women’s movement championed by grass-roots feminist activism now
represents Egyptian women at the international level, mainstreaming change and connecting
with global feminism through subtitled videos on social network sites such as those uploaded by
The New Woman Research Center and The Women and Memory Forum in Egypt.
Over the last two decades the shift to digital media and the instantaneity of media flows have
had significant implications for the production of knowledge and connectivity among interest
groups. Aristea Fotopoulou (2016) uses the term “networked feminism” to describe the decen-
tralized structures that allow women’s groups to connect in an inclusive way. In the same vein,
Arab feminists have generated and circulated media content on created and co-created inter-
active virtual communities and social aggregations on the web. Many of these virtual activist
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movements have the advantage of Creative Commons License which allows free distribution of
their media content. Other groups – locally and globally – have simply made available the right
to share and use the media content on their websites. This maximizes the activist groups’ sense
of connectedness with global women’s movements and fosters global solidarity.
Feminist social media and virtual communities in the Arab world, especially after the ‘Arab
Spring’ revolutions, were initiated by small feminist groups who share the same positioning to
mobilize women’s collective action and power and challenge the negative portrayal of women
in the Arab media (Allam 2008). In Egypt, for instance, Internet initiatives that document crimes
of sexual harassment against women marked post ‘Arab Spring’ activism: HarassMap Egypt, the
“I saw Harassment” initiative, Anti-harassment Movement, and many others. The independ-
ent platform for research on women and gender in Egypt, the “Women and Memory Forum”
(WMF) launched the project of an oral history archive to document women’s narratives of
the 2011 revolution and women’s participation in public life in times of change in Egypt. The
project attempts to “create an archive of hope for the future” (Elsadda 2016, 153). Wiki al-gender
(Wiki Gender) is another example of feminist online networking. It is an Arabic participatory
virtual platform, with English translation, that provides knowledge and information about gen-
der and feminism in Egypt (https://genderation.xyz/wiki/). Wiki Gender serves as a compre-
hensive directory of institutions and active groups working on gender and women’s issues in
the Arab world.
Recently, social media has come to the forefront of struggles in the Arab world. Information
disseminated on the Internet and activists campaigns that went viral have contributed to many
substantial actions such as criminalizing sexual harassment in the Egyptian national law, granting
Saudi women the right to drive a car, allowing Iraqi women to participate in drafting the new
constitution with a larger quota of women in the parliament, and making the Algerian People’s
National Assembly the most gender-balanced in the region with almost 33% of the seats filled
by women, and many others (Odine 2013). Feminist activism in the field of subtitling materials
disseminated in social networks has also contributed to the West acknowledging the societal
and political transformations of Arab feminism. A drastic change has taken place in how the
‘West’ now sees Arab women as equal partners in social change; a case in point is Tawakkol
Karman, the Yemeni political activist, being awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2011. However,
Arab feminism continues to be engaged in processes of change and there will doubtless be more
gains in the future.
Non-professional/volunteering subtitling
Subtitling has become the preferred mode of AVT in this age of globalization and advanced
technologies, allowing for the “emergence of new voices – voices of dissent” (Diaz-Cintas 2012,
284). Hence, subtitling practices, and non-professional/volunteer subtitling in particular, are
worth investigation in terms of the subtle messages they convey,“[subtitles] are sometimes unno-
ticed but nevertheless carriers of meaning and messages. They may reset for a period, remain
inactive, but they slowly work their way into the consciousness of the viewers/hearers/readers”
(Diaz-Cintas 2008, 4). The subtlety of messages/ideologies disseminated through words, photo-
graphs, video clips, and sound tracks can contribute to re-constructing social stereotypes but can
also serve as tools to help new values emerge. Seen from this angle, AVT has many implications.
Jorge Diaz Cintas (2009, 8) further elaborates “It is not an exaggeration to state that AVT is
the means through which not only information but also the assumptions and values of a soci-
ety are filtered and transferred to other cultures.” Besides being purveyors of information, the
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translators of audiovisual material (mostly volunteers in the case discussed in this chapter) can
be viewed as activists or dissidents who want to bring their cause to global attention and gain
international solidarity, Further, free online subtitling programs are allowing bilingual volunteers
to contribute to this work that disseminates the textual content of audiovisual material to wider
foreign audiences. These forces are coming together in non-professional subtitling that, as Luis
Perez-Gonzalez explains, is produced “by individuals without any formal training in translation
(let alone subtitling) whose work is not informed by professional standards . . . but by intuition
and a desire to effect change” (2012a, 343).
Such subtitling is a cheaper alternative to professional subtitling, and involves non-professional
subtitlers in the causes and the agenda of the media content they are working with, allowing
them to contribute to “the emergence of new forms of civic engagement in public life” (Perez-
Gonzalez and Susam-Saraeva 2012, 152). The fact that they are “ordinary citizens [who] become
increasingly involved in the ‘co-creation’ of media content” underlines their leading role in
social relations (Perez-Gonzalez 2013b, 4) and accounts for the emergence of new paradigms of
linguistic and cultural mediation in new sites of cross-cultural contact and interaction (Perez-
Gonzalez and Susam-Saraeva 2012). In this sense, non-professional subtitlers in our contempo-
rary digitized world are “agents contributing to the stability or subversion of social structures
through their capacity to re-define the context in which they mediate” (Perez-Gonzalez 2012b,
172). They also create “forms of co-creational or participatory linguistic mediation” (Perez
Gonzalez and Saraeva 2012, 154). Subtitling in such cases has become a ‘user-generated transla-
tion’, i.e. subtitlers are consumers of the audiovisual content in the first place and they then use
the online activist space to project/share their beliefs to a wider foreign audience by creating
subtitles.
While it might be possible to divide non-professional translators into those who are guided
by standards of translation accuracy and language policies and those who are free and work-
ing as volunteers (Perez-Gonzalez 2013a), translation scholars have so far shown little interest
in the forms of professional or guided non-professional practices. Primacy in the literature is
given to free participatory and co-creational practices of non-professional translators who seek
to mediate their own profiles through the subtitling of interactive social platforms. More focus
is given to how non-professional/volunteer subtitlers use language to circulate a wide selection
of ideologies without clear expression of their own position. In this sense, current academic lit-
erature explores how subtitling practices have assumed different roles in the broader expression
of political/social struggles.
To maximize a sense of connectedness with the global women’s movement, subtitles in dif-
ferent languages are regularly added to the productions of virtual social interactive networks
promoting Arab feminism on spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. Due
to the lack of funding, translation and subtitling are rendered by bilingual volunteers who
subscribe to the same causes as the activist groups. As non-professionals, these volunteers are
engaged in promoting the new-identity formation of these communities of women activists
for wider foreign audiences. Arab feminist communities upload their video clips onto online
channels, and produce media clips for TV shows or other venues in order to visually project
their thoughts and their revolt. A good example of such work carried out in the context of
Arab women’s activism is the message of women’s empowerment expressed in the subtitled
Egyptian women’s interviews in the media collective “Words of Women from the Egyptian
Revolution.” In this case, the subtitles are positioned to “make local political struggles visible to
other protest movements, and further foster international networking and solidarity” (Mortada
2016, 127).
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Non-professional subtitling as ‘voluntarist action’

In the previous sections, I have articulated some of the significant issues that inform the analysis
here. In this section, I explore language mediation that integrates Arab feminist values and ide-
ologies into a global context. The ‘intensification’ of language through explicitation, addition or
emphasis in translation might come under Flotow’s strategy of supplementing, which “compen-
sates for the differences between languages, or constitutes voluntarist action on the text” (Flotow
1991, 75; emphasis added). The discursive intervention of subtitlers may thus be considered
voluntarist action for as Salma El Tarzi (2016) insists,“it is crucial for subtitlers to [. . .] add what-
ever they deem necessary to enhance the foreign audience’s understanding of the issue at hand”
(2016, 91). In the following examples, questions are raised about how language encodes attitudes
to gender, and analyses provide insights into the volunteer subtitlers’ linguistic decisions.
Analytical discussion
The following examples are extracted from the Egyptian independent NGO Nazra for Feminist
Studies2 which was founded in 2005 and registered as an association in December 2007. Since its
inception, Nazra has advocated for women’s rights and contributed to the continuity and devel-
opment of the Egyptian and regional feminist movements in the Middle East and North Africa.
Connected to global women’s activist movements, Nazra has explicitly expressed its objectives,
feminist values, activities and initiatives in English on its website. Amongst its various activities
such as documentation, research, analysis on women’s and gender rights accompanied by work
on developing Arabic terminology in relation to feminist causes and advocacy of women’s
political participation, Nazra has given priority to ending sexual violence against women and
providing legal, psychological, and medical support to women survivors of sexual violence. Fol-
lowing a court ruling in 2017 that froze the assets of both the association and its founder and
executive director Mozn Hassan in the legal process known as the “Foreign Funding Case,”
Nazra had to close down its office in Cairo in March 2018. On its website it announced that
its activities would continue through volunteers, a hotline and services provided to women
survivors of violence. Mozn Hassan acknowledged the genuine role played by younger groups
of activists operating through initiatives and hashtags on social media (Hanan Haggag 2018).
The following discussion addresses the direct intervention of volunteer subtitlers in render-
ing enhanced linguistic versions of certain text excerpts. Since the names of the subtitlers remain
unknown, they are able to make discursive translational decisions that reconceptualize the origi-
nal within a wider sociopolitical context. The analysis focuses on how volunteer subtitlers
appropriate (add/intensify/explicit) the language in their renderings in order to communicate
their protest against patriarchal dominance at a global level and inform the outside world of the
feminist struggle in the Arab context, thus strengthening networks of solidarity. Examples are
chosen from extracts of the videos entitled ‘Nashaz Law’ [Discordant Law] and ‘She and Elec-
tions’, uploaded by Nazra for Feminist Studies.
The four examples that follow were selected because of the popular themes they address in
the discourse on Arab women’s rights, namely legal reform to stop violence against women and
women’s continuous struggle against patriarchal dominance. Predominant social misconcep-
tions in the Arab countries have long conceptualized the roles assigned to women as ‘natural’
and associated with reproductive processes (Said-Foqahaa 2011), and so their duties and rights
in Islamic Sharia have long been misinterpreted accordingly. In the absence of a just legal
framework, such misconceptions have given men the power to control women, “normalizing
discrimination, especially within the realm of family law” (Said-Foqahaa 2011, 236). A case in
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point is men’s impunity in cases of domestic violence. Women activists have long fought for the
criminalization of these cases and voiced cries for freedom from men’s dominance.
The first three examples are drawn from the 12.22 minute video entitled ‘Nashaz Law’ [Dis-
cordant Law] which was part of a 16-day campaign launched by Nazra in 2014 on the legal
issues associated with violence against women. The two interviewed feminist activists criticize
the Egyptian Penal Law, which does not consider domestic violence against women a crime and
describes the law as Nashaz. The Arabic word nashaz has its origin in the Islamic tradition where
zawja nashiz means ‘disobedient wife,’ i.e. a wife who disobeys her husband in Islamic duties.
However, the word ‘nashaz’ is usually used ironically in Arabic to refer to anything contradictory
or incongruent. The choice of the title merges the incongruity of the Egyptian Penal Law with
the recent shift in women’s struggle for their rights in Egypt.
The decision of the subtitler to intensify the narrator’s criticism of the Egyptian Penal Law
is apparent in her/his deliberate language intensification by describing the law as being “out of
order.” In Arabic the narrator says (min 1.30–1.37):
.‫ ينتهي بيها الحال يعني إنها ما تنصفش المرأة‬. . . ‫قانون العقوبات الجديد فيه حاجات كتيرة لألسف‬
[The New Penal Law has many things, that sorrowfully . . . do not do justice to women (my
translation)]
English subtitles
The Egyptian Penal Code is out of order
[In the sense that many articles are unfair to women]
By labeling the law as “out of order” the subtitler invokes an ongoing refusal to accept laws that
do not do justice to women, intensifies the invalidity of the Law in terms of its mismatch with the
recent sociopolitical gains of Egyptian women, and brings the activists’ revolt to global attention.
It is worth adding here that Arab feminist initiatives launched to stop violence against women
primarily took legal reform as a nucleus from which to build up allies and run campaigns
advocating legal frameworks for gender equality. Such initiatives include the Moroccan action
launched by the feminist group ‘L’Union Feministe Libre’ (UFL),3 the Lebanese NGO KAFA
(Enough) Violence and Exploitation, and MohamiatMisr (Egypt’s female attorneys) initiative.
Another sharp attack on the Egyptian Penal Law is manifested in an extract from the same
video ‘Nashaz Law’. In a recorded interview with the woman attorney who heads the Board
of Trustees of the Association of the Egyptian Women’s Issues, the attorney explicitly criticizes
Article (20) of the Law pertaining to the right of the husband to ‘discipline’ his wife.
.‫تسقط أي عقوبة في حالة إن دا حق تأديب للزوج‬

(min 1.53–1.56)
[it [the Law] states no penalty is imposed if this is the husband’s right to discipline (my translation)]
English subtitles:
It states that no penalty may be imposed if the violent act is committed under the right to
discipline the wife
A considerable amount of information is communicated through the use of the term vio-
lent acts in the English subtitles as the translation of the colloquial Arabic pronoun dā [this].
This explicitation uncovers the fact that recurrent cases of domestic violence against women
are practiced by their Moslem husbands under their alleged right to ‘discipline’ their wives
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Nihad Mansour
according to Islamic Shariaa. The issue of wife disciplining which Moslem theologians have
long argued derives from the Quran, has now become subject to subversion. Women activists
are promoting a new gender-equality paradigm of the Quran and Shariaa that is formulated in
accordance with the Quranic principles of justice. They are challenging patriarchal interpreta-
tions of Quranic verses that have been used to justify physical abuse of women.
The attorney in the interview further explains that such ‘right to discipline through violent
acts’ should not contradict Shariaa, i.e. disciplining a woman should not cause her any pain. This
is a controversial issue in Islamic tradition, as many religious interpreters, over the centuries,
have been trying to define the ‘acceptable’ forms of discipline (such as for instance corporal
punishment without causing an injury), ignoring the fact that any form of physical violence is
unacceptable in Islamic teachings (and Shariaa). In this sense, she here ironically refers to men’s
resorting to ‘discipline’ according to what they interpret as ‘acceptable’:
.‫تأديب ال يتعارض مع الشريعة اإلسالمية‬

(min 158–159)
[Discipline that does not contradict Islamic Shariaa (my translation)].
English subtitles
“Discipline” which they deem not to contradict Islamic Shariaa
In the original, there is no reference to those who drafted the Law; however, by adding the
perpetrator ‘they’ which refers to the judges who drafted this article and who seem not to see
violent acts as contradicting the Islamic Shariaa, the subtitling intervenes discursively and alerts
the foreign audience to the nodes of injustice in the Egyptian legal framework. This interven-
tion provides information on whom to blame and reflects the subtitler’s critical view of the
Egyptian laws, domestic violence, misconceived patriarchal rights in the society, and other con-
cerns. Further, extratexual emphasis is provided with the addition of inverted commas around
the word ‘discipline’ in the English subtitles, which draw the viewers’ attention to the paradox
of considering violent acts as discipline. Such linguistic interventions on the part of the subtitler
intensely co-create the context of legal injustice for foreign audiences.
Among the gains Egyptian women made after the 2011 Revolution is effective political partici-
pation and representation as in the inclusion of five feminist women in the 2014 constitution draft-
ing committee, the inclusion of women’s rights in the 2014 constitution, and recently the proposed
amendments of the constitution in 2019, which grant women one quarter of the seats in parlia-
ment. The long activist struggle to increase the quota of women representatives and have adequate
representation in parliament has topped social media discussions lately. As part of its endeavours to
promote fair and effective representation of women in the parliament, Nazra launched its initiative
“She and Elections” in 2012 which included a report about mentoring women candidates run-
ning for parliamentary elections and a video about the experiences of women from Upper Egypt
fighting for 2011–12 parliamentary elections. This was uploaded on the channel.
The screen capture (Figure 30.1) from “She and Elections” is about a female candidate who
speaks to a gathering, of mostly men, expressing her enthusiasm to run in the parliamentary
elections and her intentions to overcome all obstacles that might prevent her.
The verbal mode: (‫[ )لما أقول حانزل دا معناه حاكسر حواجز كتير‬when I say I’ll run [for elections],
this means I’ll break many obstacles] is integrated with close full face frame of two men gaz-
ing at the speaker (non-verbal mode). The synchronization between the image (non-verbal)
and the speaker’s comment (verbal) contributes to the meaning-making of a direct confronta-
tion between the speaker and the men seeking to impose obstacles and unjustified restrictions
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Image 30.1 Screen capture: ‘She and the Elections’, min 0.46 (.com)
on women, which the latter intend to break. Yet the subtitles further intensify the meaning
by translating ‫[ حواجز‬obstacles] as “taboos.” The meaning-making of the semiotic ensemble in
this subtitled screen capture, with the addition of “taboos,” creates a sharp short message about
women’s revolt and magnifies women’s struggle against many generations of patriarchal oppres-
sion. It is worth adding here that the concept of taboo in the Arabic Islamic context includes
the sinful actions that are forbidden by Allah. Linguistically, the word taboo is more forceful in
meaning than the Arabic word ‫[ حواجز‬obstacles]; it makes women’s revolt visible to other activ-
ists worldwide to foster international solidarity.
Concluding remarks
The overview offered in this chapter has been less concerned with surveying the literature
on feminism and audiovisual translation in the Arab world, which is rare, than with explor-
ing the emergence of citizens’ engaged digital media content that moves across boundaries via
non-professional/volunteer subtitling with a special focus on the Arab world. While interactive
social networking has provided much more connectivity and hence opportunities for solidar-
ity amongst local activists, the language of the subtitles produced and used by these networks
contributes to disseminating echoes of activism to foreign audiences. I have focused on how
non-professional/ volunteer subtitlers attempt to effect change by connecting with others who
fight the same battle elsewhere. Their discursive linguistic interventions work to spread global
awareness of the pressing issues in the Arab world, situate Arab feminist activism within broader
struggles, and build up virtual solidarity with the world’s activist networks. Translation decisions
such as deliberate intensification, explicitation, and addition enhance the feminist values of the
original. Where volunteer subtitlers are activists as manifested in their ‘voluntarist actions’ in
the language of the subtitling, their work is part of the dynamics of global feminist activism. As
discussed in this chapter, volunteer subtitling of the productions of Arab feminist activist com-
munities creates a universal cry against societal injustice against women that is imposed through
‘taboos’ and legal discrimination. I have also touched on the anonymity of the subtitlers, a phe-
nomenon that makes possible much of the ‘voluntarist actions’ in subtitling and opens up future
409
Nihad Mansour
research directions on the topic of volunteer work in translation. Another future challenge will
be to study feminist activism in the Arab world in other genres of audiovisual translation such
as dubbing. This would allow further investigation of the links between video/film productions,
their translations and the effects of such translation.
Further reading
Badran, Margot and Miriam Cooke. 2004. Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing. Indi-
ana: Indiana University Press.
This book is a collection of Arab feminist writing, from the 1920s through the 1980s, which challenges
the widely accepted view of Middle Eastern women as submissive non-thinkers.
De Marco, Marcela. 2012. Audiovisual Translation Through a Gender Lens. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.
This book offers insights into the role of audiovisual translation in the transmission of stereotypes of
gender sexuality, ethnicity, and economic status.
Makdisi, Jean, Noha Bayoumi, and Rafif Rida Sidawi. 2014. Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the
Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris.
This book gives an account of future and present directions in Arab feminism, and addresses theoretical
and methodological issues in Arab feminist thought.
Baker, Mona, ed. 2016. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York: Routledge.
This volume consists of a number of articles written by a group of activists who reflect on discursive
and non-discursive interventions through translation in the political arena and the impact of translation
in creating networks of solidarity.
Diaz-Cintas, Jorge, Anna Matamala, and Joselia Neves, eds. 2010. New Insights into Audiovisual Translation
and Media Accessibility, Media for All 2 series. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Brill and Radopi.
This volume offers new insights into both theoretical and practical issues of audiovisual translation and
media accessibility.
Related topics
Audiovisual translation, non-professional subtitling, feminist virtual communities, Arab women’s
activism
Notes
1 The terms ‘non-professional’ and ‘volunteer’ subtitling are used interchangeably throughout the chapter.
I use ‘non-professional’ subtitling more extensively only because it can be used as a generic term that
stands for practices that go beyond technical and professional codes of subtitling.
2 See http://nazra.org/en/about-us [Accessed 30 July 2019].
3 The UFL sets out to provide legal assistance to victims of rape. Their campaign ‘How Many Women
must die to change laws?’ came after the rape and death of an 18-year-old. The video UFL launched for
this campaign went viral on the Internet. Available at: https://youngfeministfund.org/grantees/lunion-
feministe-libre/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].
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Al-Ali, Nadje. 2000. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement.
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31
The sexist translator and
the feminist heroine
Politically incorrect language
in films and TV
Irene Ranzato
Introduction
In a scene from the US series Life on Mars (Graham et al. 2008–2009), policewoman Annie Nor-
ris and detective Sam Tyler exchange this conversation:
Life on Mars USA, season 1 episode 14
ANNIE: I need answers
SAM: And you’re going to get them by posing as a dead flight attendant?
ANNIE: No, I’m gonna get them by posing as a dead stewardess.
SAM: Right, same thing. Someday that word will become politically incorrect.
Set in the early 1970s, this series1 narrates the story of Sam Tyler, who finds himself in the
unusual and mysterious position of coming ‘from the future,’ from 2007, and is thus continu-
ously judging the world that surrounds him from his arguably ‘extradiegetic’ standpoint. The
preceding dialogue will be discussed in one of the following sections but, for the moment, it
is useful to introduce the topic of this chapter, which will offer a reflection on how politically
incorrect (PI) language and, most specifically, sexist language at the expense of women, is used
in fictional dialogues, in conventional film and TV topoi.
When the translation process is brought into the equation, it adds further layers of nuance to
already charged texts. In the last section of this chapter, after a brief introduction to the way in
which studies in audiovisual translation (AVT) and gender studies have intersected, I will discuss
the notion of the audiovisual translator as sexist manipulator by studying some Italian adaptations
for dubbing. My focus is on how these translated texts, especially those from pre-politically correct
(PC) eras, filter narratives in which women attempt to come into their own by following a precise
ideological pattern which models characterizations into new and sometimes dubious forms.2
Political correctness/incorrectness and sexism

Political correctness can be defined as an “attempt to redress, through language, some of the nega-
tive images our culture affixes to people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
413
Irene Ranzato
age, physical disability or some other condition that separates them from the mainstream” (Miller
and Swift 1995, ix–x). From a different viewpoint, it is an endeavour to mark as taboo certain areas
“which previously involved prejudicial attitudes and stigmatizing language” (Hughes 2010, 46).
There is a complex relationship between the terms and discourses surrounding political cor-
rectness, incorrectness and sexism (Mills 2008, 117) and no agreement on whether the term PC
finds its origin within Marxism, and thus has mainly left-wing associations, or if, on the contrary,
it derives from an essentially right-wing public debate which started on university campuses in
the United States in the late 1980s. According to Geoffrey Hughes (2010, 7), the fundamental
unspecificity of the ideology behind this concept makes “the anonymous agenda-manipulators
of political correctness” difficult to identify:
political correctness is not one thing and does not have a simple history. As a concept it
predates the debate and is a complex, discontinuous, and protean phenomenon which has
changed radically, even over the past two decades.
(Ibid., 3)
From a sociolinguistic point of view, the visibility of the notion of political correctness seems to
prove that the Sapir-Whorf view of the relation between language and thought, espousing as it
does the belief that the adoption of new terms will change society for the better, is relevant to
contemporary debates (Mesthrie et al. 2005).
As for the term ‘politically incorrect,’ Sara Mills (2008, 108) claims that it has acquired various
associations because of its use in particular contexts and highlights that the expression does not
mean just the opposite of ‘politically correct’:
The first group of meanings (A) can be characterised as broadly positively evaluated: a
positive association with risky humour and fun, as a term of praise for those who are doing
something daring, and as an accurate, if unpalatable to some, assessment of affairs. The
second group of meanings (B) can be characterised as when the phrase ‘politically incor-
rect’ is used to refer to a set of opinions which are considered trivial or concerned with
the banning of offence. The third group of meanings (C) is when ‘political incorrectness’
is portrayed as ridiculous. Finally, there is a fourth group of meanings (D) where ‘political
incorrectness’ is used as a synonym for sexism or racism.
Sexism, mentioned in the last of Mills’s associations, is a term coined in the late 1960s to refer to:
“social arrangements, policies, language, and practices enacted by men or women that express a
systematic, often institutionalised belief that men are superior, women inferior” (Code 2000, 441).
As for the way in which audiovisual texts filter these concepts, the first item of Mills’s cat-
egorization (the association with risky humour) and the last one (PI language as a synonym
for sexism) appear to be particularly relevant, because of the numerous instances which reveal
how this type of language is used on the screen to construct derogatory humour and denigrate
women or minimise their skills.
With these premises in mind, the following sections present examples of different types of
sexist language found in audiovisual texts from different periods and in their translations.
The group laughs

Ever since the beginning of cinema, screen representations of women as secretaries and office
employees, nurses and, later on, with a different twist, policewomen, have been the butt of sexist
comments, gazes and gropings.
414
Sexist translator, feminist heroine
In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), elevator operator Fran Kubelick daily endures the
unwelcome attention of an office executive in a lift mostly full of men. The leading character
C.C. Baxter’s explanation for her refusing such attention is that she must be “a nice respectable
girl.” Almost 50 years later, in one of the first scenes of the very first episode of the TV series
Mad Men (Weiner 2007–2015),3 incidentally, greatly influenced by The Apartment, the firm’s
new secretary, Peggy Olsen, is introduced to the audience in a similar situation: she rides the lift
to her future job surrounded by a group of men, her prospective superiors, who size her up and
down and make comments on the new girl. The group laughs, as groups on screen often do.
According to Mills (2008,141), a great deal of research on humour has shown that women are
often the butt of jokes by males and that humour is frequently used to reinforce unequal power
relations. Going back to the scholar’s categorizations cited earlier:
if ‘political correctness’ is viewed as an overzealous concern with the rights of political

minorities, then ‘political incorrectness’ can be seen as a positive mocking or undermining
of such concerns, with a stress on the fun which ‘PC’ is trying to eliminate.
(Ibid., 109)
Groups of men have always shared laughs and made sexist comments at the expense of women,
whether the women’s positions are subordinate or not. In policewoman narratives, for example,
from Police Woman (Collins 1974–1978) to Prime Suspect (UK, La Plante 1991–2006, and USA,
Cunningham and La Plante 2011–2012) to The Fall (Cubitt 2013–2016), the butt of sexist jokes
can be the men’s professional superior. The group laughs, too, at the expense of women, in
pseudo-historical series like Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss 2011–2019) and in royal shows
like The Crown (Morgan 2016-in production). It is a topos which runs across genres and is a
source of immediate humorous relief.
Peggy, in Mad Men, who is shyer than Shirley McLaine’s Fran in The Apartment, but only
because it is her first day at work, experiences sexism at every turn from both men and women,
especially in the somewhat facile early episodes of the series, in which the audience is taken by
the hand and guided to recognize every instance of female subordination.
It is my contention that a great part of the success that ‘vintage,’ pre-PC stories enjoy today is
due to the welcome, if temporary, relief from the constraints of PC language and the possibility
that these shows and films allow viewers to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of women. It is true
that most of these moments foretell the final ‘victory’ of the feminist heroine over the force of
male evil, but the road to success is paved with obstacles and humiliations that elicit much guilt-
less fun. Viewers are free to laugh about topics we are otherwise not allowed to laugh about, while
actually reinforcing our sense of moral righteousness. As Maurice Yacowar (2011, 87) writes in
commenting on the sense of instinctive superiority that is triggered by watching the unethical
behaviour of our previous selves from a not so remote past: “whatever says ‘This was them then’
connotes ‘This is us now.’ ” And the comparison with the way we were is always flattering.
To sum up, the qualitative analysis of audiovisual texts containing sexist language and behav-
iour has revealed the recurrent presence of a few narrative devices:
• Derogatory language at the expense of women often occurs for the benefit of a group. The
laughs that the most outspoken member of the group elicits come from his peers;
• The closer the story is to our times, the more we, the audience, feel outraged by his
uncouth behaviour; at the same time the distancing process activated by this kind of narra-
tive encourages us to laugh freely with the user of offensive language at the expense of the
victim: for a moment we become members of the group;
415
Irene Ranzato
• Sexist language and behaviour are the peculiarity of a key character but generally not of the
protagonist4;
• The leading character himself openly criticises or looks down on this behaviour, thus acting
as a moral gatekeeper (C.C. Baxter, Sam Tyler or even, despite his elegant machismo, Mad
Men’s Donald Draper);
• Finally, after being the butt of jokes and unbounded sexist behaviour, the feminist or proto-
feminist heroine emerges, weary but victorious, from the din of derogatory words.
In the next section I will discuss some examples of audiovisual narratives in which this dis-
course is effectively displayed.
The extradiegetic onlooker

In the apparently similar situations described in The Apartment and Mad Men, film and TV show
from different eras, there is a fundamental difference: a shift in point of view. Unlike the original
audience of The Apartment – men and women who might have thought: ‘this could happen to
me’ – we (the contemporary audiences and authors) look at the characters of stories set in earlier
periods as entomologists look at their insects. Every scene is meant to make the contemporary
viewer shudder, as explicated in the following lines from Mad Men, in which two characters
exchange derogatory comments at the expense of a group of secretaries who have been asked
to try on a new brand of lipstick:
Mad Men, season 1 episode 5

KEN: Did you know that lipstick was invented to simulate the flush on a woman’s face after you
treated her right?
FREDDIE: [. . .] I’ll be honest. I don’t speak moron. Do either of you speak moron? Let’s throw
it to the chickens.
This is only one of the many sexist comments uttered by the spokesman of a group at the expense
of the secretarial pool (“the chickens” who “speak moron” while testing their lipsticks). However,
this is also the scene where secretary Peggy Olson takes her first steps towards a prominent posi-
tion and a high-end career. In another typical topos in today’s narratives, the feminist heroine sur-
vives the verbal and nonverbal carnage thanks to her talent, hard work and courage. Fran Kubelick
and other key characters in so many pre-PC films distinguished themselves only through love. Of
course, they could have skills and show a mind of their own (after all, no man likes a stupid wife,
says Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightley), but these usually came in handy once married.
In today’s films and shows that are set in a time far-removed from our PC-era, audiences can
make an immediate and natural comparison between their contemporary situation and “the way
we once were.” When Peggy endures the ordeal of her first visit to a gynecologist, the scene is
constructed in such a way as to make our present-day hearts cringe:
Mad Men, season 1 episode 1

GYNECOLOGIST: I see from your chart, and your finger, that you’re not married.
PEGGY: That’s right.
GYNECOLOGIST: And yet you’re interested in the contraceptive pills.
PEGGY: Well, I was . . .
GYNECOLOGIST: No reason to be nervous. Joan sent you to me because I’m not here to judge
you. There’s nothing wrong with a woman being practical about the possibility of sexual
activity. Spread your knees.
416
PEGGY: That’s good to hear.

GYNECOLOGIST: Although, as a doctor, I’d like to think that putting a woman in this situation
is not gonna turn her into some kind of strumpet. Slide your fanny toward me. I’m not
gonna bite.
This type of dialogue has the purpose of pleasing contemporary audiences by showcasing esca-
lating verbal abuse and the patriarchal attitude towards women.
The contrast between past and present is more evident when the extradiegetic onlooker is
also part of the diegesis, as in another quality TV series, Life on Mars, in which the main char-
acter, Sam Tyler, a man of today in a world of yesterday, represents us and our point of view.
It is not by chance that Life on Mars, especially in its UK version, is the richest and most
diversified text in terms of PI language and behaviour, a real ‘feast’ of political incorrectness: it is
exactly Sam’s temporal ‘mismatch’ that gives the authors free rein to pursue this path. Sexist and
derogatory language at the expense of women is the most exploited – and relished – dialogical
device in the entire series, outnumbering even the frequent homophobic and racist jokes.
Its US counterpart is, by comparison and as with many American remakes of British series,
sanitised5. The US Life on Mars also spells out more clearly and less sophisticatedly the game
of contrasts between that past PI world and our current PC world: “I don’t understand why
I would be dreaming about this,” says American Sam. “Who dreams of being yelled at by a closet
feminist member of the 1973 policewomen’s bureau?” an explicit line which is never uttered by
the British Sam. At the same time, the emphasis on feminism in the US version, and US Annie’s
deeper awareness of her potential, contrast with UK Annie and her context, and reveal the con-
textual influences which come into play in the production of translations (Flotow and Farahzad
2017, xiii) and adaptations. Different discourses are foregrounded in the respective cultures.
Interlingual translation adds a further stratum of meaning to these already layered texts, and
responds directly to the cultural zeitgeist.
Translating gender in AVT: translators as sexist manipulators

Feminist thought has contributed crucially to critical reflections on translation and on pro-
cesses of cultural transfer and contamination (Bracke et al. 2018). Regarding the intersection
between translation studies and gender studies, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (2014, 161–162) notes
that both are interdisciplinary fields that “have been interested in similar areas and have encour-
aged research into a variety of neighbouring branches, such as language, society, religion, litera-
ture, anthropology, and communication.” However, the connection between gender studies and
audiovisual translation, in particular, has developed only since the early 2000s and comparatively
slowly, given the broad awareness of feminist and gender issues (Flotow and Josephy-Hernández
2019) and the contributions of feminist scholars in media studies since the 1960s and 1970s6.
Film studies, and research that tackles gender issues in audiovisual productions more broadly,
can provide inspiration for scholars interested in the still underexplored connection between
gender studies and AVT. Gender bias and sexism have been found to govern the very selection
and production of audiovisual material; in a 2018 study on how the sexual division of labour in
scientific audiovisual productions is portrayed, Marta Cintas-Peña et al. (2018, 90) found
solid evidence demonstrating that the androcentric bias with which social activities are
portrayed in the audiovisual productions reviewed by us is entirely unjustified [. . .] [and
that] these productions tend to transmit a completely erroneous message to the public in
terms of SDL [sexual division of labour] and gender relations.
417
Irene Ranzato
Another area of research in film studies that can offer obvious inspiration to AVT (especially
dubbing) scholars is that of the gendered voice in film. In Pavitra Sundar’s (2017) study on the
representation of women and vocal performance in Hindi cinema, the scholar explores to what
extent the inclusion of diverse vocal timbres, accents and styles of singing influences Bombay
cinema’s representational logics, going beyond the almost exclusively visual notion of the body
in cinema to delve into other, ‘aural’ ways of perceiving it.
The role of the voice has been a subject of interest in AVT in recent years, with scholars
investigating the interplay between translation issues and prosodic features (Bosseaux 2015, 2019;
Sánchez Mompeán 2017, 2019). The connections with gender, however, have been touched
only sparsely (Bosseaux 2008). As Luise Von Flotow and Daniel Josephy-Hernández (2019,
306) put it:
The ‘aural’ aspects of dubbing and the meaning conveyed by the sound of a voice could/
should be of great interest in regard to the effects of dubbing: how are male/female/other
voices made to sound not only in the scripted dialogues of the source cultures, but in the
dubbed versions? Does the sound of a voice change across languages? And if so, what does
this mean or indicate?
Elsewhere, I have discussed how crucially the reception of a character changes when the
voice chosen to represent it in a dubbed version is distant from the original (Ranzato 2018).
The Italian Netflix adaptation of the TV series The Crown, for instance, arguably alters the target
audience’s perception of the main character. Portrayed in the original, also through voice char-
acterization, as a fundamentally insecure and fragile young woman, Queen Elizabeth’s dubbed
voice is, on the contrary, assertive, firm and confident, thus projecting a strikingly different image
of the queen in her early years.
Although AVT has become important as a didactic tool and studies on gender in the transla-
tion classroom have attracted the attention of some scholars (De Marco 2011; De Marco and
Toto 2019), AVT has undeniably also played “a prominent role in the creation of stereotyping
and denigration” (De Marco 2011, 140), thus encouraging gender stereotypes and homophobic
attitudes.
As Flotow (1997, 14) remarks:
Gender awareness in translation practice poses questions about the links between social ste-
reotypes and linguistic forms, about the politics of language and cultural difference, about
the ethics of translation, and about reviving inaccessible works for contemporary readers. It
highlights the importance of the cultural context in which translation is done.
Video games, too, have tended to propagate stereotypical gender roles (Pettini 2018; Corrado
2009; Cunningham 2012; Maxwell-Chandler and O’Malley Deming 2012; O’Hagan and Man-
giron 2013; Bernal-Merino 2015; see Pettini in this volume).
To conclude this brief overview of the rather scanty intersections between gender studies and
AVT, it is worth mentioning a different perspective on the topic: in a recent conference presen-
tation, Carol O’Sullivan (2019) presented her archive-based work on neglected female subtitlers
of the early decades of film sound in the UK. Her analysis evaluates how the translation activity
of these women influenced foreign film distribution and reception in Britain, laying the founda-
tions of the UK’s audiovisual translation industry. Reviving the unacknowledged work of these
subtitlers is part of an effort to establish the real value of neglected professionals of the film
industry, whatever their gender, and translators are certainly some of the most easily forgotten.
418
I will summarize from Marcella De Marco (2007, 97) the issues of concern to scholars and
politicians who fight sexism, because they are also relevant in translation where they appear as
potential hurdles to be overcome in cross-cultural transfer: the choice of the names for profes-
sions practiced by both men and women; the replacement of the generic masculine with neutral
forms; the presence of nouns which have the same form for the masculine and the feminine but
which may take on very different connotations depending on whether the addressee is a man
or a woman; the decision, in Romance languages, to make the adjective referring to two nouns
(one masculine and the other feminine) agree with the masculine form in the plural; political
correctness in the use of certain terms and expressions to avoid offence against particular cul-
tural, ethnic and identity groups.
In AVT the topic of incorrect and sexist language has blended, often implicitly, with stud-
ies on manipulation, derogatory language and gender stereotypes (De Marco 2012). In Italy,
traditionally a dubbing country, manipulation and censorship of the formal aspects of film as
well as its contents have a long history which predates fascism (see Ranzato 2016, 28–52, for a
summary of historical vicissitudes related to film censorship in Italy, and Carla Mereu Keating
2016, for dubbing in fascist Italy). Other countries which also went through dictatorial regimes
have witnessed substantially similar adaptation procedures, as in the case of Spain (Díaz Cintas
2019). Jorge Díaz Cintas (ibid.) illustrates how the Spanish dubbing translation of the 1954 film
Barefoot Contessa, by Joseph Mankiewicz, ‘modelled’ the main female character on a conserva-
tive agenda, with the aim of perpetuating certain dominant values by censoring any behaviour
deemed inappropriate for a woman (especially her ‘loose’ sexuality).
The feminist or proto-feminist heroine is characterized through words, those that she speaks
and those spoken to her, which is why even the nuances of her words in translation may have an
effect on the identity that AV authors are defining for her. It is useful to go back, for example,
to the Life on Mars excerpt quoted in the introduction, as it concentrates most of the sensitive
issues listed by De Marco in a few lines.
This is how the dialogue between Sam and the “closet feminist” Annie continues and how it
was translated for the Italian dubbed version:
Life on Mars USA, season 1 episode 14
Original dialogue:
ANNIE: The universe is trying to tell me something? I need answers.
SAM: And you’re going to get them by posing as a dead flight attendant?
ANNIE: No, I’m gonna get them by posing as a dead stewardess.
SAM: Right, same thing. Someday that word will become politically incorrect.
ANNIE: Why?
SAM: I’m not sure, I guess it’s demeaning?
ANNIE: Really? Will the same be said for “seamstress” and “princess” in this wonderful future of yours?
Italian adaptation:
ANNIE: L’universo mi manda dei messaggi? Li vorrei capire.
SAM: E fingerti un’assistente di volo morta a che serve?
ANNIE: No, quella ragazza faceva la hostess non l’assistente.
SAM: È la stessa cosa, ai miei tempi hostess non si usa più.
ANNIE: Perché?
419
Irene Ranzato
SAM: Ma, non lo so, credo sia degradante.

ANNIE: Davvero? E come si dirà “casalinga” o “puttana” nel tuo meraviglioso futuro, Sam?
Back translation:
ANNIE: The universe is sending me messages? I’d like to understand them.
SAM: And pretending to be a dead flight attendant – what is the use?
ANNIE: No, that girl was a stewardess not an assistant.
SAM: It’s the same thing, in my time “stewardess” is not used any longer.
ANNIE: Why?
SAM: Well, I don’t know, I think it’s degrading.
ANNIE: Really? And how will one say “housewife” or “whore” in your wonderful future, Sam?
The first problem the adapter had to face relates to the translation of the word stewardess. The
Italian term to define this professional figure has always been hostess, itself a loan word from
English. Even though today the expression assistente di volo (flight assistant) is considered more
modern and probably more widespread (even though more formal), the two are considered
virtually interchangeable, with no particular stigma attached to hostess. The Italian Wikipedia
states that assistente di volo is also known as steward for men and hostess for women. In colloquial
exchanges hostess is still often preferred over the more formal recent option. Sam’s comment
referring to the word not being used anymore is therefore not quite true. More importantly,
the translator omits (perhaps for reasons of lip-synch) the explicit reference to PI language
(“Someday that word will become politically incorrect,” a phrase replaced by a reference to the
term hostess being now simply old-fashioned). Finally, a literal translation of the last line would
not have worked in Italian (one of the reasons being that seamstress does not have an Italian -ess
ending (to go with stewardess and princess), so the adapter resorted to two equally sensitive
words, though not because of their morphology. They were chosen for the roles in society to
which they allude, casalinga (housewife) and puttana (whore), two words often used to diminish
or denigrate women. This way a term defining a woman’s job (seamstress) is substituted by one
which defines women’s traditional occupation (housewife), while a term defining a woman of
power (princess) is replaced by one which is typically used as an insult against women (whore).
The translator has subtly, whether consciously or (most probably) not, introduced sexist asso-
ciations in a line which originally focused on a typical, ‘grammatical,’ PC topic related to the
appropriateness of certain word endings.
The original dialogue is also notable, however, because in line with Mills’s (2008, 108) cat-
egorization reported previously, it is clearly devised to show that political correctness is ridicu-
lous, a procedure which is made clear by Annie’s mocking facial expression.
As with other areas of gender in translation, like gayspeak (Ranzato 2012), Italian translators
can face some objective difficulties in finding the right words to express the right concept, when
many of the right words are in fact loans from English and have taken on slightly or substantially
different meanings. The other problematic fact relates to the actual dissemination in Italy of
topics which have become more mainstream in other cultures: the whole debate over politi-
cal correctness, for example, permeates popular culture in English-speaking countries more so
than in Italy. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that some audiovisual translators
appear to be struggling to focus on the real function that sexist dialogue performs in these texts,
by either giving it a raunchier twist or simply missing the point, as in the following example:
Life on Mars UK, season 2 episode 2
420
Original dialogue:
SAM: Look, half of CID [Criminal Investigation Department] will be alcoholics by the time
Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister.
WOOLF: If Margaret Thatcher ever becomes Prime Minister, I’ll have been doing something a
lot stronger than whisky.
Italian adaptation:
SAM: Lo sa, metà degli ispettori saranno alcolisti all’epoca in cui Maggie Thatcher sarà Primo Ministro.
WOOLF: Se Margaret Thatcher diventerà mai Primo Ministro, avrò bisogno di qualcosa di più
forte del whisky.
Back translation:
SAM: You know, half the inspectors will be alcoholics at the time Maggie Thatcher is Prime Minister.
WOOLF: If Margaret Thatcher ever becomes Prime Minister, I will need something much
stronger than whisky.
The English source text denigrates the idea of a woman becoming Prime Minister by referring
to it as an impossible and unrealistic development: to see Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister
one has to be drunk and delirious. In the translation this idea was completely overlooked by the
adapters either because of a factual mistake or a deliberate simplification: to tolerate the presence
of Margaret Thatcher as a Prime Minister, one needs to get drunk. In the original text a woman
Prime Minister is conveyed as an impossibility, in the target text it is an unbearable reality. Miss-
ing the point of a sexist joke does not amount to rendering the text less sexist, just more banal.
As in the Díaz Cintas’s case study cited previously, the instances where translators become
sexist manipulators by altering contents that describe potentially ‘liberated’ women for the pur-
poses of some conservative agenda, are even more interesting. This has been done in Italian dub-
bing through deliberately ‘creative’ translations and also by ‘carefree’ editing procedures. One of
the ways to detect the ideological discourse underlying audiovisual texts is in fact by analyzing
the editing solutions adopted in the cutting room. These practices were obviously more freely
applied at a time when feminist issues were not yet as rooted as they are today. See for example
the following original excerpt from Alfie (Gilbert 1966), in which the protagonist has just made
love in a car with Siddie, a married woman. The lines in bold are the parts of dialogue which
have been edited out of the Italian version which is clearly much shorter than the original.
The heavy manipulation, evident on the DVD in which the dubbing is intercut by the English
original dialogue in the places where the Italian track is missing, was achieved smoothly in the
first part of the dialogue, when the couple is still in the car and the audience can only hear their
voices. Then, after Siddie calls Alfie and the title of the film appears on the screen, the two are
out of the car and images were montaged to allow dialogue deletion:
Alfie
Original dialogue:
SIDDIE: Here, you starting all over again?
ALFIE: What about it if I am?
421
Irene Ranzato
SIDDIE: Well supposing the police was to come along?

ALFIE: Let’ em come. The windows are all steamed up, the doors are locked. It’s like a
Turkish bath in ‘ere. Don’t half make you thirsty.
SIDDIE: Here. Watch your ring with my stockings.
ALFIE: Move over a bit, then. Get your knee off the steering wheel!
SIDDIE: I can’t. I’m stuck.
ALFIE: ‘ey, look. I’ll do it.
SIDDIE: That ‘urt.
ALFIE: I told you before to be careful where you put your legs.
SIDDIE: I was only trying to be helpful.
ALFIE: I can help myself.
ALFIE: Hello. They never make these cars big enough, do they? Well, you all settled
in? Right. We can begin. My name is . . .
SIDDIE: Alfie?
ALFIE: Alfie. I suppose you think you’re going to see the bleeding titles now. Well,
you’re not, so you can all relax.
SIDDIE: Alfie!
ALFIE: Here. What time did your old man say he’ll be waiting for you at the station?
SIDDIE: Oh, never mind about him
ALFIE: That’s just who I’m gonna mind. Never spoil a good thing. That’s a thing you
women can’t get into your heads. Come on, now. Enough’s as good as a feast.
SIDDIE: Oh, you soon changed your tune.
ALFIE: Well, that horn put me off. I hate a noise at a time like that. Hey, mate.
SIDDIE: You don’t forget your napkin.
ALFIE: I won’t.
SIDDIE: D’you know what I thought the first time I saw you put your handkerchief over your
shoulder?
ALFIE: Wha’?
SIDDIE: Thought you were going to take out your fiddle and play.
ALFIE: Well, I come from a musical family, don’t I. Here. Mind you don’t catch cold.
SIDDIE: I’ve had a lovely time, Alfie.
Italian adaptation:
SIDDIE: Ehi, che fai vuoi ricominciare?
ALFIE: Perché, ti dispiace?
SIDDIE: Be’, ma se capita qualche poliziotto?
ALFIE: E che può fare?
SIDDIE: Ma attento, non farmi rompere le calze.
ALFIE: E spostati un po’, allora. Non ti appoggiare al volante!
SIDDIE: Scusami, ma qui non ci si rigira . . .
ALFIE: Aspetta, ti aiuto io.
SIDDIE: Oh, mi hai fatto male.
SIDDIE: Alfie?
SIDDIE: Alfie!
SIDDIE: Ehi, non ti scordare il bavaglino.
ALFIE: Sta’ tranquilla.
SIDDIE: Lo sai che cosa ho pensato la prima volta che ti sei messo il fazzoletto sulla spalla?
422
ALFIE: Che?
SIDDIE: Ho pensato che avresti tirato fuori il violino.
ALFIE: Io vengo da una famiglia di musicisti.
Back translation:
SIDDIE: Hey, what are you doing, you want to start again?
ALFIE: Why, would you mind?
SIDDIE: Well, what if some policeman happens to pass by?
ALFIE: And what can he do?
SIDDIE: Careful, don’t make me snag my stockings.
ALFIE: Move a bit then. Don’t lean on the steering wheel!
SIDDIE: Sorry, but one can’t even turn around in here . . .
ALFIE: Wait, I’ll help you.
SIDDIE: Oh, you hurt me.
SIDDIE: Alfie?
SIDDIE: Alfie!
SIDDIE: Hey, don’t forget your bib.
ALFIE: Don’t worry.
SIDDIE: Do you know what I thought the first time you put your handkerchief on your shoulder?
ALFIE: What?
SIDDIE: I thought you would take out your fiddle.
ALFIE: I come from a family of musicians.
The heavy ideological manipulation operated on this scene in the Italian version was evidently
implemented to minimise the most graphic evidence of the sex act which has just taken place
(It’s like a Turkish bath in ‘ere; I told you before to be careful where you put your legs; They never make
these cars big enough). In the Italian dialogue there is also no reference to the woman’s husband
(What time did your old man say he’ll be waiting for you at the station? Oh, never mind about him). The
most revealing phrase of those eliminated, however, is: I’ve had a lovely time, Alfie, which clearly
spells out the fact that the (married) woman has had just as much fun as the man. Sound and
image cuts also probably serve the purpose of enhancing the comedic side of this otherwise
tough and uncompromising film.
Following a similar procedure as that chosen by the Spanish adapters of The Barefoot Con-
tessa, another Mankiewicz film, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), based on the play by Tennessee
Williams, was handled in a similar fashion by Italian adapters who also adopted a censorial and
moralistic attitude. The Italian version of this film was heavily manipulated and subjected to
savage editing, which rendered its plot and meaning opaque to say the least. In a conversation
with the doctor who is assessing her mental state, Catherine, the leading character, tells him
about a traumatic experience when – as the audience slowly but clearly grasps from the original
dialogue – she had an affair with a married man.
Suddenly, Last Summer
Original dialogue:
CATHERINE: I think I got out of the car before he got out of the car, and we walked through the
wet grass toward the great misty oaks as if somebody were calling for help there.
423
Irene Ranzato
Italian adaptation:
CATHERINE: Forse uscii dalla macchina prima di lui come per salvarmi, ma mi sentii spinta verso
un gruppo di alberi che vedevo nella nebbia come se di là qualcuno chiedesse aiuto.
Back translation:
CATHERINE: Perhaps I got out of the car before him as if to save myself, but I felt pushed towards
a group of trees that I saw in the mist as if from there somebody were asking for help.
In the Italian version, Catherine’s act of getting out of the car is not voluntary. We are led to
believe that she is the innocent victim of an act of violence, probably rape. In the dubbed dia-
logue, the young woman gets out of the car come per salvarsi, as if to save herself, and feels pushed
towards the trees. The complex woman character, who in the original is free to determine her
own sexual conduct, is altered in the target version. The episode is mentioned again at the end
of the film, when Catherine’s aunt says “He was a very ordinary married man,” translated as
Era un tipo molto comune di uomo (He was a very ordinary type of man). The Italian late 1950s
audience was evidently not allowed to know the man’s marital status. As a result, a play that had
escaped, almost unaltered, the strictures of the American Hays Code of cinematography7 in its
transfer to the screen, could not be left untouched by the dubbing adapters who, acting as sexist
manipulators, altered, among other important features, the characterization of a woman who did
not fit into the mould of the spotless heroine.
Concluding remarks and future directions

As this article has tried to demonstrate, connecting gender and translation studies with film
and television studies proves to be a fertile area of research. To these domains I would add the
specific field of adaptation studies, important to unveil the various layers of manipulative inter-
ventions in the intersemiotic processes that move written prose fiction or plays into film, while
AVT is more concerned with what is taking place on the screen and in the dubbed or subtitled
or otherwise translated dialogue lines.
Further, the exploration of gender in AVT would benefit from delving more deeply into
analyses of voice properties. This has been a subject of interest in AVT in recent years, but
its connections with gender have as yet been only sparsely investigated. The way voices are
changed across languages and through translation, and how the lack of attention to this side of
adaptation can affect the reception of an audiovisual product are matters of paramount impor-
tance if we wish to grasp the whole picture of the representation of gender in AVT.
Politically incorrect language at the expense of women has been exploited extensively in
cinema and television dialogues for different purposes. This chapter has described some trends
in the use of what is a highly offensive but at the same time liberating language (for some). And
while, in today’s narratives, the verbal denigration of selected women characters may end with
the ultimate ‘victory’ of the feminist heroine over the forces of male evil, the offending words still
hang in the air and one wonders which of the two moments the audiences actually enjoy more,
the final catharsis or the process of liberation from the constraints of politically correct language.
The translation of the words uttered by and to the feminist heroine may have a crucial
importance for the identity the authors are creating for her. At different times and in various
cultures translators and adapters have consciously or unconsciously acted as sexist manipulators
424
by altering dialogue lines which described potentially liberated women in order to comply with
a conservative agenda. The more translators and audiences are aware of the ideological forces
that may be at play in the cross-cultural transfer, the more the heroine can be said to be truly
triumphant.
Further reading
Nelmes, Jill. 2007. Gender and Film, in Jill Nelmes, ed., Introduction to Film Studies. London and New York:
A still valid introduction to gender and film, with analyses of some contemporary classics such as Fight
Club (David Fincher 1999).
Pérez L. de Heredia, María. 2016. Translating Gender Stereotypes: An Overview on Global Telefiction.
Altre Modernità/Other Modernities: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, Special issue edited by Jorge Díaz
Cintas, Ilaria Parini and Irene Ranzato. Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation, 166–181.
This article explores paratextual and textual information involving gendered features, attitudes and
values in television series.
Santaemilia, José, ed. 2014. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. New York: Routledge.
The text presents different aspects of manipulation in the translation of gender, and explores, among
other issues, translation as a feminist practice; the importance of gender-related context in translation;
the construction of national heroism and national identity as male preserve; the emergence of new
reproductive technologies, which are causing fundamental changes in the perception of creativity as a
male domain.
White, Patricia. 1998. Feminism and Film, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibbons, eds., The Oxford
Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 117–131.
An essay which photographs the moment in which once-heated arguments in feminist film studies are
both superseded and become foundational for contemporary debates on gender and popular cinema.
Related topics
Dubbing, subtitling, feminist film studies, gender stereotypes, quality TV, political correctness,
censorship
Notes
1 This is the US version of a qualitatively superior and widely acclaimed UK show (Life on Mars, Mat-
thew Graham et al. 2006–2007), officially by the same authors. According to Kay Richardson (2010,
155), Life on Mars can be regarded as a quality series because it satisfies a number of the characteristics
that Robert Thompson (1996) suggests are typical of this kind of TV shows, namely: a large ensemble
cast; a memory; a new genre formed by mixing old ones; a tendency to be literary and writer based;
textual self-consciousness; subject matter tending towards the controversial; aspiration towards realism; a
quality pedigree; attracting an audience with blue-chip demographics.
2 The number of film and TV scenes quoted in this article is necessarily limited. For the purposes of this
chapter, as well as the titles that are explicitly mentioned, the author has viewed and taken into account
the following telecinematic texts which all prominently feature women in subordinate positions: Batman
Returns (Burton 1992); the James Bond films (Young et al. 1962–2015); The Knick (Amiel and Begler
2014–2015); Masters of Sex (Ashford 2013–2016); and Vinyl ( Jagger et al. 2016).
3 Mad Men is, by popular and critical consensus, one of the best examples of quality television and one of
the best series ever made. It is the subject of various academic essays; see, for example, Melissa Jane Har-
die (2012, 152), who discusses the show’s own interpretation of “the contemporary place of twenty-first
century ‘quality’ television and shows like Mad Men as rejuvenated forms of the pleasing bestseller.”
4 Unless, of course, the story centers on a sexy, beyond-good-and-evil antihero who is allowed a sexist joke
now and then (the Sherlocks or Houses of the eponymous series).
425
Irene Ranzato
5 See also, for example, the comparatively ‘gentler,’ less-raw versions of The Office (Gervais and Merchant
2001–2003, UK; developed by Daniels 2005–2013, USA), Shameless (Abbott 2004–2013, UK; Abbott
2011-in production, USA) and the already cited Prime Suspect.
6 See Flotow and Josephy-Hernández (2019) for an overview which includes classic feminist studies such
as Laura Mulvey’s (1975/1999) on the sexualization of the female body on screen, as well as more recent
feminist critique of film.
7 Particularly strict censorship guidelines in vigour in the USA from 1930 to 1968, originally created by
William H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Association of America.
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Films and TV
Alfie. 1966. [film] UK: Lewis Gilbert.
The Apartment. 1960. [film] USA: Billy Wilder.
Batman Returns. 1992. [film] USA: Tim Burton.
The Crown. 2016-in production. [TV series] UK, USA: Peter Morgan.
The Fall. 2013–2016. [TV series] UK, Ireland: Allan Cubitt.
Fight Club. 1999. [film] USA: David Fincher.
Game of Thrones. 2011-in production. [TV series] USA: David Banioff and D.B. Weiss.
James Bond films. 1962–2015. [film] USA: Terence Young et al.
The Knick. 2014–2015. [TV series] USA: Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Life on Mars. 2006–2007. [TV series] UK: Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan & Ashley Pharoah.
Life on Mars. 2008–2009. [TV series] USA: Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan & Ashley Pharoah.
Mad Men. 2007–2015. [TV series] USA: Matthew Weiner.
Masters of Sex. 2013–2016. [TV series] USA: Michelle Ashford.
The Office. 2001–2003. [TV series] UK: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
427
Irene Ranzato
The Office. 2005–2013. [TV series] USA: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, developed by Greg Daniels.
Police Woman. 1974–1978. [TV series] USA: Robert L. Collins.
Prime Suspect. 1991–2006. [TV series] UK: Lynda La Plante.
Prime Suspect. 2011–2012. [TV series] USA: Alexandra Cunningham and Lynda La Plante.
Shameless. 2004–2013. [TV series] UK: Paul Abbott.
Shameless. 2011-in production. [TV series] USA: Paul Abbott.
Suddenly, Last Summer. 1959. [film] USA: Joseph Mankiewicz.
Vynil. 2016. [TV series] USA: Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter.
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32
Women in audiovisual translation
The Arabic context
Nada Qanbar
Introduction
Feminism was institutionalized in the West long before it reached the Arab world, and the few
instances of grass-roots feminist activism in the Arab World have mostly been met with denun-
ciation and severe criticism, though they did continue to cause small ripples until the Spring
Revolutions that swept large parts of the Arab world in 2011 when women’s participation came
to the fore (von Rohr 2011; cf. Kamal 2016). Young activists condemned the existing women’s
organizations as being “dominated by an older generation” (Care 2013, 11) and started demand-
ing civil states based on equity and social justice. This sociopolitical movement may herald the
birth of a genuine and organic Arab feminist movement where gender parity is fully bridged,
and women in all spheres assume active agency in social disruption.
Given that translation in the Arab world is “a political exercise of a different kind” (Spivak
1999, 406) and that translation does not happen in a vacuum, feminist translation may well
play a role as feminist translators expedite the dissemination and construction of feminist ideas
through the terminology they choose to use (Alsharekh 2016, 274). And their roles in audio-
visual translation are crucial as television, social media and cinema have become major channels
through which prejudiced views and assumptions about some social categories are transmitted
and caused to proliferate (De Marco 2012). These media shape and formulate peoples’ attitudes
making audiovisual mass media a potential ‘culprit’ in perpetuating women’s oppression and
reinforcing discriminatory and misogynistic gender ideologies.
As audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT) is one of the main ways to “transmit values from
one culture to another” (De Marco 2012, 109), it is crucial to shake up and deconstruct deeply
rooted patriarchal attitudes and foster the implantation and absorption of new ideas into the
local culture including the elimination of sexual discrimination in language, which is the aim
of feminist translation practice (Furukawa 2017). There is no doubt that Arab mass media has
taken part in creating and boosting a distorted image of Arab women by depicting negative and
misleading stereotypes (Allam 2008). Not only are negative images circulated through media,
but also terms of address and references that are derogatory or carry sexual connotations about
women have thrived (Qanbar 2016).
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Nada Qanbar
Within this context, and following my earlier line of research on the challenges faced by
women in the Arab world (Qanbar 2012, 2013), where I found that negative stereotypes and
biased speech against women constitute part of the cultural repertoire of some of the Arab com-
munities (Qanbar 2013), I have decided to take my research a step further. This time, through
the lens of a researcher in the field of audiovisual translation, I examine women’s working
conditions as translators, subtitlers, dubbers, and reviewers in several subtitling and dubbing
companies in the Arab world. And while Luise von Flotow and Daniel Josephy-Hernández
(2018) argue that the output of the translation is affected by factors such as the attitudes of
translators and their perception of gender as well as the agendas of the broadcasting network,
this chapter examines how working conditions have an impact on the quality of translation and
on women’s role as agents of change and active members in the field of audiovisual translation,
breaking the stereotypes against them.
In this chapter, ‘gender awareness’ refers to the ability of women and men alike to perceive
and identify certain views and expressions, which might be inherent in the society and in the
language, yet demean one of the sexes. Such views and expressions are usually directed towards
women, and tend to imply that men are intrinsically superior to women and thus more socially
appreciated, more physically and mentally competent. A lack of gender sensitivity leads to the
perpetuation and continuation of discriminatory practices against women. Therefore, one aim
of this chapter is to investigate the extent to which women working in the field are aware of
the sexist images and expressions contained in the audiovisual texts they translate and explore
whether they take a stand towards mitigating them. These texts may not be on women or
women-related issues specifically but may include any text of any type that contains as little as
one derogatory word or expression or stereotype.
Translation studies and gender studies are two different disciplines, each having their own theo-
retical considerations. However, since the entry of the concept of gender into the field of trans-
lation in the late 1980s (Flotow 2010), induced by the rise of feminism and gender awareness in
the 1970s and, inter alia, the reflection on the gendered role of language (Kate James 2011), the
traditional boundaries between translation and gender have been crossed and a considerable vol-
ume of academic literature and research in the field of translation began to focus on the concept
of gender in translation (e.g. Flotow 1991; Chamberlain 1992). The Canadian feminist transla-
tion ‘school,’ which foregrounded the landscape of gender-sensitive translation (Godard 1990;
Flotow 1997; among others), advocates that feminist ideology be integrated into translation in
an attempt to deconstruct conventional meanings and ‘patriarchal language’ in order to make
room for women’s words to develop and be heard (Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. 2001, 74). This
school’s proposal became “the universal paradigm of feminist translation” (Castro 2009) allow-
ing feminist translators to confront androcentric texts ( James 2011) and, thus, to adopt various
interventionist translational strategies such as “prefaces, footnotes, commentaries, omissions and
substitutions” (Kamal 2018, 134). The feminist Arab translator Hala Kamal views translation
as an act of “re-writing . . . representation, and . . . interpretation” (Kamal 2008, 258), and “not
merely an act of transferring information, but a process of knowledge production” (254). In her
work, she consciously and intentionally includes a “[N]ote on Translation to offer an explana-
tion of the process that governed the selection of equivalents in the translation of gender-related
terminology” (258). In light of this new approach, feminist translators have become conscious
of the translation strategies that can help repudiate patriarchal language and make changes to
traditional views on women.
430
However, the active and heated discussions related to gender sensitivity in translation in the
West hardly conform with or fit the Arabic scene. While Western feminism is widening its
linguistic and cultural borders to include concepts like gender, queer and gynocriticism, Arabic
feminist engagement with the act of translation still cannot be traced. Arab feminists are still
fighting to agree on domestic equivalent terms for ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ (Alsharekh 2016).
The theoretical underpinning of mainstream feminist thought is seen to be Western-based,
which makes feminist activism a target of severe criticism and denunciation. It has been claimed
that the movement is not representative of the situation of most Arab women (Carol Giacomo
2012), and many of the movement’s leaders have been accused of immorality and of being neo-
colonial agents because they promote Western values (Care 2013,16). Given this cultural and
linguistic rigidity, Arab women translators have little room to move within the field of written
translation, let alone the new field of AVT.
The field of AVT has been rising in scope and significance, but it largely remains a Euro-
pean research pursuit (Pilar Orero 2004). In the Arab world, AVT as a profession and a field of
research is still rather invisible. However, the increase in the need and scope for subtitled and
dubbed English programs and entertainment channels in the wake of the satellite revolution in
the 1990s in the Arab World does not correspond to the continuing invisibility of AVT in the
Arab world. Although translation studies as an academic domain has gained ground in the Arab
world with established translators, university departments and (non)government-sponsored
institutes, AVT is still not recognized as a specialization of TS (Gamal 2014), or a discipline
that has its own principles, norms and theoretical underpinnings. Translation departments in
Arab universities do not have units for AVT (except for an AVT Master program which was
inaugurated in Qatar in 2014). There is not even an Arabic word equivalent to the word ‘sub-
titler.’ AVT remains a personal interest of some faculty and has not attracted academic interest
or training opportunities (Gamal 2015). And those who earned their degrees in AVT from
non-Arabic universities have focused largely on the linguistic or cultural issues of subtitling or
dubbing, disregarding other topics at the heart of AVT such as technical considerations, other
forms of AVT modes like audio description (AD), subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing
audience (SDHA), re-speaking and localization as well as the sociology of the AVT profession
(the human agent, the working conditions, workplace environment, freelance work, rates, norms
and conventions, assignment of work, and editing).
Current issues and topics

Upon reviewing the studies conducted in the field of gender and translation, I found that the
topic of women (or gender) in AVT is not only under-researched in the Arab world but also
in Europe (Flotow and Josephy-Hernández 2018, 269). The direction of most AVT research in
the field has been on the processes of subtitling/dubbing certain linguistic features into certain
languages, or on comparing the translation of the different modes of AVT, or on the technical
constraints of these modes. Flotow and Josephy-Hernández (2018) note that so far there seem
to be three main trajectories for studying gender in audiovisual content. The first focuses on
how the translation of Anglo-American genderlects are rendered into Romance languages; the
second looks at the differences between the output of subtitled and dubbed versions of Anglo-
American texts; and the third studies queer source materials and uncovers whether translated
texts match the neologisms and the flagrantly queer references of the source texts.
Marcella De Marco is one of the first scholars to investigate gender in AVT in her 2006
study of three films which had been subtitled and dubbed into Spanish and Italian. She explored
whether the films chosen for the study contained and displayed stereotypes through the language
431
Nada Qanbar
they used, and if such stereotypes were left unmodified or modified in the dubbed and subtitled
versions. She found that these films contained clear examples of stereotypes which disclosed
general discriminatory views.
De Marco’s findings concerning the translations were confirmed by subsequent works of
scholars such as Feral (2011) who investigated the way certain feminine elements were modified
or kept neutral in AVT. She analyzed aspects of North American feminism as constructed in a
US television series and their renderings into the French dubbing and subtitles, and found that
the original terms were kept in the subtitles, while they were deleted or watered down in the
dubbing versions. Her conclusion was to call for the incorporation of a feminist approach into
AVT research so that subtle gender values would be identified and addressed.
De Marco (2006) noticed, while teaching subtitling to university students, that problems of
social discrimination and marginalization arise in the classroom. The classroom thus constitutes
the optimal place for raising awareness of the issues around gender. To integrate gender and
identity-related issues within the curriculum of the subtitling module, she assigned students
tasks involving the translation of clips containing gender discussions to gauge students’ aware-
ness of gender-biased expressions as well as their capacity to identify them and make sensible
decisions about whether to reproduce them in their own language. Most of the students’ trans-
lations were literal and the students seemed unaware of gender nuances. De Marco found that
the majority of her students thought gender had no bearing on subtitling practices and were
hardly aware of the extent to which AVT might affect /be affected by factors related to gender.
However, the question of how prejudicial views against women are transmitted via AVT is
not fully explored in the literature to date. De Marco (2012) published an analysis of how AVT
contributes to exporting gender stereotypes across cultures and to what extent the Spanish and
Italian translations of selected exchanges “reproduced, softened, reinforced” or eliminated the
strength of certain allusions to gender. The strong interdisciplinary connection between AVT
and Gender Studies on which her analysis is based allowed De Marco to pinpoint gender preju-
dices, how they are perpetuated through dubbing and subtitling, and how challenging it is to
translate an exchange containing a sexist or derogatory reference, whose meaning is strongly
tied to its contextual culture.
Questions related to the social force of translation in social activism and political dissent, and
its link to gender have lately been raised and addressed in the Arab World post Arab Spring in
2011 (Baker 2016). Leil-Zahra Mortada (2016) came up with a film project in which women
participating in the Egyptian revolution in 2011 were interviewed to voice their experiences.
Their speech was subtitled into different languages and this was justified not as an issue of dis-
seminating information but as an integral part of a postcolonial and feminist commitment, and
a step towards empowering women by connecting them to networks of political movements
across borders.
Ideological and economic pressures that define the profession of translation are believed to
create a gap between theory and practice. Olga Castro (2012), for example, attempted to assess
whether feminist linguistic practices were adopted or dismissed during translation. She analyzed
two translations of the same text, with one containing an inclusive translation, and the other
containing gendered markers that are gender-exclusive. The publisher approved the latter on
grounds of fidelity to the source and the objectivity of translator. This implies that factors other
than ideology are at play during translation. Besides economic considerations, the gendered
working conditions of translators also affect the outcome of translation.
Fotios Karamitroglou’s work (2000) is an example of a macro-contextual research into AVT
that considers the human agents, the market, the institutions involved, as well as the relationship
between gender and AVT. His research focuses on the patterns found in the field of audiovisual
432
translation, and how these patterns affect decisions about which type of audiovisual translation
to use: subtitling or revoicing. Another study by Szu-Yu Kuo (2014) focusing on the profes-
sional reality of subtitlers in Europe and their working conditions, did not provide any discus-
sion of women as subtitlers, though they constituted most of his data. This negligence may be
attributable to gender awareness not being a part of this project.
Interestingly enough, in one of his recent papers, Muhammad Gamal (2015) states that AVT
in Arabic has become his primary research area and he has been devoted to comprehensively
examining this field and its context in the Arab world. However, upon examining his body
of research, it is evident that he has not paid any attention to women translators in the AVT
industry.

In this chapter, two interrelated research questions are explored to address women’s status in
AVT in the Arab World:
1 What are the profiles and working conditions of women translators of AV products in the
Arab world?
2 Are Arab women translators aware of the biased views and stereotypes transmitted through
audiovisual texts during their dubbing and subtitling processes?
To answer the first question, a total of 36 people (32 women and 4 men) responded to a ques-
tionnaire (see Appendix A) on the profiles and working conditions of AV translators, and six
company managers/owners were interviewed in Jordan in 2016. The first finding was that the
majority of AV translators in the six Arab companies surveyed (94.7%) are women (Figure 32.1).
This was entirely unexpected before the initiation of the study as one might expect this field to
be dominated by men as are most fields of work in the Arab world (Moghadam 2014).
women men
Figure 32.1 Ratio of women to men in AVT companies surveyed in Jordan
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Nada Qanbar
When this issue was raised with the company owners/managers, they provided a number
of reasons for the much higher employment rate of women in AV translation and the lower
presence of men, and almost all of them stated that translation needs saber wa ihsas bilmasouliyah
(patience and responsibility) and believed women mutfaneen fi amalahom wa la yefawtu maweed
altasleem (are more committed to their work and less likely to miss a deadline). The owner of
one of the oldest AV companies in the Arab world thought the general attitude of male transla-
tors might explain the situation. For example, he suggested that men usually aspire to managerial
work and shun the translation profession as they see no professional development in the job,
thinking that a translator will remain a translator for their lifetime. Another manager clarified
that while men seek full-time jobs with a stable income, women who work for her company are
typically ‘mothers’ taking care of their families. This means they can work from home as free-
lancers, an arrangement that also proves beneficial for the company as it lessens the company’s
financial burden. The company does not have to pay for vacations, for example. She thought that
men do not consider AVT lucrative employment, viewing it as badly paid compared to written
translation, which seems to be paid at a much higher rate, even though AVT is quite a special-
ized way of working and requires completely different skills.
Another reason for the dominance of women translators in AVT is, I would argue, the that
majority of women university graduates in Arab countries, come from university Faculties of
Foreign Languages. This corresponds with Christina Schäffner (2013, 146) who states that “lan-
guage and education have traditionally been ‘feminine’ subjects.” For example, at the University
of Jordan, the number of graduates of the Faculty of Foreign Languages in 2015 was 155, of
which 130 were women and 25 men (The University of Jordan 2016). Therefore, it makes sense
that those who are most likely to join a translation career are women and such figures suggest
that this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
At first glance, this prevalence of women in the field could be interpreted as a healthy sign of
women’s participation in the workforce. However, it could also be argued that the dominance of
women in this profession is, in fact, an example of how women’s circumstances can be exploited.
The overwhelming majority of women in my sample were young (within the age category of
25–40 years) (84%), mothers (78%), university degree holders (83%) (though quite a number of
them had majored in fields other than translation), and with a minimum of three years’ work
experience (80%). Their profiles should be of value to any company they work for, and indeed,
their employers, as ascertained through the six interviews, unanimously see these women as
hardworking, committed, flexible, punctual, and efficient.
However, based on findings from the questionnaire the working conditions of these transla-
tors are disappointing: almost all of them (both freelancers and in-house) work without a writ-
ten contract, which leaves them deprived of many benefits to which they should be entitled,
such as a stable income, sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacation, pensions, and other benefits.
As most of them are freelancers (70%), they are confined to home and work in isolation. They
are underpaid when one considers the time consumed and mental effort invested in audiovisual
translation when compared to written translation. Work is assigned regardless of their prefer-
ences or expertise. No extra remuneration is given when tight deadlines are imposed, or when
a difficult specialized text is assigned. The women are not provided with any kind of vocational
training opportunities to upgrade their skills in this growing field, nor are they given written
guidelines so that consistent high-quality work may be produced; only four respondents (14.3%)
had received company guidelines. The managers mentioned that the task of modifying certain
expressions or softening them is yutrak lehads al-mutarjem (left to the translators’ discretion) as they
are all assumed to be sensitive to the nature of Arab culture and Islamic society. These women’s
work is not officially or publicly acknowledged nor given proper credit. And it is not only their
434
work that is not acknowledged, but their experience and qualifications are not rewarded either.
All of them, according to the managers, are paid the same regardless of the years of experience or
qualifications. With these poor working conditions and a lack of a career path, it seems that these
translators are relegated to a pink-collar ghetto, though the nature of their work is noteworthy,
powerful in regard to communications, and carries a high level of responsibility.
These results led me to question how such poor conditions affect these women’s gender
awareness and sensitivity to the subtle prejudices against women prevalent in the texts they
translate. I devised a tool that would help me gauge this awareness. I designed seven sample
English sentences taken from natural speech (see Appendix B), three of which contained sexist
expressions. The rest of the sentences included expressions and words that are considered taboos
in the Arab world (religion, politics, and sex (Giles 2012, 287; Qanbar 2011). Translators usually
avoid translating words or expressions related to these categories. For example, according to the
guidelines of one of the most renowned Arab-based channels, only words related to sex, religion,
and politics are banned. This means that sexist expressions and hate speech against women lie
outside of this ‘triangle’ and are not considered discriminatory or abusive.
The real purpose of the translation test was not stated so that participants would not
be directed to translate in a certain way. Instead, the instructions said the study was meant to
determine how certain idioms are translated from English into Arabic. I included idioms in each
of the six sentences and underlined them so the respondents would be distracted from paying
attention to the inclusion of taboos and sexist expressions. I intended to make the sentences
short and easy to translate to facilitate the task for them.
The translation test was given via email to (12) females working for different AVT compa-
nies. After receiving the completed translations, I talked with nine of them to better understand
the reasons behind their choices. Their responses were interesting.
All of the translators to a certain degree modified what they believed to be offensive and
inappropriate, except for the sentences that contained biased views against women. When their
attention was later drawn to these biased views, all the respondents claimed that they should
be loyal to the source text. Therefore, even when a woman translator succeeded in spotting a
discriminatory attitude or a sexist expression, she reacted passively. She prioritized adherence to
the source text over changing a degrading expressions and sexist views for a non-sexist solution.
Such behaviour supports my argument that women are both victims of a deep-rooted patriar-
chal system and agents in perpetuating and condoning this system. They are not ‘aware’ that they
should be aware of their agency as a driving force for change in long-established malpractices
against them. By adopting the prevalent men’s practices, they become ‘culprits’ in re-producing
the bias against themselves (Qanbar 2012). After long periods of marginalization and repression,
women seem to accept men’s attitudes towards them, and many defend men’s biased attitudes by
providing normatively acceptable explanations for men’s attitudes and practices.
Considering the poor working conditions of these women, the answer to the second question
related to their gender sensitivity and awareness of derogatory and sexist terms or stereotypes
against women is not completely surprising. I found that the lack of gender sensitivity under-
standing amongst them can, in part, be directly linked to their work conditions. It is undeniable
that these working conditions, particularly underpayment is a manifestation of an asymmetrical
power relationship between workers and employers where profit is the driving force behind any
business and both genders can be the victim of this capitalist system, but men have other options
and have more freedom of mobility (Moghadam 2014). Based on the interviews with their
managers, most of the managers implied that they prefer women over men because they accept
the status quo. Most of them are mothers and are juggling responsibilities between work and
home. It is no wonder then that these women are deprived of the time to develop intellectual
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Nada Qanbar
luxury to ponder upon sophisticated issues like gender sensitivity, and the poorer their work
conditions, the lower their engagement. Moreover, and most importantly, these women have to
be seen in the cultural and historical context of the Arab World – they are products of a deeply
rooted patriarchal system, where many discriminatory practices are justified and have been
normalized and codified. In this context, gender sensitivity can hardly be expected. Being loyal
and true to the text means being loyal and true to what they have long been programmed and
indoctrinated to believe in and do. The correlation between their poor work conditions and
lack of gender awareness is subtle but established: women should be conforming to the ‘norms’.
The question of women’s gender sensitivity and gender awareness in AVT will not, therefore,
be truly addressed unless working conditions in this field are improved at all levels. Associa-
tions and unions for audiovisual translators that negotiate better conditions for the translators
need to form and bring about change in the working conditions – for men and women alike.
Furthermore, gender sensitivity needs to be brought to the attention of the managers of AVT
companies as well as translators. A demeaning term or expression against women should be con-
sidered just as offensive as other taboo or face-threatening words in the Arab world and should
be modified or left untranslated on screen. This may help eliminate views against women that
have been instilled in the collective mindsets of Arabs and that sometimes result in undesirable
practices against women. It is hoped that this research will lay foundations for the empowerment
of women audiovisual translators by finding ways to improve their work conditions and encour-
aging their roles as agents who can contribute towards eliminating biased attitudes against them-
selves, thus creating a more balanced society based on equity and justice.
Future directions
The scope of this chapter is limited to the Arab context. The chapter discusses the working
conditions of only Arab women working in the AVT field in the Arab region and their gender
sensitivity. The results are thus only representative of AVT in the Arab world. The small number
of the participants in the study is due to the limited AVT companies in the Arab World which
seem to be concentrated in Egypt, the Levant and the Gulf (Emirates). The number of AV
translators is thus small. Furthermore, it was difficult to reach out to many translators as they are
freelancers and some companies I contacted were reluctant to give their employees’ contacts.
A potential future avenue of research could compare the profiles and working conditions of
Arab AV women translators with those of AV women translators in other parts of the world.
This would offer further insight into the social and cultural factors controlling women’s work.
Further research could use the same methodology and tools with other AV companies in dif-
ferent Arab countries that are not included in this survey in order to increase the sample. Eth-
nographic field work involving a researcher observing the companies and the women at work,
developing more refined tools, and speaking to the people involved about sexism, unions, the
role of women in society and the work force, would be helpful in yielding more conclusive
results. Other research could also focus on analyzing subtitled or dubbed texts translated by
women, in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis and multimodality, for example, in order
to see real examples of translation. A study could be taken further by having graduates reflect
on their roles in perpetuating stereotypes and raising awareness of the transformative power of
translation. It would also be valuable if this research could be extended to a comparison between
men and women translators in terms of their profiles as well as awareness towards gender-related
issues and examine any difference in the way they address these issues.
Finally, it is wise to acknowledge that changing mentalities is a long process requiring a
commitment that should be taken up by educational systems. In the understanding that it is
436
difficult to change ingrained beliefs and entrenched social orders, it may be the role of research
to call attention to delicate matters such as those addressed in this chapter. Feminist awareness,
“involves knowledge and activism through intellectual realization, solidarity and resistance, and
action towards social change” (Kamal 2016, 6). If children are exposed to questions about gender
inclusive language from an early age, and if translator training at university level makes a point
of demonstrating the political and social power of the trade, then, there may be hope that new
professionals with a new degree of awareness may become agents of change, thus contributing
to a more balanced society that will respect men and women alike, allowing both to give more
of themselves towards greater equality and progress.
Related topics
Arab women, audiovisual translation, gender awareness, feminist translation
Further reading
Alsharek, Alanoud. 2016. Instigating Social Change: Translating Feminism in the Arab World and India.
QScience Connect, Special issue on Translating the Gulf: Beyond Fault Lines. http://dx.doi.org/10.5339/
connect.2016.tii.2
This paper looks at the importance of translation in gender studies and the hurdles and triumphs that
were experienced by translators working in India and Arab World.
De Marco, Marcella. 2016. The ‘Engendering’ Approach in Audiovisual Translation. Target, 28(6), 314–325.
The article discusses the extent to which such interdisciplinary area as gender studies, film studies and
translation and an ‘engendering’ approach may contribute to building a valid methodological frame-
work within which AVT can be explored. It highlights the limitations imposed by the difficulty of
applying the same approach to the study of AVT in which gender priorities are not perceived as impor-
tant as other professional priorities.
Furukawa, Hiroko. 2017. De-Feminizing Translation: To Make Women Visible in Japanese Translation,
in Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons.
Gaines, Jane. n.d. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory. Available at: www.ejumpcut.
org/archive/onlinessays/JC41folder/DeviantEyesBodiesRev.html [Accessed 20 Dec. 2017].
Furukawa argues that while Western feminist translation seeks to make the feminine visible in language,
Japanese translation conventions have ‘over-feminized’ certain types of text by deploying a romanticized
language (for women characters only). The ‘Western’ impetus thus requires reconsideration.
Flotow, Luise von and Daniel Josephy-Hernández. 2018. Gender in Audiovisual Translation Studies:
Advocating for Gender Awareness, in Luis Perez-Gonzalez, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual
Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 296–311.
This chapter discusses gender in feminist film studies and as a topic in AVT studies and shows that
research so far has demonstrated how sensitive and political gendered language is in every culture, and
that researchers are advocating the importance of ‘gender awareness’ in AVT.
References
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Alsharek, Alanoud. 2016. Instigating Social Change: Translating Feminism in the Arab World and India.
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APPENDIX A
QUESTIONNAIRE
Good Day! I am examining the status of audiovisual translation in the Arab world for research
purposes. Your responses and the information you will provide are of crucial importance to my
research. You will need five minutes to fill out this questionnaire. Your responses will only be
used for survey purposes, and will not be marked in any way that would identify you. Thank
you very much for your time and suggestions.
1 Sex:
2 Marital status:
3 Language combinations you translate from/into:
4 Age:
• Below 25 years old
• Between 25–30
• Between 31–35
• Between 36–40
• Between 41–45
• Between 46–50
• Over 51 years old
5 Highest educational attainment:
• Diploma
• University Degree
• Master
• PhD
• Other (Please specify)
6 Specializations:
• Translation
• Audio-visual translation
• Other (please specify)
440
7 Experience:
• Below 1 year
• 1 year and under 3 years
• 3 years and under 5 years
• 20 years or more
8 Type of work:
• (In-house) full time
• Part time
• Freelancing
9 Type of contract:
• Verbal agreement
• Signed-up contract
10 Nature of work:
• Translation
• Script Writing
• Dubbing
• Editing/Proofreading
• Timecoding
11 Genre/nature of text:
• Soap Operas
• Movies
• Shows
• Documentaries
• Adventure Shows
12 Assignment of work:
• Self
• Company
• Client
13 Working hours:
• Less than 10 hours a day
• 10 hours a day
• More than 10 hours a day
14 Frequency of work:
• On a daily basis
• On a weekly basis
441
Nada Qanbar
• On a monthly basis
15 Way of payment:
• Per minute
• Per hour
• A day
• A month
16 Payment date:
• On the delivery of the work
• Within 30 days
• Within 60 days
• Within 90 days
• More than 90 days
17 Who sets the Rate?
• You
• Company
• Client
18 In cases of short notices and tight deadlines, are you awarded:
• Extra payment
• Regular payment
19 Software/manner of translation:
• Pen and paper
• Professional software (please specify)
• Free online downloadable software (please specify)
20 Are you given any of the following supporting materials:
• Glossary
• Script
• No thing
21 Are you provided with professional training?
• Always
• Sometimes
• Rarely
• Never
22 Is your name acknowledged in the work?
• Always
• Sometimes
• Rarely
• Never
442
APPENDIX B
TRANSLATION TEST
1 Jesus Christ! A killer still on the loose. Kenny, tell me I’m dreaming.
2 Bring your little sexy ass over here again. Last time, it made my day.
3 “She is an excellent manager, for a woman. The women on our staff – those who haven’t
left to become stay-at-home mothers – are hard-working and loyal” (Heaps n.d). Getting
them into the firm is like the icing on the cake.
4 This ham sandwich is the best thing since sliced bread.
5 I don’t believe all this shit coming from the government. What we need is people who are
really on the ball. These guys know nothing about what’s going on.
6 Don’t blame it on me. This disaster was all your fault. Who, on earth, trusts women anyway?
They never think sensibly. They are all half-minded.
7 Karen. Give it up. It’s not nice to play football. You must start behaving like a proper
woman.
443
33
Gender in war video games
The linguacultural representation
and localization of female roles
between reality and fictionality
Silvia Pettini
1 Introduction
Video games are expressive computational media which service representational goals akin to
literature, art, and film. Through the unique persuasive power of “procedural rhetoric,” they
make claims about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience, which influence
players’ conceptions of the world (Bogost 2007). For example, they “are important symbolic sites
for conveying messages about appropriate gender roles and perceptions of social reality” (Cun-
ningham 2012, 407). Through engaging with specifically gendered game worlds, players “gain
substantial knowledge of gender attributes [. . .] and extract rules as to what types of behaviour
are considered appropriate for their gender” (Bussey and Bandura 1999, 696) or, one might add,
for any other gender.
War video games offer players entertaining experiences of “gendered militarism” (Robinson
2016), whose aesthetic and narrative dimensions are framed in strongly androcentric terms.
Virtual armed conflict is a predominantly masculine setting, combat is a masculine act, military
heroism is a masculine trait, and significant emphasis is placed on the links between militaris-
tic values and manhood. Gendered militarism is played out on very simulated battlefields and
takes shape in the more or less realistic representations of warfare. As Matthew Payne explains,
military-themed video games may indeed represent real, near-real or fantastic conflicts but they
are all overly militarized worlds: players eliminate human threats on behalf of their country, usu-
ally the USA, or alien foes in an imaginary world and “these are not mere cosmetic distinctions.
Rather, these differences determine how games are understood as relating to reality or not”
(2016, 5). Indeed, according to Payne (2016, 46), these differences affect players’ expectations
concerning the relationship between war games’ experiences and the reality of war, or between
games’ representations of war and their understanding of it, because they determine whether
and how players can make connections between the game world and the real world to meaning-
fully interpret the political, social, and cultural content that war games implicitly or explicitly
transmit through procedural representations (Bogost 2007).
More notably, wargaming is a commercial and cultural phenomenon globally. No video
game genre has been more popular or more lucrative in recent years than the military shooter.
444
According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA 2018, 12), it was the best-selling
genre of 2017, accounting for 26% of all video game sales in the USA. Given the market-driven
nature of the game industry, as Payne underlines (2016, 153), this genre’s popularity is closely
connected with the male hardcore consumer base. Indeed, 61% of US game purchasers are male
(ESA 2018, 13). In other words, it seems to be the (stereo)typical target gamer, as often presented
in popular media, who makes military shooters an almost exclusively male space, with only 7%
of players being female (Yee 2017).
War has been an integral theme of multimedia interactive entertainment since the very
beginning. Gerald A. Voorhees states that the shooting genre is “one of the most notorious, and
certainly the oldest, type of video games” (2014, 251). After all, “Spacewar!, developed in 1961
by Steve Russell et al. [. . .], was the first [shooting] video game” (ibid.). Moreover, as Voorhees
remarks, shooters, in Bob Rehak’s words “feature prominently” (2007, 193) also among the most
controversial areas of gaming, generating much discussion in both public and scholarly circles
concerned with the medium’s impact on society (Voorhees 2014, 253).
As vehicles of militarism, war video games have attracted considerable interdisciplinary aca-
demic attention (Halter 2006; Huntemann and Payne 2010; Mead 2013; Voorhees et al. 2012,
among others). Of special interest is the way their contents affect an audience of “virtual citizen-
soldier[s]” (Stahl 2010, 21), the militaristic messages male players internalize, and the extent to
which these games impact on social values and relations of power, such as race, ethnicity, and
gender (Robinson 2016, 271), the latter being surprisingly understudied.
Similarly, the linguacultural dimension of gender in war games is a neglected area of investi-
gation and, more generally, little scholarly attention has been given to gender from a linguistic
or translational viewpoint. Apart from a few case studies (Czech 2013; Maxwell-Chandler and
O’Malley-Deming 2012, 315–326; Pettini 2018; Šiaučiūnė and Liubinienė 2011), no systematic
and large-scale research has been performed so far.
In this light, from the perspective of game localization (Bernal-Merino 2015; O’Hagan and
Mangiron 2013), this chapter aims to stimulate academic debate on the topic by investigating
the relationship between the biological concept and sociocultural construct known as ‘gen-
der,’ as well as language and translation in international mainstream wargaming. It examines
the narrative weight and the linguacultural representation of female characters in a corpus of
three story-driven military-themed games, namely Medal of Honor Warfighter (Danger Close,
Electronic Arts 2012), Battlefield 4 (DICE, Electronic Arts 2013) and Mass Effect 3 (BioWare,
Electronic Arts 2012), which have been selected to simulate a reality-fictionality spectrum of
war games, as will be discussed in Section 3.
For these purposes, this study offers a background content analysis of female roles in the
games’ storylines, based on a working taxonomy adapted from Edward Downs and Stacy L.
Smith (2010, 724–725) and Teresa Lynch et al. (2016), which classifies the female cast into
‘primary’, i.e. player-controlled, ‘secondary’, and ‘background’ characters, depending first, on
their playable nature, and second, on their either active or passive role in virtual warfare. Due to
the importance of this text-type in narrative-driven games (Christou et al. 2011, 40), the study
focuses on parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving female characters and compares the
original US English version with the Italian and Spanish localizations by adopting a corpus-
driven descriptive analytical approach to translation. Thus, the final objective is to provide a
quantitative and qualitative account of the female linguacultural dimension in typically male-
gendered militarized game worlds.
Section 2 briefly outlines this chapter’s theoretical framework and discusses the main gender-
related challenges and issues in game localization. Section 3 illustrates the most important
features of the corpus under investigation, with special attention to methodological aspects.
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Silvia Pettini
Section 4 explores the roles female characters play in the three games’ storylines and serves as
the background content analysis for Section 5, which quantitatively and qualitatively examines
their linguacultural representation in the corpus.
2 Gender in game localization

Game localization is a specialized translation area combining elements of audiovisual trans-
lation and software localization, which presents remarkable medium-specific challenges and
constraints. The multimedia nature of video games, the limited access to the original game, to
reference material and extratextual information concerning game contents, the multi-textual
variety of game assets, and textual non-linearity to allow interactivity are only some of the
unique issues translators deal with in this realm.
In regard to gender, its cross-linguistic representation in game texts proves to be especially
difficult in the translation from English into Romance languages. The transfer from a language
where gender is mainly a semantic category into languages where gender is also a grammatical
category (Hellinger and Bußmann 2001) means complying with the TL mandatory agree-
ment that establishes a morpho-syntactic relation between one gendered referent and all associ-
ated elements, such as articles, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs, through grammatical marking or
inflection. Without adequate co-textual and contextual information, translating gender in game
texts may be a blindfolded task, potentially causing inconsistencies and incorrect sentences across
different languages (Bernal-Merino 2015, 147–152; Heimburg 2006, 142–151; O’Hagan and
Mangiron 2013, 132–134). Consequently, a number of developers and localization agencies have
started to use a programming metalanguage consisting of variables, a set of codes and characters
that mark gender-variable strings with tags, generally ‘M’ for male and ‘F’ for female between
brackets, serving as computing instructions that allow the game engine to display gender-
specific strings correctly. This system is fundamental when translating gender-customizable games,
which enable players to select either a male or female avatar, since their choice theoretically
affects all linguistic items referring to the playable character. For example, as the dialogue line
in (2) shows in Section 5.3, the translation of the adjective ‘proud’ in ‘I’m proud of all of you’ is
contained within gender variables in the two localizations. Accordingly, it will be displayed as
either ‘fiero’ if male or ‘fiera’ if female in Italian, and as either ‘orgulloso’ if male and ‘orgullosa’
if female in Spanish. However, although variables pose the most evident and medium-specific
challenge, they represent only one example of the gender-related phenomena worth explor-
ing in game localization research. Indeed, in translation, as Sections 5.2 and 5.3 evidence, other
issues emerge from linguacultural-specific approaches to gender equality, exhibited in the use
or non-use of “gender-inclusive language” or “gender-fair language.” The latter concept, in
particular, is borrowed from psycholinguistics (see Sczesny et al. 2016) as a working definition
to mean a tool aimed at reducing gender stereotyping and discrimination and able to influence
people’s gendered perception of reality. The objective of gender-fair language is the symmetric
representation of women and men through language, and especially in regard to female charac-
ters, the use of feminine forms that make female referents visible.
3 The reality-fictionality corpus of war video games

This chapter examines a reality-fictionality spectrum of three war video games, purposefully
selected according to the following three major criteria: (1) local distribution, i.e. all games
were officially released in Italy and Spain; (2) time proximity, i.e. all games were published in
a two-year period (2012–2013), in order to limit the implications of constant technological
446
advancement on localization and, consequently, on this research; (3) genre and subgenre-related
characteristics with respect to the degree of reality or fictionality of game contents. As regards
genre, all titles belong to the ‘action’ macrogenre and in terms of gameplay subgenre they fall
into the category of shooters. Nevertheless, while Medal of Honor Warfighter (MoHW hereafter)
and Battlefield 4 (BF4 hereafter) are ‘first-person shooters’ proper, Mass Effect 3 (ME3 hereafter)
is a mixed genre game combining the typical elements of role-playing with those of shooters in
a third-person perspective (Patterson 2015).
With reference to narrative genre and to the degree of reality or fictionality of their game
worlds, they all depict war settings. These range from conflicts based on actual events like
in MoHW, which represents the topical global war on terror, to near-future conflicts based
on believable international tensions like in BF4, whose theme is a political-fiction 2020 war
between the USA, Russia and China, to fantastical conflicts set in the distant future, as in ME3,
which presents a science-fiction 2186 war to save the Galaxy from alien invasion. The degree
of reality or fictionality of game contents was evaluated on the basis of working criteria adapted
from what Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams (2003, 60–75) describe as the most important
dimensions of a game world: (1) the physical dimension that represents the places where the
story-driven action unfolds and where the player moves her/his avatar; (2) the temporal dimen-
sion that indicates the time of the story-driven action; and (3) the cultural dimension that refers
to “the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the people in the game world hold, as well as their
political and religious institutions, social organisation, and so on” (Rollings and Adams 2003,
69). Accordingly, as Figure 33.1 shows, depending on the relationship between the real world
and the game world, the three titles can be positioned on the spectrum axis as follows: MoHW
and ME3 represent the realistic left-hand edge and the fictional right-hand edge of the axis
respectively, while the political-fiction BF4 occupies the central position.
Moreover, the games in the corpus share the following features: seriality, they all belong to
popular long-running game franchises, namely Medal of Honor (1999–2012), Battlefield (2002–
Present), Mass Effect (2007–Present); as for target audience or age rating, they are all labelled
‘Mature’ according to the US Entertainment Software Rating Board and, more relevantly, ‘18’
according to the Pan-European Game Information system; in regard to the platform, they are all
multiplatform titles but this paper examines their console versions; they all present single-player
mode of play, as opposed to online multiplayer; they boast high production value and global sales
(VGChartz 2019); and they were all released by Electronic Arts, the US publishing giant which
provided the researcher with the three games’ localization databases.
In terms of localization levels (Maxwell-Chandler and O’Malley-Deming 2012, 8–10),
MoHW and BF4 are fully localized into Italian and Spanish, i.e. all game assets are translated,
and the original audio is dubbed, while ME3 is fully localized into Italian and partially localized
into Spanish, i.e. all game assets are translated, but the audio is subtitled.
With respect to methodology, as Mike Schmierbach (2009, 148) notes, the interactive nature
of video games introduces several challenges to the analyses of their content. This is particularly
true in game translation research because, as mentioned in Section 2, in order to give players
authorial agency in the storytelling process, game texts are non-linear: they consist of separate
and independent strings, that are displayed in different locations of the product in response
MoHW BF4 ME3
reality fictionality
Figure 33.1 The reality-fictionality spectrum axis
447
Silvia Pettini
to the player’s actions and which often do not have a clear meaning outside the context of
the game (Bernal-Merino 2015, 141–146). Text fragmentation manifests itself in the Excel
spreadsheets or databases translators usually work on, with little or no recourse to co-textual or
contextual information about game contents. This non-linearity also represents a challenge for
researchers, especially when dealing with story-driven games and focusing on dialogues as text
type, as in this chapter. Consequently, for the purposes of this study, three walkthroughs of the
games were selected to create the corpus: one per game, played by three different Italian gamers
and uploaded as videos on their personal YouTube channels.1
Since the players remained independent of the research, this technique also involved avoid-
ing bias in content capture (Schmierbach 2009). The overall duration of each of these online
resources, accounting for a total of 1,241 minutes (20:41:02 in the format hh:mm:ss), was divided
into four parts, necessary adjustments were made and 40% of each walkthrough was analyzed,
namely the first 10%, the fourth 10%, the seventh 10%, and the final 10%. The objective was
to include fundamental components of the storytelling process, i.e. the beginning and the end,
together with middle sections. Thus, the overall playtime of the corpus is 484 minutes (08:04:00
in the format hh:mm:ss). In order to make dialogues linear and meaningful, thanks to the origi-
nal databases provided by Electronic Arts, the strings uttered by game characters during the four
sections selected were chronologically arranged in English, Italian and Spanish by adopting the
Italian version as the point of reference. Given the authenticity of the database, double-checking
the accuracy of the dialogue script in English and Spanish was not necessary. Moreover, due to
the very interactive nature of video games, unless gamers are commissioned by the researcher
and asked to play the game by performing exactly the same actions, it is highly unlikely to
find three identical walkthroughs across languages. For this reason, the Italian localized version
was used as a guideline to make texts, and consequently narratives, linear and meaningful. The
result was a parallel corpus including official aligned texts in the three languages. The total size
of the corpus is 117,504 words consisting of 1151 strings and 20,475 words in MoHW; 1002
strings and 18,934 words in BF4; 3389 strings and 78,131 words in ME3. As mentioned in the
Introduction, the analytical approach of this study is corpus-driven and descriptive, it entails a
quantitative and qualitative analysis of parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving female
characters as speaker, listener, or referent.
4 Female roles in wargaming between reality and fictionality

This section explores the narrative weight of female characters in the reality-fictionality corpus
and describes the roles they play in the three games’ storylines.
4.1 Medal of Honor Warfighter

Co-written by active US Navy SEAL operators and inspired by real world Islamic terrorism,
MoHW offers players a realistic experience in the topical war on terror, aimed to prevent a
series of bomb attacks that Jihadist networks have planned at global level. Simultaneously, it
tells the story of one of these US Special Forces soldier, call-signed ‘Preacher’, at the crossroads
between family and duty after years of deployment overseas. Indeed, in Nick Robinson’s words,
the MoHW “counter-terrorist storyline centres on the consequences which military service has
for family life in the homeland, emphasising that US Special Forces (and troops more generally)
make huge sacrifices for their country that resonate within their families” and, more interest-
ingly, this “sacrifice is given a profoundly personal and gendered perspective” (2016, 265). Much
of the gameplay is linked by non-interactive conversations between Preacher and his wife Lena,
448
“which explore the incompatibility of his lifestyle [. . .] with maintaining his marriage” (ibid.)
and the relationship with his daughter, Isabella. However, when Preacher considers leaving the
military to devote himself to his family life, it is precisely Lena who persuades him to set aside
self-interest for the greater good. Moreover, according to Robinson, the death of another char-
acter call-signed ‘Mother’ (Preacher’s comrade and best friend) literally brings sacrifice home
as the game ends with his military funeral, where Preacher, Lena, Isabella and Mother’s wife
(whose name is never revealed) are at the grave side to commemorate Mother’s heroism (ibid.).
Preacher’s wife, his daughter and Mother’s wife are the only three female characters in
MoHW game world cast, representing 10% of the total population (28 characters in the whole
game, out of which 23 appear in the walkthrough analyzed). They are non-playable and back-
ground characters, who play a minor part only during some non-interactive sequences inter-
rupting game missions. Lena is the most frequently occurring female role in the game and she
is also the only one present in the sections under scrutiny: her voice is heard during a tense
phone conversation with Preacher following the game prologue, which is discussed in Sec-
tion 5.1. Thus, the realistic and modern representation of warfare clearly demarcates gender
boundaries and confines almost invisible and passive women to the traditional role of wife and
mother, entailing the maintenance of family life, while awaiting their men’s return and, even,
self-sacrifice for the sake of the higher ideal only men are fighting for.
4.2 Battlefield 4
In BF4, the player is Sergeant Daniel Recker, a US Marine leading an elite team of militarily
skilled commandos to prevent a 2020 global-scale war between the USA, Russia and China. As
such, as Marcus Schulzke explains, BF4 exemplifies those video games which “are not set in or
based on real conflicts” but which “tend to create new conflicts that involve real political actors
and that mirror existing international tensions” and these political-fiction wars “reflect and
reinforce conceptions of hostility and risk” revolving around the Americans-versus-communists
plot (2014).
The BF4 game world cast includes a total of 26 characters, five of whom are women, thus
representing 19% of BF4 population. Only 21 characters appear in the walkthrough selected,
out of which three are women. More importantly, all these secondary female characters are
more or less actively involved in warfare: Lieutenant Jennifer Hawkins, call-signed ‘Firebird’,
is a US Marine providing air support during the first game mission, when she eventually dies
under enemy fire; Lieutenant Marion Duncan is also a US Marine serving as a doctor aboard
the main US Navy ship; and, lastly, Huang ‘Hannah’ Shuyi is a Chinese intelligence officer who
joins the US squad and enters the battlefield to protect the Chinese pacifist and future political
leader, whose safety is threatened by a military coup. As opposed to the two US female soldiers,
who play a limited role and about whom little is known, Hannah is a well-developed charac-
ter. She is an idealist, patriotic, and brave woman who feels the burden of saving her country
from dictatorship so that her family’s death and the destruction of her village are not in vain.
She plays a supportive role throughout the story and, more importantly, she becomes playable
in the final game mission when she sacrifices herself for the sake of world peace. As a result,
it is true that the political-fiction representation of warfare more actively involves women in
fighting near-future battles but only eventually offers players a real female-gendered engage-
ment to contain the outbreak of modern-day fears. Moreover, in positioning the US female
Marine call-signed ‘Firebird’ in the non-playable role of helicopter pilot, who is never visible
and simply takes the form of tactical interaction, the game seems to suggest that the battlefield
is a predominantly male space.
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Silvia Pettini
4.3 Mass Effect 3

ME3 involves players fighting a 2186 science-fiction war to save the Galaxy from the invasion of
the Reapers, an alien race dedicated to destroying all organic life. An elite human soldier named
Commander Shepard is the game’s protagonist and, since the avatar’s gender is customizable, gam-
ers can play as either a male or a female Shepard. In the latter case, she is commonly referred to
as ‘FemShep’ and is considered to be one of the most popular heroines or even first true feminist
protagonist in gaming history (Blüml 2014). The fate of the universe, however, is not entirely
in her/his hands but rather it depends on the cooperation between humans that s/he leads, and
dozens of different fictional species which populate ME3 galaxy-sized game world. Thus, it comes
as no surprise that the total number of characters in the game amounts to 556, out of which 236
are female (62 and 35 respectively in the walkthrough selected), meaning 42% of the ME3 game
world population. Their roles vary widely, ranging from simple extras to FemShep, and a multitude
of more or less developed and narratively instrumental female roles. Based on their engagement in
dialogues and their relevance to gender analysis, as Section 5.3 illustrates, two of the four female
members of Shepard’s squad, out of a total of six selectable comrades, are significant. They are the
human Lieutenant-Commander ‘Ashley Williams’, an elite and merciless soldier with a promising
military career but also a sensitive, poetry-loving woman, and doctor ‘Liara T’Soni’, a scientist with
extraordinary combat skills and a representative of the asari race, a fictional mono-gender species
of human-like beautiful, blue, alien girls. Accordingly, it is in the futuristic representation of warfare
that women come into play. First, ME3 lead, playable character can be female from the very begin-
ning and, although this reinforces the binary notion of gender, it is an important point challenging
the norm in war games. Moreover, secondary and background female characters increase consider-
ably in number and their narrative roles can be so varied that a more in-depth analysis, which is
beyond the scope of this study, would be necessary to address them in a comprehensive manner.
5 The linguacultural representation of female characters

This section provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the linguacultural representation
of female characters in the corpus and examines parallel excerpts of in-game dialogues involving
them as speaker, listener, or referent.
5.1 Medal of Honor Warfighter

As mentioned in Section 4.1, after the game prologue, a brief cutscene introduces Preacher’s
personal side of the story. He is in a hotel room in Madrid and talks on the phone with Lena,
his wife. Their conversation is tense; they argue because the nature of his job and the frequency
of his deployments are leading to their marriage and family breakdown. In the corpus, this
conversation is the only instance of Lena’s linguacultural representation, including a total of 15
dialogue strings out of which seven involve her as speaker character. As regards translation, no
gender-related phenomena are detected. This absence of results is noteworthy because it seems
to depend exactly on the quantitatively limited and qualitatively stereotypical portrayal of female
characters in the game’s verisimilar narrative, which offers a linguistic insight reinforcing the
notion of “gendered militarism” (Robinson 2016) in realistic war video games.
5.2 Battlefield 4
In the BF4 story, three female characters play an active part and, more relevantly, their roles
in dialogues provide pertinent data. From a quantitative viewpoint, as speaker characters, the
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US Navy doctor Marion Duncan has two dialogue lines, the US pilot call-signed Firebird has
38, and the Chinese secret agent nicknamed Hannah has 115. From a qualitative perspective,
no issues emerge except for the Italian gender-biased rendition of ‘doctor’ (two instances), used
as a label to identify doctor Duncan when she is the speaker character. As example (1) shows,
only Spanish translators correctly provided a gender-specific equivalent form, while in Italian
‘dottore’ is masculine and ‘dottoressa’ its feminine counterpart.
Example 1
Doctor: Easy. You’ve been Dottore: Piano. È rimasto Doctora: Tranquilo. Has
unconscious for several days. incosciente per giorni. estado inconsciente varios días.
5.3 Mass Effect 3

The following paragraphs examine the gender-related phenomena and issues emerging in the
linguacultural representation of the three major female characters in ME3: Commander Shep-
ard and her/his squad members, namely Ashley Williams and Liara T’Soni.
Acting as the playable heroine/hero of ME3 galactic war, Commander Shepard plays a lead-
ing role in the game storyline. Indeed, dialogue strings casting her/him as speaker or listener
represent almost 95% of the corpus (3217 strings). More importantly, their translation from
English into Italian and Spanish exemplifies the use of variables to comply with players’ gender
choices. In the ME3 corpus, the female/male gender option has produced 183 and 49 gender-
tagged dialogue lines in Italian and Spanish respectively, but to fully understand these figures, it
is important to consider that ME3 was fully localized into Italian and that 139 instances depend
on the different approaches to translated texts adopted by male Shepard’s voice actor and Fem-
Shep’s voice actress during audio localization (Pettini 2018, 111–114). Indeed, while the former
decided to substantially modify texts to make dialogues fit into his personal interpretation of
the character’s way of speaking, FemShep’s voice actress did not change the wording of trans-
lated dialogue lines (Pettini 2018, 108–109). These in-studio changes required editors to add
gender tags in any strings presenting variation in order to make audio match verbatim subtitles.
Consequently, while in Spanish, all gender-tagged strings result from the mandatory gender
agreement of this TL grammatical system, in Italian only 44 lines (24%) belong to this category
and, interestingly enough, from a contrastive perspective, there are only 19 instances of cor-
respondence between the two Romance languages. In detail, if we compare gender-marked
strings in the two localizations, we find: (1) symmetries, like example 2; (2) asymmetries, like
examples 3 and 4, where language-specific structures perfectly render the ST but do not require
tags because they are not variable gender-marked expressions; and (3) gender-biased solutions,
as in 5–8.
Example 2
I’m proud of all of you. Sono [{M}fiero] [{F}fiera] di Estoy[{M}orgulloso]
tutti voi. [{F}orgullosa] de vosotros.
Example 3
Glad that worked out. [{M}Lieto][{F}Lieta] che abbia Me alegra que haya
funzionato. funcionado.
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Silvia Pettini
Example 4
We’ll stop them, Liara. Li fermeremo, Liara. Insieme. Los detendremos, Liara.
Together. [{M}Juntos.] [{F}Juntas.]
Example 5
I’m Commander Shepard Sono il comandante Shepard Soy [{M}el] [{F}la]
with the Alliance. (. . .) dell’Alleanza. (. . .) comandante Shepard,
de la Alianza. (. . .)
Example 6
You know the Commander? Conosci il comandante? ¿Conoces [{M}al] [{F}a la]
comandante?
I used to. Lo conoscevo. Antes sí.
Example 7
Because you’re the only Perché sei l’unico soldato Porque eres [{M}el único]
soldier (. . .) who knows how (. . .) che sa come uccidere [{F}la única] soldado (. . .)
to kill Reapers. i Razziatori. que sabe matar segadores.
Example 8
You are the first human Lei è il primo Spettro Eres [{M}el primer
Spectre, Commander. (. . .) umano, comandante. (. . .) espectro humano] [{F}la
primera espectro humana],
comandante. (. . .)
As regards ‘commander’ in 5 and 6, whose equivalent is ‘comandante’ in both TLs, while in

Spanish the gender variable is maintained thanks to the gender-marked definite article ‘el’ or
‘la’, Italian translators used the masculine definite article ‘il’ only, although it is possible to refer
to a female commander as ‘la comandante’ since the word ending letter ‘e’ makes this noun
gender-neutral. Similarly, in 6, ‘lo’ is the masculine object pronoun, meaning ‘I used to know
him’, which unreasonably adopts the masculine form to be congruous with the question in 5.
Concerning ‘soldier’ in 7, since the Spanish equivalent ‘soldado’ refers to both male and
female members of the army (DRAE 2018), translators used gender-marked satellite elements
to refer to Commander Shepard’s gender, such as articles and adjectives. Conversely, in Ital-
ian, the masculine equivalent form ‘soldato’ determines the presence of masculine-marked ele-
ments, even if feminine counterparts such as ‘donna soldato’ and ‘soldatessa’ exist. Nevertheless,
in everyday language, ‘soldatessa’ has an ironic and derogatory figurative meaning, referring
to a soldier-like woman with brusque and authoritative manners. Lastly, even the transfer of a
futuristic game-specific military title like ‘Spectre’ in 8 disregards Commander Shepard’s gender.
This rank is translated into its masculine equivalent ‘spettro’ and ‘espectro’ in Italian and Spanish
respectively, both representing invariable masculine forms meaning ‘ghost’. However, given the
science-fictional nature of this title, actually representing a creative blending of “Special Tactics
and Reconnaissance” (Mass Effect Wiki 2019), the imaginary sociopolitical institution it refers
to in ME3 universe, translators might have opted for a gender-fair inventive solution since the
morphology of both languages allows for the creation of a feminine form by simply changing
452
the word ending letter from ‘o’ into ‘a’. But again, Spanish translators used gender-marked arti-
cles and adjectives while Italian satellite elements are all masculine.
The other two major female characters in ME3 are Lieutenant-Commander Ashley Wil-
liams and doctor Liara T’Soni. Dialogue strings casting them as speaker or listener, mostly in
conversations with Shepard, are 206 (6%) and 169 (5%) respectively. As regards Liara, her rel-
evance to gender analysis depends on her mono-gender race of female aliens which, for the
purposes of linguacultural representation, are always referred to with feminine forms like ‘she’
and ‘her,’ and they bear feminine titles like ‘matron,’ ‘huntress,’ and ‘matriarch.’ Going back to
humans, Italian gender-biased solutions re-emerge when Ashley Williams is the listener or refer-
ent of some dialogue strings, as seen in examples 9 and 10. While Spanish articles and adjectives
co-occurring with ‘soldado’ and ‘teniente comandante’ are all feminine, Italian translators opted
for masculine forms only, which ignore her womanhood.
Example 9
You’re a fine soldier with an Sei un ottimo soldato, Eres una buena soldado con
impressive record. con uno stato di servizio un historial impresionante.
impeccabile.
Example 10
And Lieutenant-Commander E il tenente Williams? ¿Y la teniente comandante
Williams? Williams?
6 Conclusions
Given the ideological impact male-gendered war video games may exert on a global army of
virtual soldiers, and given the influence the degree of reality or fictionality of the militarized
worlds may have on players’ understanding of the political, social and cultural messages they
convey (Cunningham 2012; Payne 2016), this chapter has focused on female gender in simu-
lated conflicts by examining a reality-fictionality spectrum of three internationally mainstream
military shooters.
As the content analysis in Section 4 shows, the number and the importance of women seems
to be inversely proportional to the degree of verisimilitude of game content. Indeed, the more
the game is realistic, the more limited is the number of females, the more passive and sociocul-
turally stereotyped are their narrative roles. Women in MoHW are few (10%), non-playable and
act as the wives and daughters of male heroes, thus representing the families who have been left
behind in the fight against global terrorism. In political-fiction BF4, women are still few (19%)
and secondary, but they are all actively involved in warfare, though to a lesser extent than men.
Furthermore, gamers can select one of them and play as the female world saviour in the final
game mission. In science-fiction ME3, the number of women increases (42%) and, more impor-
tantly, the protagonist of this galactic war can be a human heroine fighting against alien invasion
together with other well-developed female secondary characters.
As regards their linguacultural representation, findings in Section 5 indicate that gender
deserves special attention in game localization research, since it presents linguistic and transla-
tional phenomena worthy of further investigation in the transfer from English into Romance
languages and doubtless other languages. First, the medium-specific challenge of gender vari-
ables, due to games’ interactivity and customization, requires translators to use computing
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Silvia Pettini
metalanguage to comply with the mandatory grammatical gender agreement of the TLs. This
exemplifies how digital technology affects language professionals’ work and underlines the
need for translational specialization. Secondly, the use or non-use of gender-fair language and
the underlying approach to gender equality might provide ample opportunities to investigate
linguacultural-specific tendencies: in this study Italian and Spanish present remarkable asym-
metries in the representation of female characters and, particularly in Italian, these irregularities
seem to disclose gender-biased values and assumptions that mirror and reinforce sexist clichés
and stereotypes through language.
7 Future directions
A complex and multifaceted relationship emerges when examining the interface between gen-
der and video games. This is particularly true in regard to the female gender, because the general
perception of gaming as a male territory inevitably tends to direct attention to the variety of
gender issues concerning the status and role of girls and women in this realm. Many aspects of
this relationship should be explored: the positions women occupy within the whole cycle, from
development to reception, represent interesting future directions for interdisciplinary research.
Moreover, considering the market-driven nature of the game sector, it is possible to hypothesize
that the increasing number of female gamers may considerably influence female representation in
video games, which is of special relevance from the perspective of game localization. Research in
this subfield of translation studies is gaining ground, but specific studies on the topic are still limited.
As this demographic expands and creates more demand, the face of gaming and game con-
tents may be altered. This seems to be confirmed by the constant rise in the number of gender-
customizable titles casting either male or female lead playable characters, which increased from
46% in 2015 to 55% in 2018, at least, as far as the games presented at the electronic entertain-
ment expo are concerned (Feminist Frequency 2019). Since gender customization so deeply
affects game texts and translation, further research providing insights into the linguistic and
cultural dimension of female representation is required to shed light on how gender is dealt with
across game genres and, more relevantly, across different languages and cultures.
Further reading
Czech, Dawid. 2013. Challenges in Video Game Localization: An Integrated Perspective. Explorations:
A Journal of Language and Literature. [pdf] 1, 3–25. Available at: http://explorations.uni.opole.pl/wp-
content/uploads/CzechDawidText_Vol1_Lang.pdf [Accessed 2 July 2018].
This article explores some of the characteristics of video game localization and, with regard to gender,
it demonstrates how the lack of situational context in game translation can lead to several complications
related to sociolinguistic aspects such as proper gender marking in Polish.
Maxwell-Chandler, Heather and Stephanie O’Malley-Deming. 2012. The Game Localization Handbook. 2nd
ed. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett, 315–326.
Written by two experts, this book offers a detailed and well-organized industry-oriented guide to the
practice of video game localization. In particular, the authors provide an interesting case study which
illustrate the difficulties professionals deal with in translating a gender-customizable video game.
Pettini, Silvia. 2018. Gender in Game Localization: The Case of Mass Effect 3’s FemShep, in Irene Ran-
zato and Serenella Zanotti, eds., Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. London:
This chapter presents a corpus-driven case study focusing on the linguistic and textual dimension of
gender-related issues in the localization of a science fiction role-playing game. It shows how gender
ultimately determines the form of target texts and provides players with a gender-specific gaming
experience thanks to localization.
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Related topics
Gender in gaming, women in video games, game localization, game translation, war video games,
gendered militarism
Note
1 At the time of the research, these online resources were the only complete walkthroughs of the three games
available on YouTube, satisfying the selection criteria of console platform and single-player mode of play
for each of them. Since these factors may considerably affect the quantity and quality of game texts, their
adoption as selection criteria aimed to guarantee a certain degree of homogeneity across the three games.
References
Bernal-Merino, Miguel Á. 2015. Translation and Localisation in Video Games: Making Entertainment Software
Global. New York and London: Routledge.
Blüml, Andreas. 2014. Gender and Racial Roles in Computer Role-Playing Games, in Gerold Sedlmayr
and Nicole Waller, eds., Politics in Fantasy Media: Essays on Ideology and Gender in Fiction, Film, Television
and Games. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 31–41.
Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bussey, Kay and Albert Bandura. 1999. Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentia-
tion. Psychological Review, 106(4), 676–713.
Christou, Chris, Jenny McKearney and Ryan Warden. 2011. Enabling the Localization of Large Role-
Playing Games. Trans. Revista de Traductología, 15, 39–51. Available at: www.trans.uma.es/pdf/Trans_
15/39-51.pdf [Accessed July 2018].
Cunningham, Carolyn. 2012. Video Gaming: Representations of Femininity, in Mary Kosut, ed., Encyclo-
pedia of Gender in Media. London: SAGE, 407–409.
Downs, Edward and Smith, Stacy L. 2010. Keeping Abreast of Hypersexuality: A Video Game Character
Content Analysis. Sex Roles, 62(11–12), 721–733.
ESA (Entertainment Software Association). 2018. Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Indus-
try [pdf]. Available at: www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ESA_EssentialFacts_2018.pdf
[Accessed 2 July 2018].
Feminist Frequency. 2015–2018. Gender Breakdown of Games Showcased at E3 [online]. Available at: https://
feministfrequency.com/?s=gender+breakdown [Accessed 20 Feb. 2019].
Halter, E., ed. 2006. From Sun Tzu to XBox: War and Video Games. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
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dam: John Benjamins, 135–151.
Hellinger, Marlis and Hadumod Bußmann. 2001. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of
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Lynch, Teresa, Jessica E. Tompkins, Irene I. van Driel, and Niki Fritz. 2016. Sexy, Strong, and Secondary:
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[Accessed 12 Apr. 2019].
Maxwell-Chandler, Heather and Stephanie O’Malley-Deming. 2012. The Game Localization Handbook
(2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
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34
Gender issues in
machine translation
An unsolved problem?
Johanna Monti
Introduction
Machine Translation (MT) is one of most widely used Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications
on the Internet: it is so widespread in online services of various types that sometimes users do
not realize that they are using the results of an automatic translation process. From social net-
works, like Facebook or Twitter, to online selling platforms, like eBay or TripAdvisor, search
engines like Google and video chat software as well as instant messaging systems like Skype,
machine translation can break down linguistic barriers in various ways and for a number of dif-
ferent purposes: translating texts or websites, doing online searches and communicating in real
time with people who speak different languages.
In spite of the remarkable progress achieved in this field over the last 20 years thanks to the
enhanced capacity of computers and advanced technologies in the field of Natural Language
Processing (NLP), the machine translation systems, even the most widely used ones on the
Internet such as Google Translate, still present some critical areas. Many challenges are linked
to the complexity and ambiguity of natural language and the obstacles posed by the translation
process itself. One of the most frequent problems in the state-of-the-art MT systems, such as
Systran Pure Neural MT, Google Translate and DeepL, is that the translation of gender repre-
sents a recurrent source of mistranslation: incorrect gender attribution to proforms (personal
pronouns, relative pronouns, etc.), the reproduction of gender stereotypes and the overuse of
masculine pronouns are among the most frequent problems.
When dealing with the concept of gender, linguistic and cultural aspects both need to be
taken into account. From a linguistic point of view, the concept of gender refers to a grammati-
cal category and is therefore defined as grammatical gender (masculine, feminine and neutral)
based on the distribution of nouns in nominal classes according to a certain number of for-
mal properties which are implemented by means of the pronominal reference, the agreement
between the adjective (or the verb) and the nominal affixes (prefixes, suffixes or case endings).
The grammatical gender is not always coherent with the semantic categorization of the word,
namely its natural gender (generally intended as the gender of a person or an animal within the
male/female polarity), and can vary from language to language since it depends on the represen-
tation of objects in the world according to specific properties which are assigned to them in a
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Johanna Monti
specific cultural context. An example of this is the Italian word morte (death) which is feminine,
whereas in other languages it is masculine; for example, the corresponding word Tod in German.
A further distinction has to be made between languages such as Italian and German on the
one hand, which present the grammatical gender for nouns, adjectives as well as determiners,
and languages such as English on the other, which present only the pronominal gender, i.e.
when the gender is marked only on the pronominal system (Corbett 1991): masculine pronouns
are used for male human referents (he is used for John, man, etc), feminine pronouns for human
female referents (she is used for girl, Joan, etc.), whereas neuter is used for all other entities (it is
used for table, window, etc.).
The variation of grammatical gender in translation not only has linguistic implications but
also cultural ones, especially for words that have a marked metaphorical and mythological valence
as Roman Jakobson reminds us in his famous essay On linguistic aspects of translation (1959, 237):
The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by
German artists; he did not realize that “sin” is feminine in German (die Sünde), but mas-
culine in Russian (грex). Likewise, a Russian child, while reading a translation of German
tales, was astounded to find that Death, obviously a woman (Russian смертъ, fem.) was
pictured as an old man (German der Tod, masc.). My sister Life, the title of a book of poems
by Boris Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where “life” is feminine (жизнъ), but was
enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his attempt to translate these
poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine (život).
The grammatical gender is a meaning bearer and plays an important role in the construction of
male power, especially in Romance languages. An example is the inclusive use of the masculine
gender in Italian for the agreement of adjectives and past participle forms if the reference is to
several masculine and feminine nouns such as in I ragazzi e le ragazze sono veloci (transl. Boys and
girls are fast (+ masculine marker)). The same applies to French and Spanish.
The issues which arise from the interrelationship of language, gender, culture and transla-
tion have been extensively studied by Sherry Simon (1996) and Luise von Flotow (1997) who
contributed significantly to focusing the discussion concerning gender not only on linguistic
aspects, but also on cultural and ideological ones. In the name of the Derridean “différance,”
feminist translators subvert the concept of the original text and work on meaning by proposing
experimental texts which present critical discussions of a text’s linguistic aspects and by paying
special attention to textual and linguistic aspects which let the feminine emerge. For instance,
in the translation of L’Interloquée (1988) by Michèle Causse, Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood
(1991) uses the ‘e’ in bold to mark the feminine gender in English as in “no one ignores that
everything is language,” the translation of “nulle ne l’ignore, tout est langage.”
It would take too long here to include the rich debate on this subject, but I would like to
underline how these reflections have helped to highlight the way gender issues affect the dif-
ferent levels of the construction of a text and therefore require particular attention from the
translator. Gender issues not only concern textual cohesion but also coherence. The logical-
semantic texture of a text requires encyclopaedic knowledge from the receiver which is shared
with other speakers to elaborate and therefore understand the text. If we consider, for example,
the aspects of knowledge on this level, especially typical knowledge, that is, the specific knowledge
or judgments about a given situation elaborated and actualized in the textual world, particular
attention must be paid to social gender, that is to say, the gender associated with particular nouns
because of social stereotypes as with the English noun doctor, generally associated with a male, or
nurse referring to a female rather than to a male.
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The translator must pay particular attention to the correct identification of the natural gen-
der of the person referred to by the noun since it may not correspond to stereotypical ideas
in a given cultural context. This topic deserves more articulated discussion but it is only men-
tioned here to underline how the issue of gender in translation is not negligible or of secondary
importance, but is a complex topic that deserves careful consideration, whether the translator is
a professional or an automatic system.
In this chapter we will cover one of the most common problems in MT: after briefly outlin-
ing the different approaches to MT, we address historical perspectives and recent developments
concerning gender issues in MT and we end with a brief discussion of outstanding issues in
this field.
Definitions
We define Machine Translation as a computer program that is able to translate from a source
language to a target language automatically, i.e. without any human intervention in the transla-
tion process performed by the machine.
Approaches to Machine Translation

Rule-based Machine Translation (RBMT) historically represents the first approach to MT
and in 1954 the first prototype was built by IBM in cooperation with Georgetown University.
RBMT systems are based on linguistic resources, namely (1) bilingual dictionaries providing the
morpho-syntactic and semantic information, and (2) a set of morpho-syntactic and sometimes
also semantic rules for both the source and target languages.
The first-generation RBMT was based on a direct translation approach, where bilingual dic-
tionaries were used to provide a word-for-word translation, and on a set of rules that reordered
the words according to the target language.
Later, transfer systems became the most widespread paradigm in RBMT, and there are some
systems that still use it, such as Apertium.1 It is based on a three-stage architecture, namely analy-
sis of the source language, transfer, and finally generation of the target language: in the analysis
phase the source text is parsed and transformed into an intermediate source-language abstract
representation which during the transfer phase is transformed into the corresponding represen-
tation in the target language, used in the last stage to generate the target text.
A third type of RBMT is based on an interlingua approach, i.e. an abstract representation
used to encode deep structures and knowledge common to all languages, which can be used to
translate from any source language to any target language without recurring to a language-pair
specific representation (transfer).
These three approaches are illustrated in the Vauquois triangle (see Figure 34.1).
In the 1980s the RBMT approach was progressively replaced by statistical approaches, based
on the distribution probability p(e| f ) whereby e in the target language is the translation that
is statistically more frequent for a string f in the source language (Koehn 2009). This typology
evolved from a word-based approach to a phrase-based one and relies on the availability of
large parallel and monolingual corpora that are produced by human translators. Corpora are
collections of monolingual or bilingual electronic texts used as a valuable source for this MT
approach. Parallel corpora or bi-texts are sets of pairs of texts composed of sentences in the
source language aligned with the corresponding sentences in the target language and are used as
translation models, i.e. to compute the most frequent translation for a word or a phrase. Monolin-
gual corpora are sets of texts in one language and represent the language model used to measure
459
Johanna Monti
interlingua
transfer
ge
sis
ne
aly
rat
an
ion
direct translation
source target
text text
Figure 34.1 Vauquois triangle (Vauquois 1968)2
the probability that a given word or phrase, the word order, and the grammatical constructs will
correspond to real use in the target language.
A new model based on neural networks has recently been developed (Klein et al. 2017) and
is rapidly becoming the dominant approach: the underlying principle is that the translation pro-
cess consists of finding sentence y in the target language that maximizes the conditional probability
of y given a sentence x in the source language, namely arg maxy p (y | x). This approach also uses
parallel corpora as a translation model to train the system: once the neural network has learnt the
translation model from the parallel reference corpus and a sentence x has been received in the
source language, a translation can be generated by selecting the sentence y in the target language
which maximizes the conditional probability.
Historical perspectives and recent developments

Although translation problems connected with gender have been widely discussed in feminist
approaches to translation (Godard 1990; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990; Flotow and Farahzad 2017,
2010, among others) from different perspectives and in a comprehensive way, in MT they have
been studied mainly with reference to grammatical and pronominal gender in the following
research areas:
• Anaphora resolution whereby NLP systems and also MT try to handle the complex linguistic
phenomenon of pointing back to a previously mentioned item in the text (Mitkov 1999;
Hardmeier 2012, and more recently, Luong and Popescu-Belis 2016; Voita et al. 2018)
• Named entities recognition, i.e. the location, identification, and classification of names of per-
sons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, etc. Research in this field highlights how
MT systems in general are not able to correctly recognize named entities and how the
incorrect recognition of proforms such as personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, and pro-
nouns may lead to distortions of the meaning of the source text (Babych and Hartley 2003).
• Agreement problems mainly concerning adjective-noun and verb-noun agreements. Incorrect
agreements are also a source of frequent mistranslations in MT and arise when translating
between morphologically rich languages, such as Italian or German, and morphologically
poor ones, such as English.
460
Natural or social gender issues, on the other hand, have not been sufficiently addressed even
though they present considerable obstacles to any MT approach adopted, from RBMT systems
to the most recent neural approaches. Even the most comprehensive collection of studies on
MT, i.e. John Hutchins’s website (www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/) does not record a specific entry
for natural and social gender issues. There is no holistic approach to gender biases in MT which
takes into account the linguistic, social and cultural aspects linked to this topic.
The reason for underestimating this problem lies in the fact that in the current dominant
paradigms in MT, namely phrase-based MT and neural MT, the results for specific linguistic
problems cannot be specifically addressed and improved since translations are obtained by means
of statistical computations which calculate the most probable translations for a word or a phrase
in parallel corpora. Therefore, the outputs obtained using these MT systems offer the most
frequent translation solutions for a given linguistic phenomenon, identified and chosen on a
probabilistic basis from the corpora they are based on: if the corpora selected to train the system
statistically reflect a prevalence of choices that favour the use of the masculine gender for some
concepts or linguistic constructs and the feminine gender in other cases, the system inherits
these with no or little possibility of regulatory intervention on the results. For these types of
system, it is difficult to intervene and modify specific translation and linguistic problems.
Recent contributions are mainly devoted to comparative studies which take into account
different commercial systems, different MT approaches and different language pairs. Anke Frank
et al. present a first study concerning gender issues in MT by comparing different commer-
cial MT systems for the English-German language pair (2004). They discuss specific linguistic
phenomena such as anaphoric references and the treatment of noun phrases as well as aspects
concerning productivity, lexicalization, scope and coverage of dictionaries, morphological rules,
grammar and transfer. Different contexts are provided where there is the need to transform a
gender-neutral English word, such as the word manager, to a gender-marked German word such
as Managerin. Interesting examples are provided for different constructions such as adpositions,
noun and object predicates.
Londa Schiebinger (2014), who supervises the Gendered Innovations Project at Stanford Uni-
versity, carried out a study on the performance of Google Translate. In her contribution to gen-
der issues in MT entitled Machine Translation: Analyzing Gender (https://genderedinnovations.
stanford.edu/case-studies/nlp.html), she demonstrates that the algorithms used by the well-
known MT system lead to a sexist language. She has highlighted two different trends:
1 The use of masculine nouns to translate gender-neutral English words in which it is neces-
sary to specify gender when translating to strongly gender-inflected languages such as, for
instance, the English word defendant translated as ein Angeklagter, masculine in German.
2 The use of feminine nouns to translate English words referring to traditional women’s jobs,
such as the word nurse in languages where this type of specification is required, thus mak-
ing them correspond to gender stereotypes (as an example nurse translated as eine Kranken-
schwester in German).
A comparative study which took into account not only Google Translate but also other com-
mercial systems such as Bing by Microsoft and Systran confirmed these trends on the basis of
the translation into English of an article published in El País on Schiebinger’s research. In the
article, Schiebinger not only raises the need for a more correct linguistic use of gender in MT
but through her research project, she also seeks to foster a search for possible solutions, highlight-
ing the need for MT research to take into account a more inclusive use of language if it wants
to avoid discrimination and inequality.
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Johanna Monti
After all, MT does not perform any differently than any other Artificial Intelligence (AI)
application that learns from the training data, as was recently pointed out by Aylin Caliskan
et al. (2017). The study analyzes how cultural stereotypes are present in all AI applications, and
consequently also in MT, reproducing in this way the prejudices, hostilities and nastiness that
sometimes characterize human discourse. James Zou and Londa Schiebinger also highlight the
role of skewed training data in AI but at the same time state that the source of bias can be traced
to the algorithms themselves (2018, 325):
A typical machine-learning program will try to maximize overall prediction accuracy for
the training data. If a specific group of individuals appears more frequently than others in
the training data, the program will optimize for those individuals because this boosts overall
accuracy. Computer scientists evaluate algorithms on ‘test’ data sets, but usually these are
random sub-samples of the original training set and so are likely to contain the same biases.
A promising solution proposed in the paper is the use of de-biasing approaches, but accord-
ing to the authors, these need to be refined and evaluated in the real world.
Lastly, researchers in the MT field evaluate their systems mainly on the basis of quantitative
metrics such as BLEU, METEOR and the like which can hardly detect problems related to
the correct transposition of gender or, in general, the correct translation of meaning. They are
obtained by comparing translations done automatically for a given body of texts with those
done by humans. All these metrics are based on the similarity principle, i.e. how much MT out-
put is similar to a corpus of human translations used as reference: the less automatic translations
record deviations in relation to the reference corpus, the higher their score.
One of the most used automatic metrics is BLEU which is based on the idea that “the closer
a machine translation is to a professional human translation, the better it is” (Papineni et al. 2002,
311). Other measurements of this type include NIST, WDR, and METEOR. Although they
are widely used in the MT community, they present several shortcomings since they produce
results which are not always relatable to each other or to human judgment as has emerged from
a number of evaluation campaigns in which various automatic metrics were compared with
each other and also with human judgments (Federmann et al. 2012; Labaka et al. 2014). The
shortcomings of these quantitative metrics in evaluating systems performance with reference to
specific linguistic problems (Wang and Merlo 2016) in some way hinders the desirable develop-
ment of research areas that address specific translation problems, including gender biases.
Current trends in MT research as we will discuss in the next section try to overcome some
of these problems.

The evaluation of different approaches to gender in translation is one of the current contribu-
tions to research in this field. Some studies have been devoted to the evaluation of different MT
systems such as Johanna Monti (2017) who provides a contrastive analysis for the English-Italian
and German-Italian language pairs in three different MT systems: Google Translate and Micro-
soft Translator, which adopt a neural approach, Lucy KWIK Translator, a RBMT system, and
finally SYSTRANet which tries to combine a linguistic and a statistical approach. The study
takes into account several types of gender translation problems such as (1) subject-predicate
adjective|noun agreement, (2) subject|object agreement – subject|object complement, (3)
Noun – apposition agreement, (4) Noun – anaphora|cataphora agreement, (5) Noun – past
462
participle agreement, (6) social gender. It highlights how mistranslations concerning gender are
present in all approaches. A similar study was conducted by Abu-Ayyash (2017) who examines
the translation of gender-based structures in English and Arabic by three MT systems: Systran’s
Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT), Google translate (GT) and Microsoft Bing (MB).
Unfortunately, so far, the evaluation mainly concerns language pairs that include the English
language and no comprehensive studies have been carried out for wider sets of language pairs.
A few papers have been devoted to the study of contextual aspects which might help to de-
bias MT outputs, such as Ronan Le Nagard and Philip Koehn (2010) and Guillou and Hard-
meier (2016), which address the co-reference and translation of pronouns, particularly between
languages that do not have the same system of grammatical gender. Further studies in this area
have been devoted to the integration of contextual information to produce gender-aware unbi-
ased translation by introducing new approaches which consist in modelling the speaker/listener
gender information (Elaraby et al. 2018) for Spoken Language Translation. This information
enables, for instance, “I am happy” to be translated into French “Je suis heureuse” if the speaker
is female or “Je suis heureux” if the speaker is male.
Another interesting approach consists in handling gender-related biases in Statistical MT
(SMT) systems as a domain-adaptation task as suggested by Mirkin et al. (2015) where female
and male genders are treated as two different domains by using (1) gender-specific phrase-tables
and language models, and (2) a gender-specific tuning set.
Pronominal translation is probably one of the most studied areas in regard to gender short-
comings in MT and a shared task has been organized in recent years in order to foster research
on this specific topic (Guillou et al. 2016). The task consists of a cross-lingual pronoun predic-
tion task in which participating classification systems aim to correctly predict target pronoun
forms in the target sentence, based on contextual information in the source and target sentences.
Prates et al. (2018) used a list of job positions from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
to build sentences such as “He/She is an Engineer” in 12 different gender-neutral languages
such as Hungarian, Chinese, Yoruba, and several others. The sentences were translated into Eng-
lish using Google Translate. On the basis of this experiment, they assessed a strong tendency by
the MT system to adopt male defaults, in particular for the STEM fields (Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics).
Vanmassenhove et al. (2018) describe the attempt of building a speaker-informed NMT sys-
tem by incorporating gender information for multiple language pairs and show that providing
tags that indicate the gender of the speaker can lead to significant improvements over state-of-
the-art systems, especially for languages that express grammatical gender agreement.
When looking for solutions for de-biasing data, MT research has recently taken advantage of
research carried out in other NLP areas such as word embeddings, a language modelling tech-
nique related to semantic similarities between words on the basis of their distributional proper-
ties in large amounts of data. For instance, Tolga Bolukbasi et al. recognize the need to address
gender stereotypes and try to remove this linguistic bias without altering the meaning of words
(2016). The method consists of two different stages: the first one aims to identify gender stereo-
typical analogies learned by the algorithm from the data such as “man is to computer program-
mer as woman is to homemaker,” and then neutralizes and equalizes or softens the relationship
between those words. Following Bolukbasi (2016) and Jieyu Zhao (2018), who try to generate
gender neutral word embeddings, Joel Font and Marta Costa-jussà (2019) define a framework to
experiment, detect and evaluate gender bias in neural MT for specific occupations (in the same
way as Prates et al. 2018) for the English-Spanish language pair and propose to use a de-biased
word embeddings technique to reduce the detected bias.
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Johanna Monti
Figure 34.2 Example of translation of the single gender-neutral word ‘nurse’ from English into
Italian
Finally, at this time of writing, the discussion about gender bias in MT on the media and
social networks has been fuelled by Google’s announcement3 that it has been attempting to
address gender bias in translations: they provide the masculine and feminine form of single
gender-neutral words from English into four different languages (French, Italian, Portuguese,
and Spanish), and when translating phrases and sentences from Turkish into English. For the first
option they updated their dictionaries with gender attributes, such as for the English word nurse
(see Figure 34.2), translated into Italian with infermiera (feminine) and infermiere (masculine). For
the second option, instead, the solution required significant changes to their translation frame-
work with the addition of a state-of-the-art text classification algorithm to build a system that
is able to detect when a given Turkish query is gender-neutral and to offer translations for both
the masculine and the feminine forms when translating phrases or sentences: for example, for
the sentence “o bir doktor” in Turkish, where the pronoun o is gender-neutral, now the user
gets both “she is a doctor” and “he is a doctor” as gender-specific translations.
Even if it is only a very first step towards more gender-balanced MT approaches, it represents
a positive approach to this topic which we hope will be taken by other MT companies and
researchers in the field.
Outstanding issues and topics

In recent years, thanks to the emergence of the new paradigm of neural MT and the increasing
data available for linguistic processing such as monolingual, comparable and parallel corpora,
dramatic improvements have been made in the quality of MT. However, there are still a number
of outstanding issues that need further attention and consequently represent major challenges
for the mitigation of gender biases in MT. These include the need for the MT research com-
munity to pay more attention to ethical questions and the social impact of the technology, and
to improve the MT evaluation process and metrics.
464
Ethics and social impact

With regard to ethical aspects, much of the discussion in data sciences so far has centred on
privacy concerns (Tse et al. 2015; Kamocki and O’Regan 2016 specifically for MT), but with
the emergence and diffusion of AI and NLP applications, attention should also be paid to their
social impact, as highlighted by Dirk Hovy and Shannon Spruit (2016) who introduce an inter-
esting set of terminology to classify different types of bias, namely exclusion, overgeneralization, bias
confirmation, topic overexposure, and dual use. AI and NLP systems make inferences on the basis of
their training corpus and therefore model their output assuming that all language instances are
identical to what they find in the corpus. A lack of attention to this fundamental aspect may lead
to serious consequences such as exclusion or demographic misrepresentation. The exclusion
and misrepresentation of gender may lead in turn to an overexposure of certain demographic
groups such as men compared to women.
The social and ethical impact of an unbalanced representation of gender in MT output can-
not be overlooked and researchers in the field should pay more attention to this aspect since the
tools they create and the linguistic resources they use may perpetuate biases and even amplify
them by producing more and more biased output. Possible countermeasures include the devel-
opment of benchmark datasets specifically devoted to gender bias, i.e. corpora annotated with
gender information (natural, social and grammatical gender) to be used for developing, evaluat-
ing and comparing different approaches.
The adoption of more fine-grained evaluation metrics would also help improve the way
that gender biases are addressed: indeed, current metrics, even if based on qualitative approaches
such as the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), do not specifically take into account
this issue, with the exception of agreement mistakes detected in the target text. In addition
to different types of agreement mistakes related to gender identification, the desirable metrics
should also include mistakes related to natural gender identification as well as mistakes related
to social gender.
Evaluation
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, improvements to gender bias in the MT field can be
obtained by developing more fine-grained evaluation metrics which help focus on specific criti-
cal areas and benchmark datasets specifically devoted to this issue. To the best of our knowledge,
there are no specific evaluation campaigns devoted to this type of bias, probably because it is
not clear how to address this issue in a more comprehensive way. Nevertheless, it is important
to identify the different types of gender bias in MT according to different approaches and lan-
guage pairs and measure their impact on MT systems. There are no simple solutions, but the
availability of benchmark corpora, i.e. corpora annotated with gender information to be used
as reference corpus in evaluating MT systems, could be a first step towards a more careful con-
sideration of the issue.
Although a number of evaluation campaigns, usually competitions devoted to evaluating new
methods of addressing specific critical issues in MT, have taken place concerning some of the areas
related to gender mentioned in Section 3 such as the 2016 WMT Shared Task on Cross-lingual
Pronoun Prediction (Guillou et al. 2016) for the English–French and English–German language
pairs, in both translation directions, there is no comprehensive evaluation task that addresses the
problem in all its complexity. Such a task and the availability of corpora annotated with gender-
specific phenomena could help evaluate the fairness of MT systems with regard to this issue.
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Johanna Monti
Conclusion and future directions

Gender issues represent an important and still open problem in the field of Machine Translation.
Regardless of the approach that is adopted, MT systems still suffer from biases in the areas of
grammatical and social gender. Current approaches to MT need to address this problem not only
in order to improve the output of the systems, but also because of their social impact. Research-
ers who aim to produce high quality MT systems will have to pay more attention to problems
regarding gender translation. More focused and intensive research on this topic and the develop-
ment of specific benchmark data sets may lead to substantial advances over the next few years.
Further reading and relevant resources

In addition to the sources cited in the text of the chapter, we would recommend as a primer
looking at the Gendered Innovations project website (http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/
case-studies/nlp.html) which addresses the problem of gender biases in Machine Translation
and also gives a number of possible solutions such as detecting the gender of entities to improve
translation algorithms and integrating gender analysis into the engineering curriculum. For an
accessible and concise overview of MT which does not require prerequisites in computer sci-
ence refer to Thierry Poibeau (2017) Machine translation. MIT Press.
Further useful sources on specific gender translation problems are the Cross-lingual Pronoun
Prediction shared task www.statmt.org/wmt16/pronoun-task.html) and the DiscoMT Shared
Task on Cross-lingual Pronoun Prediction (https://aclweb.org/portal/content/discomt-2017-
shared-task-cross-lingual-pronoun-prediction) where participants are asked to predict a target-
language pronoun given a source-language pronoun in the context of a sentence for a few
language pairs. Test data and gold test sets for these tasks are also available.
Related topics
Machine translation (MT), computer-aided machine translation (CAT), artificial intelligence
(AI), translation studies, feminist approach to translation studies
Notes
1 www.apertium.org/index.eng.html?dir=eng=spa#translation
2 Figure licensed under CC BY-SA3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
3 www.blog.google/products/translate/reducing-gender-bias-google-translate/
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Part V
Discourses in translation
35
Translating the Bible into English
How translations transformed
gendered meanings and relations
Mathilde Michaud
Introduction
On the 28th of March 2001, the Vatican published the Liturgiam authenticam, an “instruction
by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in virtue of the
mandate of the Supreme Pontiff.” In this publication, the Vatican argued for the maintenance of
what it sees as the traditional gender forms found in the ancient texts. It stated that traditional
terms such as the Hebrew term adam or the Greek anthropos should be directly translated into
the English equivalent ‘man.’ The Vatican further suggested that not to do so “would compro-
mise a clear notion of man as a unitary, inclusive and corporate yet truly personal figure”:
The traditional grammatical gender of the persons of the Trinity should be maintained.
Expressions such as Filius hominis (Son of Man) and Patres (fathers) are to be translated
with exactitude wherever found in biblical or liturgical texts. The feminine pronoun must
be retained in referring to the Church. Kinship terms and the grammatical gender of
angels, demons and pagan deities should be translated, and their gender retained, in light
of the usage of the original text and of the traditional usage of the modern language in
question.
(Liturgiam authenticam 2001)
Luise von Flotow argued in 2007 that these rules on translation reflect the masculinist lan-
guage of the Church – overtly using language to maintain the dominant status of men within
the discourse of Christianity. Indeed, the broader message of the publication was to reaffirm the
faultlessness of the biblical texts in which nothing could allow sexist or racial discrimination,
the entire responsibility for such interpretation depending on catechists and homilists (Flotow
2007, 99). This appears to have been a direct reaction to the critical attacks made by feminist
scholars of the Bible over the past 40 years. Since the 1970s, feminist and other scholars have
been reinterpreting the scriptures, commenting on early translations, and suggesting new ways
of including women in biblical narratives, namely through gender neutral or inclusive language
in translations. This late 20th-century work is a response to centuries of patriarchal translations
deemed to have both altered the text and reinforced the male bias of the Bible.
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In this chapter, I will investigate the ways in which patriarchal biases have been consolidated
if not fully introduced by translators throughout the history of the Bible’s transmission. This is
an area of both biblical and translation scholarship on which research has only just begun. Most
feminist scholars have indeed focused on contemporary issues, rehabilitating women within
biblical discourse so as to make them feel included. When historical translations have been dis-
cussed, it has mainly been through case studies used as comparisons with new feminist transla-
tions or as additional support for their interpretations.1 There is, however, much to say and to
research on the impact of Bible translations on the construction of popular gender script – as
introduced by Joan W. Scott (1986), the social expectations imposed on an individual based on
their perceived sex – and this is what we shall attend to here. What role did translators play in
transforming or reinforcing gendered meanings and relations in the Bible? What impacts did
they have on wider cultural constructs regarding femininity and masculinity? Why were such
translations undertaken and for whom? Using examples taken from the Book of Genesis, I will,
in the first instance, situate the translations that have had wide and long felt repercussions on the
interpretation of discourses of sexuality, and map out their impact on the diffusion of Christian
ideology. In the second instance, I will discuss methods deployed by historians and Bible scholars
to analyze and understand the variations of meanings in translations. Finally, I shall investigate
a few examples of such changes effected by translation and identify their implications for gen-
der scripts. To do so, I will draw on short portions of analyses made by various Bible scholars.
Indeed, research on the gendered impact of translations upon the creation of identities, espe-
cially with regard to biblical texts, is extremely fragmented. This chapter will thus attempt to
string together the pieces of this complex puzzle we have recently started to uncover.
Historical perspective: Bible translations

Christian translations of the Bible can be separated into three major waves: the patristic trans-
lations (3rd – 4th century AD), the reformation translations (15th – 16th century AD), and the
missionary – or colonial – era of translation (18th century AD). However, the first known writ-
ten translation predates the Christian era and was undertaken by Jewish scholars: The Septua-
gint. Although the conditions of production of this translation from Hebrew to Greek are still
unknown, it is believed to be the work of 72 scholars – from which its name is derived – around
Alexandria in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE (Zogbo 2011, 21). Initially meant as a Jewish text,
the Septuagint had an immense impact on the Christian Scriptures. Indeed, translated into
Greek, the language spoken by the early Christians who authored the New Testament (NT), it
is believed to have been the principal version of the texts known to them and it is the source of
most Old Testament (OT) citations in the NT (Moore 2014, 79).
The NT as we know it today was assembled in 367 AD. Scholars have counted up to 17 major
translation projects undertaken in the decades that followed and directed towards three different
continents. This is what is known as the patristic era of translation. The most important piece
of work produced in this era is Jerome’s Latin translation completed at the request of the Pope
Damascus I in 406 AD: The Vulgate (Zogbo 2011, 21–22). After this date, translation activi-
ties in the West slowed for almost 1100 years (4th–16th centuries), and for centuries, the Latin
Vulgate was the only version distributed by the Roman Catholic Church (Moore 2014, 79–80).
This translation thus held both cultural and political power over the diffusion of spiritual norms.
Rabbi Yehuda wrote in the 2nd century AD that “whoever translates a biblical verse liter-
ally is a fool, while one who adds [to it] is a reviler and a blasphemer” (De Troyer 1997, 328),
and Jerome also acknowledged changing his style when working with the Scriptures, translating
“sense for sense and not word for word.” According to De Troyer, “Jerome was influenced by
472
various theological considerations” and by adapting the metaphors to suit his language, he may
also have adapted them to fit the ideology of the 4th century Christian Church (De Troyer
1997, 328–329). Sherry Simon asserts that the Bible was always recognized as carrying both “the
dangers and the promise of interpretation” (Simon 1996, 5). As such, it provides a rich terrain in
which to study the connection between gender and Christian ideology over time.
Both the Reformation and the missionary movement of the late 18th and 19th centu-
ries provided further incentive to engage with the biblical texts and produce a growing vari-
ety of translations. Each version had its own political and spiritual objectives. The reformers,
as expressed by Erasmus of Rotterdam, aimed to widen access to the Scriptures so that the
farmer could “sing parts of them at his plough and the weaver at his shuttle, and the traveller
might beguile with their narration the weariness of the way” (Erasmus, in Moore 2014, 81).
Arthur Skevington Wood has argued that these translations, initiated with Luther’s German
Bible (1521–1532), were “the single greatest factor in spreading the message of the reform,” thus
greatly enhancing the reach of Christianity (Skevington Wood 1969, 95–96). For the Protestant
missionary movement, translations started as a tool in taking the Gospel to ‘remote’ peoples
and making it accessible in ‘unknown tongues’. Many Bible societies followed the example of
the Baptist Missionary Society founded in 1792 by William Carey, which produced and dis-
seminated multiple early colonial translations of the Bible.2 Rapidly, translation in itself came to
be regarded as “part of mission activity” (Moore 2014, 84–86). Translations have now become
the work of worldwide organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics or the United
Bible Society, enacting ‘quality control’ and creating official translations (Zogbo 2011, 22–23).

However diversified the translations have become, one aspect still proves difficult. One con-
stant factor in the translations of the Bible is that the process has been controlled by men. For
example, in his analysis of Bible translations in Poland, Aleksander Gomola reports that most
translations were still done by members of the Catholic clergy, thus excluding women translators
(Gomola 2016, 626). Similarly, of the 70 scholars involved in the 500th anniversary re-edition
of the Luther Bible published in 2017, none were women. Nevertheless, for a little more than a
century now, there has been a new group of contenders involved in the translation of the Bible:
women theologians and feminists. However, as highlighted by the Liturgiam Authenticam they
still have many detractors and the Roman Catholic institutions continue to give interpretation
rights to catechists and ordained priests, once again pushing women out (Spender, in Stanton
1985, i–v). This exclusion of women from formal religious rites and discussions can partly be
traced through choices made by translators and commentators. Scholars such as Letty Russel
have argued that returning to the original texts and retracing these decisions can help rehabili-
tate women as legitimate participants in Christian practices (Russel 1974).
A few methodological avenues have been suggested in order to retrieve translators’ re-signification
of biblical texts. In the Introduction to the Gender & History Forum on ‘Translating Feminism,’
a working definition of translation was proposed: “Translation can be seen as a process of
cultural transfer, carried out by socially situated agents, involving the transformation of a text
from one language into another, and both embedded in, and contributing to, a broader process
of re-signification and locally meaningful re-contextualisation” (Bracke et al. 2018, 218). This
approach forces us to consider translators as ‘social actors’ with the ability to destabilise but also
create new conventions of language and ideology. We can draw a close parallel between the
translators and the grammarians identified by Dale Spender as agents in the consolidation of
patriarchal language. In both cases, it is impossible to go back to the origins of linguistic norms
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Mathilde Michaud
and practices and deconstruct them as such. However, it is possible to find sexist translations that
introduce or reinforce gendered inequities and work backward to find “records which could
pinpoint the introduction by males of specific sexist usages, structures and meanings” (Spender
1980, 144). To Spender, bible translations are records in which we can, for example, locate the
‘politics of naming’3 through which “the English patriarchs added their reinforcement to the
negative names of women in the Bible” (Spender 1980, 170). One crucial question thus is: “how
are social, sexual and historical differences expressed in language and how can these differences
be transformed across languages?” (Simon 1996, 8–9). Following Mary Phil Korsak’s line of
inquiry, I would like to investigate the extent to which male translators have reinforced the
androcentric bias already present in the source texts and what impact it may have had on gender
relations in Christian societies (Korsak 2002, 132).
Current contribution and research: translating genesis

For the purpose of this chapter, I will draw examples of translation debates from the first three
chapters of Genesis as discussed by feminist scholars of the Bible. For feminists, the Book of
Genesis is particularly noteworthy, not only because it can be considered as offering an impor-
tant image and example of how sexual difference is to be treated in Christianity, but also for
being the mythical foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. This has allowed its analy-
sis from various socio-religious perspectives and its transformation and adaptation to multiple
sociocultural contexts (Shulman 1974; Russel 1974). Primeval history addresses questions about
the origins of humanity: where do human beings come from? What determines human destiny?
Why is there evil if God created a good world? For Helen Schüngel-Straumann this explains the
prominent role the first chapters of Genesis have always played in biblical commentary, and thus,
the importance these texts hold in feminist scholarship of the Bible (Schüngel-Straumann 2012,
2). Furthermore, this is where one of the biggest marks against women stems from: original
sin. In addition to introducing sexual difference and gendered social roles, Genesis has marked
women as flesh and temptation. For the Patristic Fathers, sexuality represented the gravest of
dangers, and although modern Catholic theology has finally separated concupiscence from sex,
the structure of ‘original sin’ remains unchallenged: as Eve sinned, sex and death entered the
world, that is the dogma (Warner 2000, 50).
Nonetheless, in feminist work, the analysis of Genesis ends in an almost unilateral conclusion:
from the reading of the Hebrew text alone, one cannot conclude that women are inferior or
evil. To Schüngel-Straumann, the fact that Genesis 3 is not mentioned anywhere else in the OT
should make us reflect upon the identification of women with sin: this idea “did not originate in
the Genesis texts at all” (2012, 3). It is rather the result of “tendentious interpretations” adopted
and expanded by early Christians and further complicated by the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary
in the 2nd century (3). Her claim is shared by many, pointing to early commentators and transla-
tors as the source of most of the gender inequality in Christianity (Warner 2000; Spender 1980;
Blake, Stanton in Stanton 1985). Similar discussions have been raised in the Greek NT. Indeed,
while the Hebrew ādām has been the source of debates in Genesis, so has the Greek Anthropos
in the New Testament. A few additional cases will thus complement the critical analysis of the
translation of primeval history.
Genesis 2
20
nd Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the
A
field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.
474
21
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one
of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought
her unto the man.
23
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called
Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Gen 2:20–13 King James Version (KJV), 1769
The creation of woman in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis presents in itself quite
a translation conundrum: the term for man or humankind. ādām, which has been translated
as a proper noun and the name of the first man in Hebrew in fact refers to the ‘earthling’ or
‘groundling,’ derived from the earth, the adāma (Korsak 1992, 196). Scholars such as Schüngel-
Straumann, going back to the Hebrew text, have thus insisted on the need to understand ādām as
humankind, as the species, woman being constructed out of an androgynous (incomplete) spe-
cies (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 4). Additionally, there already exists a specific word for man as
‘male’ in Hebrew, ish, from which isha/woman is derived by sound (Gen: 2:23). The importance
of this popular etymology of ‘woman’ (isha) is emphasised by Mary Phil Korsak. Throughout
the biblical narrative, nouns are repeatedly justified by wordplay referring either to events, land-
marks or character traits, and so, with each new geographical location, the relevant character
was named accordingly to support the divine story (Korsak 1992, 196–197). For example, in
the story of the Tower of Babel, meant to explain the presence of multiple languages in a world
created by a single God, the choice of the name ‘Babel’ is not random: “Therefore is the name of
it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth” (Gen: 11:9).
While the English version does reveal the etymological choices behind the name, Babel is in
fact derived from the Hebrew verb ‘‫( ‘בָ ּלַל‬bālal), which means ‘to confuse’, a choice that reflects
the impact of the introduction of multiple languages on human society (Mckenzie 1995, 73).
The usual translation of Hawwāh, the name assigned to the first gendered human, a woman, as
˙
Eve/Eva instead of ‘Life’ (which is the translation suggested by Stanton based on the etymology
provided in Gen 3:20, and relies on Julia Smith’s 1876 translation of Hawwāh as ‘Life’ (1876, 6)) is
˙
equally significant. This translation removes both the importance and the meaningfulness from
the first woman, Hawwāh, “Mother of all that lives” (Gen 3:20) (Blake, in Stanton 1985, 27), and
˙
turns Hawwāh /Life into a mere first name.
˙
An additional issue arises with the translation of ādām. Indeed, we need to consider that it
has not only been translated from Hebrew into English but also, and primarily, from Hebrew to
Greek. Whereas we may agree ādām means ‘humankind’ this does not mean that ‘humankind’
was always constructed in a way to encompass both male and female. Already in the late OT
period (approximately 500 BCE – 50 AD), commentators had begun to narrow interpretations
of ādām to signify ‘male’. However, these re-conceptions played a particular role in the transla-
tion into Greek in which the popular Hellenistic view was that ‘human’ in its fullest sense really
only meant man as male. Therefore, even if we take the first account of Genesis in which God
is said to have made humankind in its own image (Gen 1:26–27), the term ‘image’, in its full-
est, can only apply to ‘human’ (male) in its fullest, leaving women out of the script of mankind
(Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 12). This interpretation doubtless had a huge impact on the NT
considering the authors based themselves and their understanding of the OT on the Greek
Septuagint.
A debate parallel to that around ādām can be found in the Septuagint and the NT when
working with anglicised translations of anthropos. Gomola, however, suggests that the exclusion
of women found in English translations and the use of generic ‘man’ cannot be generalised
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Mathilde Michaud
to all languages. Indeed, the case of anthropos and its translation in a gender-inclusive way did
not raise any debates in Poland, since Polish – which, like French or German has grammati-
cal genders – possesses an inclusive word to signify humankind: człowiek (Gomola 2016, 627).
This reasserts the importance of studying socio-linguistic norms and contexts of production of
both source and target languages to understand where new concepts may have been introduced
(Gomola 2016, 622).
In Genesis 2:21–22, anglicised translations tell us that the first woman was made out of
Adam’s rib. However, as we have just argued, the assertion that she came out of the ‘male’ is
undermined by the language which refers to the androgynous humankind species ādām. Fur-
thermore, there are also debates about the use of the word ‘rib’. Indeed, tsela, used in the Hebrew
Bible, is commonly translated as ‘side’ (hill-side), but, in Gen 2:21–22, tsela has traditionally been
translated as ‘rib’. Although the majority of translations have opted for ‘rib’, the use of side is not
unsupported as a substantial number of rabbinical commentaries refer to ‘Adam’s side’ instead of
‘rib’ (Korsak 1992, 196). Schüngel-Straumann argues the ‘rib’ translation was specifically intro-
duced in Christian tradition to document woman’s second-class status of inferiority in the same
way ezer was translated into ‘helper’ or ‘helpmate’ (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 5).
Letty M. Russell suggests that in English ‘helper’ implies “someone who is a servant or sub-
ordinate” (Russel 1974, 54). In Hebrew, however, and in the 20 times ezer appears in the OT, it
never evokes subordination and, in 16 occurrences it refers to a superior form of help: God, “a
very present help [ezrah] in trouble” (Ps 46:01). Again in Genesis, Israel is chosen by God to be
“an instrument for making God’s love known to all nations.” Being an ezer should therefore be
understood as the privilege of having been selected for service, as “an instrument of divine help
or assistance to one in need” (Russel 1974, 54). Translating it as ‘help’ in the case of the creation
of woman in Gen. 2:20 hence not only contradicts the systematic use of the word ezer in other
sections of the OT, it also deliberately diminishes the status and role of women. In the face of
these issues, Korsak suggests an alternative literal translation of Gen 2:20–23:
20
The groundling called names for all the cattle
for all the fowl of the skies, for all the beasts of the field
But for the groundling it found no help as its counterpart
21
YHWH Elohim made a swoon fall upon the groundling
it slept
He took one of its sides
and closed up the flesh in its place
22
YHWH Elohim built the side
he had taken from the groundling into woman
He brought her to the groundling
23
The groundling said
This one this time
is bone from my bone
flesh from my flesh
This one shall be called wo-man
for from man
she has been taken this one.
Gen 2:20–23 (Korsak 1992, 7)
476
Whilst putting forward a word-for-word translation, Korsak’s contextualization of ‘help’ as a

counterpart suggests a more equal relationship than was previously professed in more traditional
English translations of the OT.
The NT also has a loaded history when it comes to assigning the status of ‘helper’ to women
in anglicised translations. The case that has attracted much interest from academics is that of
Phoebe in Romans. Her figure has been disputed in regard to many aspects, one being her status
within the early Christian Church. Indeed, in Rom 16:1, Paul mentions Phoebe as διὰκονος or
diakonos, an ordained function in the Early Church also used for male counterparts and “trusted
co-workers such as Timothy” (Punt 2014, 4; Gomola 2016, 633). Although historians of the
Bible have concluded that such a position existed, it contrasts with the absence of ordained
women in most denominations today. Gomola suggests that the way translators have chosen to
translate Rom 16:1 may “indicate the position of their denomination on the issue.” For example,
Polish Catholic translations have avoided direct translations of diakonos and favoured paraphrases,
reflecting – to some extent – “the role still assigned in many aspects of the official teachings of
the Catholic Church of Poland” (Gomola 2016, 633–634).
In Romans, Phoebe was assigned a role closer to that of a patroness: προστάτις, which can also be
translated as a protector, or female guardian. Just as for the Hebrew ezer, its translation to the English
‘helper’ greatly weakens the position represented. Indeed, according to Jeremy Punt, the English
‘helper’ completely ignores the patronage system of the 1st century AD in which “social relations
were governed in a sophisticated reciprocal relationship where honour, prestige and power dynam-
ics governed behaviours” (Punt 2014, 5). To not understand this is to overlook an important aspect
of the social relations one has to translate. For example, Punt argues that one should not translate
προστάτις as ‘helper’ to describe Phoebe when she is identified by Paul as both a minister and a
patron – most probably his. Not only does it not fit the story established in the Pauline letters, but
also strips women of their social status in the early church. Phoebe had a “coveted social status, a
public role of patronage, protection and authority” that is not translated by the English ‘helper’ (Punt
2014, 6). Punt suggests that one of the surest ways to identify the translation choices and the societal
norms from which they stem is to use cultural studies. Although it will neither guarantee a ‘proper
translation’ nor break the sexist symbolism that has become embedded into the text, it provides an
accountable point of departure for translating and understanding previous translations (Punt 2014, 9).
Genesis 3
14
And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed
above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust
shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her
seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in
sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he
shall rule over thee.
17
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and
hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it:
cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Gen 3:14–17 (KJV)
The third chapter of the Book of Genesis also holds its share of controversy and has been disputed
by feminist translators and scholars. Gen 3:16 is at the centre of most debates as the verse defining
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Mathilde Michaud
the role of women within society. In this case, however, word translations are not the only subjects
contested; the formulation of the verse itself is key to the translation debate. Schüngel-Straumann
suggests that this verse as well as Gen 3:14–17 should not be understood as a set of commands
or instructions but rather as an “aetiological description of a status of being” (2012, 6). Indeed, it
is argued that Gen 3 should not be read alone, as God’s will, but rather as a description of reality
and its flaws compared to God’s desire for a good world as presented in Gen 2. As Hebrew fails
to distinguish between present and future tense, Schüngel-Straumann thus proposes we should
choose to translate Gen 3:14–17 in the present tense: “he rules over you” rather than “he shall
rule over you” (Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 6), as factual description of the future. This would
drastically change the tone of the verses and, had they been translated in this way in the first place,
it might have made it more difficult to present women’s inferiority as god-made.
The use of ‘sorrow’ or ‘pain’ in childbirth in the anglicised versions has also caused debates
as it appears to significantly modify the script of femininity, rooting women’s experience within
the painful punishment of bearing life through the sinful act of reproduction. Indeed, feminist
scholars contend that ‘toil’ should have been used instead, just as it was to describe human labour
and the ‘toil’ associated with it. Schüngel-Straumann argues that “to translate it with “pain” is
to read unwarranted meaning into the text” which still influences women today to internal-
ise sexual humiliation as punishment for the fall, a script that is “totally inexistent in the text”
(Schüngel-Straumann 2012, 6).
Future directions
If we have been able to identify some of the translation choices made in specific parts of the Bible,
their repercussions on both secular and religious discourses on gender in a variety of contexts still
remain only vaguely drawn. Korsak has shown how Gen 3:16, more precisely the last segment
as translated in the King James Version – “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule
over thee” – was used to justify the abuse of women in 19th-century American jurisprudence
(Korsak 2002, 142). This idea, deeply rooted in our cultural construct of femininity, presents Eve/
woman, as ‘man’s subservient helpmate’ whose shameful sexuality is at his service and whose
actions he may judge and punish at will (Korsak 2002, 143). The American juridical system is not
the only one to have been affected by these two simple lines. Catholic priests in Québec also used
this idea in their sermons to justify the use of physical force by men on their wives in the late 19th
century, constructing obedience as the central task of a woman (Cloutier 1891).
In parallel, there remains a need to historicise the motives and discourses that pushed trans-
lators to become, willingly or not, patriarchal agents and reinforce unequal gender relations
in biblical texts. Some general linguistic and philosophical hypotheses have been put forward
regarding the context in which the first Greek translations were made, but most translations
have yet to be analyzed in this way. Reformation translations, especially, will need thorough
exploration – something that has barely begun – as they are the ones whose diffusion has had
the greatest repercussion. As suggested by Gomola’s comparative analysis of English and Polish
Bible translations, these first vernacular translations will have to be studied comparatively if we
wish to understand their impact on cultural norms of gender within a geolinguistic context
(Gomola 2016, 634). Moreover, such comparative studies will help uncover the socio-linguistic
norms that created these versions of the Bible and moved cultured translators into participating
in the patriarchal construction of biblical scripts.
The analysis of Genesis 2–3 has enabled us to identify the traces left by translators over the
years and through multiple layers of translations of the Bible, and has opened a door to more
research of this kind. If we can trace the significant impact of translations on scripts of femininity
478
and masculinity, there is now a need for scholars in the social sciences and humanities to dis-
entangle the network of signification woven into the fabric of our societies and identify the
constricted identities that still prevail today in order to better deconstruct them.
Further reading
Gomola, Aleksander. 2016. Aspects of Gender Neutral Language in Selected English and Polish Transla-
tions of the New Testament. Open Theology, 2(1), 621–635.
Gomola’s article is one of the few that has developed a comparative study of multiple translations in a
single sociocultural context with gender as its central focus of analysis. Investigating the methods and
issues encountered by translators in introducing gender-neutral languages, this article makes a strong
argument for the need for more context-based research on gender in Bible translation.
Korsak, Mary Phil. 1992. At the Start . . . Genesis Made New. Louvain: Leuvense Schrijversaktie.
This book is both a scholarly critique of previous translations of Genesis, and an example of a more
neutral – word for word – translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.
Kraus, Helen. 2011. Gender Issues in Ancient and Reformation Translations of Genesis 1–4. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kraus’s monograph is a remarkable in-depth analysis of translations of Genesis through five of the most
‘authoritative’ translation projects undertaken up until the Reformation. With a special focus on male-
female relations, this work compares the various interpretations of femininity and masculinity as well as
femaleness and maleness against the background of the Hebrew text.
Schottroff, L. and M. T. Wacker, eds. 2012. Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Com-
mentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature. Cambridge: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Whilst the book is not entirely dedicated to discussing translations, numerous chapters undertake the
analysis of translations of passages of the Bible. Written by a very diverse group of scholars, the com-
pendium provides a well-documented point of entry for those looking for an introduction to specific
sections of the Scriptures.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1985 [1895]. The Woman’s Bible. Reprint, Edinburgh: Polygon Books.
Written in the late 19th century by a group of educated women in response to the orthodoxy and tra-
ditionalism of translations offered by all-male groups of translators at the time, The Woman’s Bible – the
first widely read commentary made by women about the Scriptures – offers a good overview of the
primary points of contention found in Bible translation.
Related topics
History of translation, inclusive language and translation, gender construct and identity, religion
and translation
Notes
1 See Warner 2000; Nord 2003; von Flotow 2000; Stanton 1985; Daly 1986. See full references in bibliography.
2 Colonial issues in translations of the Bible are not covered in this chapter. There however exists a vast
literature. See Kinyua 2015; Naudé 2011; Dube 2002.
3 The political action of naming things and concepts through which we “impose a pattern and a mean-
ing which allows us to manipulate the world.” According to Spender, males being in control of most of
the linguistic process, it has been used to consolidate their superiority in a way detrimental to women
(Spender 1980, 163).
References
Bracke, Maud Anne, Penelope Morris and Emily Ryder. 2018. Introduction. Translating Feminism: Trans-
fer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s). Gender & History, 30(1), 214–225.
479
Mathilde Michaud
Daly, Mary. 1986. Beyond God the Father. London: The Women’s Press.
De Troyer, Kristin. 1997. Septuagint and Gender Studies: The Very Beginning of a Promising Liaison, in
Athalya Brenner and Carole R. Fontaine, eds., A Feminist Companion at Reading the Bible: Approaches,
Methods and Strategies. London: Taylor & Francis, 326–343.
Dube, Saurabh. 2002. Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity. The
South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 807–837.
Flotow, Luise von. 2000. Women, Bibles, Ideologies, in TTR. Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 13(1), 9–19.
Flotow, Luise von. 2007. Gender and Translation, in Piotre Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau, eds., Companion
to Translation Studies. Bristol: Multilingual Matter, 92–105.
Kinyua, Johnson Kiriaku. 2015. A Postcolonial Analysis of Bible Translation and its Effectiveness in Shap-
ing and Enhancing the Discourse of Colonialism and the Discourse of Resistance. Black Theology,
11(1), 58–95.
Korsak, Mary Phil. 1992. At the Start . . . Genesis Made New. Louvain: Leuvense Schrijversaktie.
Korsak, Mary Phil. 2002. Translating the Bible: Bible Translations and Gender Issues, in Athalya Brenner
and Jan Willem van Henten, eds., Bible Translation on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century: Authority,
Reception, Culture and Religion. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 132–146.
Liturgiam Authenticam, on the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Lit-
urgy. Available at: www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_
20010507_liturgiam-authenticam_en.html [Accessed 5 Apr. 2017].
Mckenzie, John L. 1995. The Dictionary of the Bible. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Moore, Richard K. 2014. The Case for Bible Translation, Viewed in Historical Perspective. The Bible
Translator, 65(1), 77–87.
Naudé, Jacobus A. 2011. Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters with the Indigenous: The Case of Reli-
gious Translation in Africa. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(3), 313–326.
Nord, Christiane. 2003. Function and Loyalty in Bible Translation, in Maria Calzada Pérez, ed., Apropos of
Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideology in Translation Studies. Manchester: St-Jerome, 89–112.
Punt, Jeremy. 2014. (Con)figuring Gender in Bible Translation: Cultural, Translational and Gender Critical
Intersections. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 70(1). doi: 10.4102/hts.v70i1.2051.
Russel, Letty M. 1974. Women and Ministry, in Alice L. Hageman, ed., Sexist Religion and Women in the
Church: No More Silence! Boston: Association Press, 17–62.
Schüngel-Straumann, Helen. 2012. Genesis 1–11: The Primordial History, in Luise Schottroff and Marie-
Therese Wacker, eds., Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books
of the Bible and Related Literature. Cambridge: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1–14.
Scott, Joan W. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review,
91(5), 1053–1075.
Shulman, Gail B. 1974. View from the Back of the Synagogue: Women in Judaism, in Alice L. Hageman,
ed., Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence! Boston: Association Press, 143–166.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. New York: Routledge.
Skevington Wood, Arthur. 1969. Captive to the Word: Martin Luther, Doctor of Sacred Scripture. Exeter: Pater-
noster Press.
Smith, Julia E. 1876. The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the
Original Tongues. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company.
Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Spender, Dale.1985. Introduction, in Stanton, Elizabeth C. et al. [1895]. The Woman’s Bible: The Original
Feminist Attack on the Bible. Abridged Ed. Introduced by Dale Spender. Edinburgh: Polygon Books, i–v.
Stanton, Elizabeth C. et al. 1985[1895]. The Woman’s Bible: The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible.
Abridged Ed. Introduced by Dale Spender. Edinburgh: Polygon Books.
Warner, Marina. 2000. Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Vintage.
Zogbo, Lynell. 2011. Bible, Jewish and Christian, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge
Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 21–27.
Primary sources
Archives de l’Évêché de Trois-Rivières (AETR). 1891. Collection de recueils de sermons, François-Xavier
Cloutier.
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36
Negotiation of meaning
in translating ‘Islamic
feminist’ texts into Arabic
Mapping the terrain
Doaa Embabi
The relevance of feminism to current world affairs is quite significant, especially in the context
of rapid technological changes that enable instantaneous cultural exchanges, which in turn
influence the travel of feminist concepts and ideas. With this relevance and speed of com-
munication comes the growing diversity and diversification of approaches within the larger
paradigm; hence, the discipline most commonly known as Islamic Feminism (IF). So far there
is no agreement on a final definition of the term and some of the pioneers of the scholarship
in the field shy away from being termed Islamic feminist writers (Amina Wadud and Asma
Barlas, for example). However, it can be said with some degree of certainty that research and
studies classified as Islamic feminism share a faith-based (i.e. Islamic/Muslim) perspective on the
discussion of feminist texts. In this regard, their work crosscuts with that of feminists working
with the Bible and other feminists working from within other faiths. In terms of substance, the
arguments provided by faith-oriented feminists are usually propelled by the central text of their
faith, such as the Quran or the Bible, in the case of Muslims and Christians. Engagement takes
different forms and levels: theological, philosophical, exegetic, translational, activist, and other-
wise. Islamic feminists also engage with the body of Prophetic traditions (hadith)1 and the large
body of Quranic interpretation, jurisprudence, and Sharia (laws and regulations drawn from the
Quran and Prophetic traditions). Moreover, the scholars’ engagement with texts of Islam covers
a very broad spectrum ranging from extreme hostility towards all that is traditional, from Ayaan
Hirsi Ali to others who believe in the possibility of engaging with the discourse of Islam about
women by providing an alternative reading of the core texts – the Quran, Prophetic traditions,
and jurisprudence scholarship. These women thinkers include Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas,
Kecia Ali, Nevin Reda, Ziba Mir-Husseini, Omaima Abou-Bakr, Asma Lamrabet, Amani Saleh,
to name only some. Despite the diversity of scholarship adopted by each, they all agree on a
reformist approach and explicitly declare they are working constructively to provide an alterna-
tive voice on the injustices experienced by Muslim women in the Muslim world.
Much of this Islamic feminist research involves translation on many different levels. Works
originally produced in English or any language other than Arabic for that matter, inherently deal
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with translation because they enter into an interlocutory relationship with the Quran and with
other traditional texts of Islam originally written in Arabic. Translation underlies all the texts
produced in languages other than Arabic. It is directly relevant in the case of women’s/ feminist
translations of the Quran into English and other languages (See Rim Hassen 2017, 17–38).
Translation is also always present because Arabic is inextricable from the jurisprudence and
ethical concepts in Islam; this means that any project produced in languages other than Arabic
involves translation of direct quotes or of concepts and ideas.
This chapter, however, is concerned with translations from English/French into Arabic of
works that either profess to be Islamic feminist texts or are read as such. The aim is, therefore,
to map such translations produced/sponsored both by individuals and institutions; examine the
ways in which they are positioned within the larger context of Islamic feminist knowledge in
Arabic; and consider the potential difference between individual and institutional translation
projects in terms of framing. Moreover, the interplay between the visibility and ethics of the
translator of such ideologically fraught texts is discussed: i.e. to what extent do translators make
visible interventions whether by commenting, prefacing, footnoting and glossing, or refraining
from interventions. Thus, while surveying the translations into Arabic, this chapter also aims to
highlight the non-traditional linguistic and conceptual actions by the translators and to examine
to what extent translators are conscious of the translational decisions they are making.
The scene of Islamic feminist translation

The translation into Arabic of Islamic feminist texts is relevant to scholarly endeavours because,
for the most part, the translations are seen to be contributing to the existing body of Islamic
feminist works in Arabic, and providing – in their own right – interventions that challenge the
traditional body of knowledge on women’s position and women’s issues in Islam. Translators
and institutions producing such translations do not see their work of translation as ‘secondary’ or
‘subsidiary’ to the source texts. On the contrary, the translators speak in the prefaces about creat-
ing an alternative knowledge. Equally important is the role the translator envisages herself enact-
ing when she produces such translations. Thus, one of the well-known translators from French
into Arabic based in Morocco, Bouchra Laghzali, who is the translator of Asma Lamrabet, the
renowned IF scholar writing in French, states that through her translation of such works she is
helping introduce the writer to her Arab constituency in Morocco, which is not necessarily able
to read in a foreign language. Laghzali regards her work as particularly relevant to women who
only read Arabic and who are ‘affected’ by the ideas discussed in such works (Laghzali, Personal
Interview).2 Therefore, such translations are seen to enlarge the body of works in Arabic and
contribute to building knowledge in this field by enabling the travel of ideas between Arabic
and non-Arabic speakers and writers.
Arabic translations of IF make the field in Arab cultures more sophisticated. The claim by
Arabic translators of IF texts, particularly when writers of these texts accept the label of Islamic
feminist, that they are helping build new knowledge, means that another class of disseminators of
Islamic feminist ideas enters the playing field. Indeed, in most cases, the translators of such texts
are also invested in the concepts and ideology of the works they translate. Their linguistic and
cultural strategies and choices, either drawing on the language used in traditional texts of Islam,
or opting to borrow or coin new terms and styles, and playing with grammatical gender – to
name only a few of the translational strategies – influence the existing IF discourse in Arabic,
at least in the academic and activist circles that produce works seeking the reform of women’s
status in Muslim communities from within the bounds of faith. Thus, their translations can be
seen as gateways to broadening the discussion, introducing new lines of Quranic interpretation,
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Translating ‘Islamic Feminist’ texts
and facilitating the understanding of new approaches to Sharia-based legal provisions concern-
ing Muslim families.
Notwithstanding the criticism leveled against IF scholarship, the body of works on the topic
is growing and many perspectives and trajectories are being explored. Some scholars are work-
ing to provide new interpretations of certain Quranic verses that influence women’s lives and
the husband-wife relationship; others are working on more abstract questions, such as identify-
ing a new paradigm for interpreting gender-relations based on the concept of justice and com-
passion; while some are more grounded, and produce scholarship related to changing realities,
particularly with respect to personal status laws and inheritance laws/practices. As will be seen,
translation into Arabic in this field is very organic and engages in questions similar to those
posed by the texts produced in Arabic.
Translations, translators, trends in translations

Efforts to combine the perspective of faith with feminist issues existed in Arabic scholarship
prior to what came to be dubbed as Islamic feminism. This study, though, does not map the
evolution of the discipline of IF in Arabic and in the Arab world – as this would require a dif-
ferent approach and different questions. This chapter is more focused on the interventions made
by translation in the form of individual and institutional projects.
In examining the terrain of Arabic translations, the following trends and features were dis-
cerned: (1) Despite the fact that the field has existed as an acknowledged area of interest for at
least two decades, the translations produced in Arabic are still very limited in number. This could
possibly be attributed to the scholarly nature and the specialized interest of such works, and, at
times, the controversial views concerning the possibility of combining feminist/gender-based
concepts with the Islamic world view of gender relations. (2) A quick overview reveals that
translations are mostly produced by academic/scholarly institutions, which necessarily implies a
niche market for the consumption of such products – probably the academics or feminist schol-
ars who have a particular interest in examining feminist/gender ideas from the angle of Islam.
(3) Development organizations – national, regional, and international – working in the field of
gender equality do not seem to have documents/platforms targeting this field, and only few of
them have just recently introduced the approach of faith-oriented gender programs. (4) The
field has been largely influenced by the growing digitization of knowledge; many platforms exist
that are either fully dedicated to the question of feminism from the perspective of Islam or that
devote ‘files’ to the topic within their larger focus which combines Islam with other disciplines.
Translation plays an important role in these platforms (see for example the volume produced by
Mominoun Without Borders 20163 and the articles produced on the topic on the website of
Qantara in English, Arabic, and German/Deutsch4). (5) There is a visible trend associated with
the ‘institutional’ nature of the field, namely ‘specialization’ by some translators as compared to
single translation instances where translation is commissioned based only on professional com-
petence. (6) Translations commissioned to this class of ‘specialized’ translators reflect a higher
degree of ‘visibility’ for the translator through paratextual elements, such as prefaces where the
translator discusses her interventions and the ‘ethics’ motivating them; this idea is also connected
to how the translator views herself, i.e. whether she identifies as an engaged ‘feminist’ translator.
Individual translators/commercial publishers

Through the examination of the very few individual translations published commercially, unlike
the translations produced under a larger project with the announced objective of achieving
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Doaa Embabi
gender justice from the viewpoint of Islam, it is possible to conclude that the individual transla-
tor assumes invisibility in the translation product by refraining from providing any additional
material indicative of his/her existence. But the question remains: to what extent does this
self-effacing attitude affect the position of the translation in the larger discourse on IF in Arabic
language or in the Arab culture?
One of the earlier translations of Islamic feminist texts into Arabic is that of Amina Wadud’s
Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1999, originally pub-
lished in 1992), which was translated by Samia Adnan, under the title Al-Qur’an wal mar’ah:
i‘adat qira’at al-nas al-Qur’ani min manzūr nisa’i5 (2006), an individual project published commer-
˙ ˙ Wadud’s early work is a thematic exegesis of the Qur’an,
cially in Cairo by Madbouli publishers.
and together with her remaining oeuvre is described, by Shadaab Rahemtulla, as a “liberationist
and women’s gender egalitarian reading of the Qur’an” which is based on her own personal
experience and struggles (2017, 232). The importance of the work in English lies also in the fact
that Wadud contextualizes her experience as a woman within the reading of the sacred text of
Islam by examining the “context” of revelation, the “grammatical compositions of the text,” and
the text’s “world-view” (Wadud 1999, 3). Despite any criticism leveled against this translation
(such as not being reviewed as indicated by some typos and mistranslations; and the fact that
the translator herself ‘regrets’ it (Adnan 2017),6 this book marks one of the earliest attempts at
translating one of the seminal IF works into Arabic.
This private project is an interesting case. On the one hand, with the exception of a short
introductory paragraph about the author, the translator does not gloss the text with any foot-
notes or an elaborate preface to explain her approach. When asked about the reasons for not
commenting on Wadud’s use of the feminine pronoun ‘she’ in reference to Allah, or other issues
in the book, Adnan states that the translation was “not a critical or analytical study” and that she
believed that “the work was to copy the book exactly as it is, but in a different language” (Adnan
2017). On the other hand, Adnan’s conscious choice of ‘invisibility’ is challenged, for instance,
by her ‘decision’ to remove a glossary of select Arabic terms (Wadud xxv–xxvi) from the transla-
tion, in which Wadud provides transliterated Arabic terms and her own interpretation of their
meanings, despite the fact that Wadud includes in this glossary some of the key terms that have
become the focus of many other IF works. Some of them are controversial, such as ‘daraba’
(which she defines as strike) and ‘qiwamah’ (which she defines as a ‘specific form of responsibil-
ity that men have for women’) (Wadud xxv–xxvi). The omission of the glossary in the Arabic
version compromises the attempt made by the author to explore the possible layers of meaning
in the terms defined and in her uses of them. The translator, though, decided to exclude this
glossary from the translation without informing the reader of the reasons behind this choice.
Another conscious decision taken by the translator is that of ‘choosing’ to translate this work –
as she owned a self-publishing business at the time (Adnan 2017) which enabled her to acquire
translation rights from Oxford University Press. According to Adnan, the main motivation for
translating the text was the uproar in the year the book was published that came out of Wadud
leading a prayer in South Africa (i.e. a woman being the Imam of the prayer); in Adnan’s view
this would make the book more popular.7 However, according to Adnan, the publication process
was not rapid enough and the Arabic version did not attract the attention she had hoped for.
Though the Arabic version was a milestone in terms of the production of translations, introduc-
ing the then new concept of IF was not the priority motivation for undertaking the translation.
Nonetheless, it can be argued that this translation – despite the issues discussed previously –
can be invoked today to counteract claims contesting the validity of gender-based exegetic
works produced by individuals without proper training in jurisprudence, exegesis, and Sharia.
At the end of the Arabic book, a statement of approval issued by the Islamic Research Academy,
484
affiliated to Al-Azhar, is published. Al-Azhar, is the highest Islamic scholarly institution (both
social and educational), which could contest any texts expressing censured views regarding
Islam. Interestingly, this statement shows that the project was sanctioned by the top religious
authority in the country of publication – i.e. Egypt. As such, this translation sets a precedent,
enabling exegetic scholarship that questions traditional unjust views on women in Islam.
Another commercially published translation is also important to map for the way it brings
forth to the Arab reader (and to non-Persian speakers) another perspective on Islamic fem-
inism, namely Siddiqa Wasamgi’s work Al-Mar’ah, al-fiqh, al-Islam (Women, Jurisprudence, and
Islam) translated by Raad al-Hajjaj (2018). In this work, the author argues that although equality
between men and women is established in most of the Islamic rulings concerning legal and com-
mercial interactions, worship, and even in punishments, discrimination is the norm in the realm
of social and family relations. The argument is made within a larger discussion of diverse issues
concerning gender roles and relations: the right of men to have multiple wives, sexual rights,
the wife requiring her husband’s permission before leaving the house, the right of the mother
to guardianship in the case of the death of the father or of divorce, or when this right is not
contested by the original legal guardians. The topics are discussed within the context of Iran in
particular. As commonly shared as those issues are, the author adds another factor to the discrimi-
nation experienced by Iranian/Persian women, which is the influence of Arab culture and the
history of Islam. At the beginning of the book, Wasamgi dedicates a full chapter to the discussion
of the inextricable relation between jurisprudence as currently practiced by and on Muslim fam-
ily relations and women, on the one hand, and the Arab culture historically inherited from the
times of Prophet Mohammad and the early community of Madina, on the other. She argues that
the prevalent relations among family, tribe, and community – continued even after the advent
of Islam, due to being validated by the approval of the Prophet – were imbued with a guise of
authority not necessarily grounded in the Sharia as pronounced in the Qur’an (p. 18).
Though the translator of this work does not ‘appear’, except in the name on the cover, the
translation itself is very relevant to scholarship on the translation of Islamic feminist texts. One of
the key pillars of the argument for gender justice in this book is the specificity of the experience
of Iranian women and family relations, which is not a frequent argument in other IF studies
that call for a re-reading of Quranic interpretations and jurisprudence in regard to women. The
author is focused on deconstructing the intertwining of Arab culture and Arabic language with
Islam; for instance, she interestingly questions the Sharia ruling on the prerequisites for mak-
ing divorce legally effective and whether the pronouncement ‘you are divorced’ (’anti taliq) by
˙
the man should in all cultures be said in Arabic regardless of the mother tongue of the spouses
(123)! The production of Arabic translations of such texts is indeed relevant to the discussion
of IF because not only do they offer an interventionist path in regard to the prevalent views on
women’s status in Islam as inherited in traditional authoritative texts, but they also bring the
perspective of non-Arab and non-Western Muslim women into the discussion. This perspective
extends beyond shared issues of gender equality, in view of the universality of the principles of
justice and equity in Islam, to questions of language and reception; it highlights the fact that
though the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic, its message is and should be universal.
Institutional translations
Other types of projects are more institutionalized and involve the translation of edited antholo-
gies. Two works are to be cited in this category: Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-
Activists in North America (2000) translated into Arabic (by a team of translators led by Ibrahim
Yahia al-Shihabi) as Da‘ūnā natakallam: mufakkirāt Amrikiyāt yaftahn nawafidh al-’īmān ‘ala ‘ālam
485
Doaa Embabi
mutaghayir [Let us talk: American women thinkers open windows of faith over a changing
world] (2002), published by the Syrian Dar el-Fikr within the context of an event organized
on 20–25 April 2002, on the occasion of the ‘Year of the Woman’ and as part of the dialogue
titled ‘The woman and transformations of the new age’.8 The second work is Gender and Equal-
ity in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition (Lena Larsen et al. 2013).
Both the English source and Arabic texts were sponsored by the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of
Religion or Belief (OC).
The two translations were part of a larger endeavour to engage the views of the Arab/
Muslim communities concerning practical gender/women’s issues. One of the key similarities
discerned, however, is the fact that the translation generally shadows the source text in style and
word choice, which reminds us of Christiane Nord’s discussion of ‘documentary’ translation,
defined as more source-text oriented compared to ‘instrumental’ translation, in which the target
text is mainly used to communicate the source text message but where the translator exercises
broader decision making (Nord 2005, 80–81, 2016, 32). The approach to the translation of the
two books also raises questions about the role of the translation ‘commissioner’ and that of the
‘translation brief ’ (Nord 2016, 30) as well as the instructions the translators might have received
to produce texts that reproduce the source closely.
The lead translator of the Windows of Faith states in the very brief forward to the book that
he was ‘commissioned’ by the publisher to do the translation (Webb 2002, 14) but is silent
afterwards about the instructions given – if any. The translation reveals a rather literal approach,
which makes some of the structures cumbersome; for instance, in her chapter, ‘Muslim Women’s
Islamic Higher Learning as a Human Right’, Nimat Barazangi states that “The intent of this
chapter . . . is to contribute toward an educational . . . interpretation of the Qur’an for women . . .
and thereby to produce an action plan for the Muslim woman to regain her identification
with Islam” [emphasis added]’ (Web 2000, 23). The Arabic of this emphasized part reads: ‘kay
tasta‘īd howiyataha al-dhātiya ma‘a al-Islām’ (Webb 2002, 63) [back translation: “to regain her
self-identity together with Islam”], which is very literal and awkward. Two other instances are
also indicative of grappling with terms, namely, ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’ – reminding us of Samia
Mehrz’s discussion in “Translating Gender” (2007) of the problematic nature of translating terms
that are laden with social, cultural, and even religious connotations into Arabic. In Barzangi’s
chapter there is reference to ‘gender justice’ (22) and the translators opt once more for the literal
approach rendering the term ‘‘adālat al-jins’ (63), which is a very exotic/opaque term. In Azizah
al-Hibri’s chapter discussing the Muslim woman’s human rights, the word ‘feminism’ is used on
more than one occasion and the translator opts for an explanatory translation. In one case, the
author was trying to differentiate between authentic feminist support for Muslim women and
other condescending positions: “Western neoorientalist critiques of Islam, thinly disguised as
“feminist” critiques, have managed only to complicate the task of Muslim women” (emphasis
added) (Webb 2000, 67). The translator shifts the modification, making it describe the critics:
‘wa al-ladhīn yadda‘ūn annahum nuqqād yad‘ūn ila musāwāt al-rajul bil mar’ah’ [those who claim that
they are critics who call for equality between men and women] (Webb 2002, 119). The author
concludes this section of her chapter confirming the denunciation of the negative impact of
neoorientalist critiques on the potential that “the Western feminist movement” (Webb 2000,
68) could have for supporting Muslim women. The translator renders the ‘feminist movement’
as harakat al-nisā’ [women’s movement] (Webb 2002, 120). Contrary, however, to such instances
where there is much ‘uncertainty’ (Nord 2016) with respect to the translational decisions taken,
the translators produce much smoother texts and structures when the source author uses words
or quotes from traditional Arabic sources. This is particularly true in chapters that quote long
stretches from the books of prophetic traditions, Quranic interpretation, and other sources, such
486
as Muhja Kahf ’s text “Braiding Stories” (Webb 2000, 147–171) on reconstructing a literary his-
tory for women from the fragmented references in the works of classical tradition. Thus, although
the translator does not speak about clear translation commission instructions, or the role of the
publisher, or Arabic speaking authors in influencing the approach to translation, it can be gleaned
from the translation that the translator was committed to being source-text oriented, and natu-
rally to refraining from retranslating quotes from classical Arabic sources by using the original.
The translation of Gender and Equality also reflects the dynamics between translation com-
missioner and translator(s)/reviser and the role of the institution – in this case the editors rep-
resenting the publishing sponsor, OC – in influencing important translational decisions. A first
review of the translation resulted in a retranslation of the whole manuscript9 – in my view, to
bring the translation closer to the source – but it would be beyond the scope of this chapter to
embark on an analysis of the differences between the two products. However, in the “Preface of
the Translator” (Mir-Husseini et al. 2017, 7–9) the reviser, Mona Ibrahim, raises important issues
that would naturally reflect on the product and that could explain why the translation com-
missioners opted for a ‘documentary’ approach to translation. This anthology was written by
Arabic and non-Arabic speaking Muslim scholars and though most of the contributions were in
English, two were in Persian and one was in French. These were translated into English for the
purposes of the source volume. The French contribution was then self-translated into Arabic;
however, those in Persian were translated from a translation. Moreover, the retranslation of the
book was commissioned to two translators: Siham bint Saniya wa Abdul-Salam and Hossam
Badr. The involvement of many translators and the intricacy of the linguistic encounter neces-
sarily meant multiple layers of decision making, including the treatment of references from the
Qur’an, Prophetic traditions, and traditional books and the translation of concept-laden words
such as ‘patriarchal’ (translated almost consistently into ‘abawi’) or ‘gender’ (translated according
to context thus appearing as al-musāwāt bayn al-jinsayn in the term ‘gender equality’ in the intro-
ductory chapter and as al-naw‘ al-ijtimā‘i when used alone); and even the linguistic styles and
structures. The reviewer, though, merely pointed out the multiplicity of the translation effort
leaving the invisibility of the translators to speak for itself through the decisions they made.
Compared to commercially published translations, these two projects reflected different types
of issues due to institutionalization. The two translations, published 15 years apart, were pro-
duced within larger projects concerned with the links between faith/religion and different
aspects of life and society: the Windows of Faith translation was part of a series titled ‘Dialogues
for a new century’10 which is still running (despite the disruption of the Syrian cultural scene
by war); while Gender and Equality is the latest publication of the OC project ‘New directions
in Islamic thought’.11 Thus, outreach has not been left to individual efforts; it is planned and
executed rather systematically, mainly through bilingualism; and although Arabic is the pre-
dominant language of Dar el Fikr and English is used for the OC website and publications, both
platforms offer the work in English and Arabic. In fact, the OC also produced a subsequent
report translated into Arabic (May 2013) “intended for policy-makers, stakeholders and advo-
cates of reform who are developing knowledge-based arguments for legal reform.” The report
also focuses on disseminating the learning experience behind the production of the book by
emphasizing “lessons . . . learned from the expert discussions and written contributions.”12 As
such, the economics and politics of marketing the works (source and target) play an important
role in achieving visibility for the translation, and hence attempting to influence the main-
streaming of IF translations into Islam’s scholarship about women’s status and rights.
The institutionalized publishing of Arabic translations by organizations whose work is
focused on gender as a core thematic thread is another important pathway for the translation and
publication of IF texts. In this respect, reference is made to works published by gender-focused
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organizations: the Egyptian-based Women and Memory Forum (WMF),13 the Malaysia-based
Mussawah,14 and the Morocco-based Center for Women’s Studies in Islam (CERFI). The com-
mon factor of such platforms is the combination of activist and scholarly interests and publications
as well as the international nature of events and intended audience, which entails an extensive
activity of translation and original research work in both English and Arabic, and French in the
case of CERFI. These platforms are specifically cited because of the publications whose produc-
tion and translation they sponsor, host on their websites, and market in print format.
The Women and Memory Forum has produced two leading publications that examine
feminist and gender issues from the perspective of faith. The first is a section in the Reader on
Feminism and Religious Studies (Al-niswiya wa al-dirāsāt al-dīniya) (2012) with Randa Aboubakr as
translator. This book was part of a series of Readers on Gender in the Humanities and Social
Sciences produced in Arabic translation. The book on gender issues and religion dealt with
feminism, Christianity and Islam; the selected translations of feminism in Islamic studies were
either book excerpts/chapters or individual articles by leading figures in the field (Azizah al-
Hibri, Rifaat Hassan, Asma Barlas, Amina Wadud, and Omaima Abou-Bakr and an article from
the platform of Sisters in Islam). This book is purely academic in its approach to and selection
of texts; the translator states that in the process of translation she mainly sought “to contribute
to the production of new knowledge in the Arab culture, and consequently to the creation of
a language capable of conveying this knowledge” (Aboubakr 2012, 38). One of the important
features that appears in most publications/translations of IF works conscious not only of the
individual project at hand but also of building a discourse in the field is the creation of a glos-
sary. This volume ends with a glossary of the translations into Arabic of words that appeared in
the translated extracts, where the glossary is preceded by the disclaimer that suggested meanings
are contextualized and a single term could have different renderings (291). In the extensive
preface (2012, 38–53), the translator explains and defends her rather ‘documentary’ approach, in
which she favours reproducing a style and structure similar to that of the source counting on the
discretion of the readers in accepting a new mode of writing about religion, which is different
from what they are used to. She touches on many issues that this type of translation necessarily
involves. The issues include: her own position within broader translation theories as a transla-
tor, particularly vis-à-vis ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ (38–41); her own reflections on the
use of gendered pronouns and ‘inclusive language’ (41–44); the question of back-translation,
particularly when Arabic words are transliterated and then glossed in the source (44–46); and
stylistic issues and problematic words whose literal translation could sound exotic (46–51).
The second publication by WMF was a larger project with a special focus on IF under the
title Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform (in Arabic: Al-niswiya
wa al-manzūr al-Islāmi: ’āfāq jadīda li al-ma‘rifa wa al-islāh) (2013b). It is a bilingual publication
˙
of the collection of papers delivered during a two-day conference held in Cairo in 2012. The
studies in English were translated into Arabic and vice versa. The translator into Arabic was also
Randa Aboubakr – but she did not provide a preface for this translation. Moreover, the trans-
lated works are not marked as such. Thus, we have the publication in English and in Arabic with
the translators and revisers acknowledged only on the information page. The articles cover a
broad range of topics starting from a discussion of the possible convergence between feminism
and Islamic perspectives to a discussion of feminist consciousness in both the Arab and European
contexts. The book also comprises a part on Islamic legal thought and new interpretations of
the Quran, which are two key components of most anthologies on IF. The book closes with a
bibliographic article on the most prominent publications in the field that covers both Arabic
and English projects to date. The WMF is actively and consciously engaged in the production
of knowledge and the incorporation of gender as a tool of analysis in their studies and activist
488
works. This reflects their interest in producing translation into Arabic due to the scarcity of such
works, and they use these texts to build a dialogue between works produced in English and
translations into Arabic with the objective of creating a discourse on relevant feminist issues.
Another significant publication in the field is the book titled, Men in Charge: Rethinking
Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (2014) translated as Al-qiwāmah fi al-turāth al-Islāmi: qirā’āt
badīla [Qiwamah in Muslim Tradition: Alternative Readings] (2016). This translation is sponsored
by the movement Musawah, and together with the work in English, was produced under their
“Five-year Knowledge Building Initiative on Qiwamah and Wilayah”15 which focuses on re-
examining the concept of the ‘authority’ of men over women from the perspective of Islam:
“This initiative seeks to show how laws based on outdated interpretations of these concepts
[Qiwamah and Wilayah], which place women under male authority, no longer reflect the justice
of Islam. Other interpretations are both possible and more in line with human rights principles
and contemporary lived realities.” This translation was also commissioned to Randa Aboubakr,
whose work includes a preface where she explains some of her concerns, positions, and transla-
tion strategies.
The two translations produced by WMF and that produced by Musawah share many features
that place them – and other translations produced under similar circumstances – in a category
of their own. They are all institutionally sponsored translations; however, the institutions com-
missioning the translations are fully dedicated to supporting the promotion of women’s rights
in theory and in practice – compared for instance to the work of other organizations that focus
on (Islamic) feminism for the purposes of a one-off project. The three works participate in
the desire to discuss gender equality and justice based on the tenets and ethics of religion but
from a perspective free of oppressive patriarchal readings. Because the two platforms aim to
engage women and men in the Arabic-speaking and the non-Arabic speaking worlds, transla-
tion into Arabic becomes an integral activity of the larger projects in which the written works
are produced. Moreover, the translator who is commissioned to do the work is selected not
only because of professional competence but also her ideological leanings. It is noteworthy
that the aforementioned three works were translated by the same translator–Randa Aboubakr,
who wrote prefaces for the reader on gender and faith-based studies (2012, 38–53) and Men in
Charge (2016, 8–16). In both prefaces Aboubakr addresses similar issues and concerns affirming
the role of translation in creating alternative knowledge; she opens up the issue of language and
its relationship to gender-based questions; and discusses the strategies used to bridge the gap
between the heavily gendered Arabic and English, the use of ‘inclusive’ language in reference
to readers, the ‘closure’ of terminological choices, and the concerns of adding phrases such as
‘peace be upon him’ after the name of Prophet Mohammad in Arabic, despite the fact that it
does not exist in English.
Importantly, also, the translator understands that the more she uses paratexts, the more visible
she becomes; i.e. by adding “a consciously crafted threshold for a text which has the potential
to influence the way(s) in which the text is received” (Batchelor 2018, 142). In fact, she argues
that as a translator she prefers to remain ‘hidden’ indicating that this is rather motivated by her
wish to encourage the reader to be actively involved in the ‘cultural exchange’ rather than com-
placently dependent on the translator for the resolution of her/his issues in understanding a text
that does not lend itself to easy reading (Aboubakr 2012, 40). In the more recent publication,
Aboubakr speaks about ‘vanishing’ in the translated text (2016, 15); however, in this translation,
she acknowledges that the sheer fact of writing a ‘preface’ is an act of visibility committed rather
out of a sense of “duty” to “highlight some of the choices” that make it easier for the reader to
undertake her/his role as “another mediator of conveying meaning” (2016, 16). The arguments
are rather complementary: in both cases she wants to engage the reader in an active reading
489
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process where the translation product and choices are reckoned with rather than relegated to an
inferior status. Indeed, within the text itself Aboubakr does disappear, with the sole exception of
adding one footnote to correct the number of a Qura’nic verse directly quoted by a writer in
support of a given argument. However, in the prefaces, she asserts her voice, fulfilling exactly the
function of the preface in a ‘feminist translation’ as perceived by Luise von Flotow almost three
decades ago (1991) – and still valid to date. Aboubakr fits Flotow’s profile of being “more than a
conventional translator; [as] she is the author’s accomplice who maintains the strangeness of the
source text, and seeks at the same time to communicate its multiple meanings otherwise “lost in
translation” ’ (Flotow 1991, 74).
CERFI is also dedicated to the scholarly investigation of Muslim women’s issues as seen in
the nature of articles published by the Center.16 The Center hosts a number of researchers and
translators as the website indicates, and one of the former prominent researchers and translators
is Bouchra Laghzali, who though no longer affiliated to CERFI made several contributions by
way of original studies in Arabic or through translations. I would like to focus, however, on three
short pieces by Laghzali published on the CERFI website where she discusses the act of transla-
tion: an earlier article titled “Importance of religion-based translation”17 in which she argues
for the importance of translation for “communication,” “building bridges between cultures,”
and “remedying the negative image of Islam.” In this 2012 piece, Laghzali tries to disentangle
in simple terms the complexity of translating texts that ‘deal’ with religion – i.e. Islam – and
situates her argument in the desire to use translation to create a better understanding among
Muslims and non-Muslims. In the other two articles, Laghzali discusses the problematic nature
of translating concepts, both faith-based and feminist, using two specific examples: one about
the translation into English of the word ‘idrubuhun’ found in the Qur’an and the use of this term
to name an act that is a disciplinary measure aimed at correcting women’s behaviour,18 and the
other on the translation into Arabic of the word ‘patriarchy.’19
The three discussions on the ‘act’ and ‘process’ of translation and the underlying strategies
adopted by translation reflect her ethico-ideological position. Laghzali’s three interventions,
read together, show that she places great importance on situating any term in its historical,
cultural, and textual contexts; she approaches the traditional sources of Quranic interpretations
with reverence, albeit with a critical lens; and she accords a great weight to using translation as a
vehicle for positive and open communication particularly between Muslims and non-Muslims
essentially affected by Islamophobic misconceptions. Moreover, she upholds an understanding
that translators/translations must be aware of preserving whatever is positive in language use.
For example, she believes that the term ‘patriarchal’ should not be translated as ‘abawi’ due to the
positive connotations of the word ‘ab’ (father), in Arabic, that need not be violated by attributing
to it the qualities of male oppression of females. Alternatively, she suggests the use of the term
‫النظام الذكوري‬, which back-translates as the ‘male system’, based on the argument that it is male
hegemony that is criticized and not compassionate fatherly care.
Closely connected to this work, Laghzali published in 2018 a glossary of terms that are both
complex and frequently used in Islamic feminist contexts, Dictionary of Women’s Studies from an
Islamic Perspective. This work was published independent of CERFI, but it could be argued that
it is the culmination of Laghzali’s long career in writing and translating feminist/gender-related
works from within Islam. It is also a reflection of the close collaboration she has had with Asma
Lamrabet – as both women teamed up as translator/author on a number of works that included
many articles and two books from French, Les femmes et l’Islam: une vision réformiste [Al-Islām
wa al-mar’ah: al-tarīq al-thālith] (2014), and Femmes et hommes dans le Coran: quelle égalité [Al-nisā’
˙
wa al-rijāl fi al-Qur’ān: ayatu musāwāh] (2015). Lamrabet revised Laghzali’s Dictionary, and Lam-
rabet’s oeuvre served as the corpus from which the 80 terms covered by this work are drawn
490
(Laghzali 2018, 9). In the introduction Laghzali once again confirms the position she assumed in
her research/translation work at CERFI: namely, to facilitate communication by creating a glos-
sary that is ‘accessible’ to readers, who may not be specialists, anchoring her work in the ‘ethical’
component of Islam, and tackling misconceptions about Islam arising from poor translations,
lack of linguistic capabilities, and cultural misunderstanding of Arabic (Laghzali 2018, 8–9).
Pragmatic translations
Another type of institutionalized translation is what could be called ‘pragmatic’ translation,
where the word ‘pragmatic’ refers to translations of works that focus on the practical aspects of
gender justice. These are usually translations produced or sponsored by rights-based organiza-
tions whether national or international. A few prominent examples of these translations include
reports on legal reform particularly of family law, studies on the promotion of women’s rights
in Muslim communities, and stories of Muslim women’s experiences asserting their rights. Such
works have been mostly produced as the ‘knowledge’ component of larger projects dedicated
to making interventions in the predominant gender discourse. Such translations are usually pro-
duced concurrently with the text in English; acknowledgement of the translator is often limited
to the mention of the name, with no further ‘visibility’ and the reports are treated as ‘technical’
texts, hence the choice of translator is not necessarily informed by the feminist ideological lean-
ings of the translator.
Interest in addressing women and gender issues from the perspective of Islam started to
make headway with the turn of the 21st century. Some reports were fully dedicated to Islamic
feminist approaches to women’s rights and others included chapters on the topic. Women’s
Rights in Muslim Communities: A Resource Guide for Human Rights Educators (2009)20 produced
by the International Center for Human Rights Education (Equitas) was translated into Arabic
in 2010. The translation was sponsored by the international organization GIZ (the German
agency for International Development), operating in Egypt, and by an Egyptian Network
for Women’s Rights Organizations – unfortunately dissolved once the support by the GIZ
ended. This Guide juxtaposes Muslim feminist arguments on gender, interpretations of the
Qur’an, provisions of national laws, and rights-based conventions to discuss urgent issues such
as reproductive rights, marriage, and freedom of movement. The translators of this report are
not named; however, the strategies used in the translation reflect a high level of professional-
ism. Though not particularly focused on highlighting feminist sympathies, for example by not
using feminine pronouns in addressing the reader and by inadvertently mistaking Riffat Hassan
for a man, still the translation reflects “translators acting as responsible agents in an interaction
between equals” (Nord 2006, 40).
Internationally, UN Women, as partner in the Men and Women Gender Equality Pro-
gramme,21 has collaborated with Musawah and CERFI to produce works that “promote alter-
native interpretations of religious texts.” This program is funded by the Swedish International
Development Cooperation Agency, which covers translation costs. Several multilingual publi-
cations have come out as a result of this program. Two of them are particularly interesting for
the purposes of IF studies: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives: Male Authority in Muslim Contexts
(Hikāyāt hayawāt al-nisā’: al-wilāya wa al-qiwāma fi al-waqi‘ al-ma‘īsh) (2016 and 2017) (English
and Arabic) – where the translator is named, Mona Ibrahim from Egypt – and Who provides?
Who cares? Changing Dynamics in Muslim Families (Man yunfiq? Man yar‘ā?) (2018) (English and
Arabic) – where the translation is commissioned to a professional translator, Mustafa Othman,
who does not seem to have feminist leanings in particular. Both texts are cross-presented on the
UN Women and Musawah websites (with interactive links) as resources aimed at knowledge
491
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building on gender issues in Islam. Both texts are also dedicated to discussing the concepts of
wilayah and qiwamah (guardianship of men) in Islam from different perspectives. The texts are
technical in form and nature: they feature info-grams and country-specific statistical tables and
draw on interviews with women from the countries where the project was implemented. The
source and the translation are produced using the stylistic features of UN reports and attempt
to be as comprehensive in coverage as the program promises; and as such, similar to UN docu-
ments, ‘visible’ intervention by the translator through notes or prefaces is nonexistent.
Conclusion
This survey has pointed to milestones along the path of Arabic translations of faith-based femi-
nist texts from foreign languages. A few observations are pertinent to the discussion: on the
position and function of the translator, the medium of publication, and the intervention such
translation makes in discourse originally produced in Arabic about IF. The ideological alignment
with feminist tendencies varies substantially depending on the type of text and the publishing
venue. Moreover, the visibility of the translator also fluctuates depending on context and nature
of collaboration between author/publisher/sponsor, on the one hand, and translator, on the
other. In terms of medium, most of the organizations under whose auspices Islamic feminist
research is published use both print and online media, which poses the question of how far digi-
tal content might lead to a wider readership and accelerate the introduction of new terminology
and knowledge? In fact, this digital content is beyond the control of official or quasi-official
religious authorities – such as Al-Azhar in Egypt – contrary to the control of paper publishing
(the example here is Samia Adnan’s translation of Wadud’s Quran and Woman featuring Al-
Azhar’s approval to publish.) To what extent is the relative ‘freedom’ afforded the publication of
Islamic Arabic content in translation without the support of the prominent religious authorities
in the Middle East liberating or restricting to the translator and her/his choice of strategies? In
regard to reception, most of the institutionalized translations claim that one of their goals is the
production of alternative knowledge; however, more research needs to be done on the textual
and conceptual levels. Textually, the translators – who discuss their choices in paratextual mate-
rial such as prefaces, articles, and notes – face the issue of making linguistic and stylistic choices
that may not conform with the traditional approach to exegesis and jurisprudence, thus making
the text on a religion-related topic ‘sound’ foreign or exotic – sometimes even intentionally so
for the purposes of influencing the traditional discourse on gender and women. Conceptually,
the Dictionary produced by Bouchra Laghzali and the bilingual glossary of terms produced by
Randa Abu Bakr in one of the WMF translations help demystify many terms that carry com-
plex meanings. Sophistication is a concern for translation from and into Arabic; however, in the
case of translation into Arabic, ethical and responsible approaches to work in Islamic feminism
entail engagement with traditional texts of Islam and the informed exploration of concepts and
terms from the perspective of Arabic culture and linguistics. If such translations are to claim they
produce ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ knowledge, then the long tradition with its vocabulary cannot be
discarded offhandedly as outdated and oppressive of women; nor should the discussion be locked
on cleansing the language of all gender-markedness – with Arabic being one of the heavily
gendered languages for both animate and inanimate references. In order for the claim that this
work of translation engages with the existing religious, legal, scholarly, and activist discourses
on gender to be taken seriously, the translator needs to be mindful of the intended audience
and to operate in a trustworthy manner – conscious of the author, publisher/organization, the
discourse on IF in Arabic, and the readers.
492
Further reading
Anwar, Zeina. 2013. From Local to Global: Sisters in Islam and the Making of Musawah: A Global Move-
ment for Equality in the Muslim Family, in L. Larsen, Z. Mir-Hosseini, C. Moe, and K. Vogt, eds., Family
Law: Justice and Ethics in Islamic Legal Tradition. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 211–240.
This chapter discusses the evolution of Musawah as a global organization concerned with women and
gender issues in Muslim communities and the role of multilingualism and strategies in achieving this
shift and this wider outreach through resources, initiatives, events, and networks with other interna-
tional and regional organizations.
Kamal, Hala. 2018. ‘Travelling Concepts’ in Translation: Feminism and Gender in the Egyptian Context.
Synergy, 14(1), 130–145.
This article creates connections between the notion of ‘traveling’ theory and feminism as traveling theory
and gender as a traveling concept between Arab and non-Arab cultures. Also, it reflects and explores how
translation is at the heart of the process.
Laghzali, Bouchra. 2017. The Translation of Islamic Feminism at CERFI in Morocco, in Luise von Flotow
and Farzaneh Farahzad, eds., Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 209–222.
This chapter analyzes in detail the uses of translation from and into Arabic in CERFI to ‘champion’
Islamic feminism and address misconceptions about gender issues from the perspective of Islam.
Notes
1 Sayings of Prophet Mohammad recorded and regarded also as texts of authority for believing Muslims.
Their power immediately follows that of the Quran.
2 Personal communication via email received on 13 Sept. 2018.
3 www.mominoun.com/articles/4022-‫اإلسالمية‬-‫النسوية‬
4 https://ar.qantara.de/
5 This chapter is using the IJMES Transliteration System for Arabic, except when using direct quotations.
6 Personal communications with Samia Adnan via email 1–12 January 2017.
7 Personal communications with Samia Adnan via email 1–12 January 2017.
8 https://darfikr.com/paidbook/‫والجندر‬-‫المرأة‬
9 Thanks to Mir-Hosseini I was given access to an anonymized version of the first rejected translation
and permission to use it for research purposes.
10 https://darfikr.com/about
11 www.jus.uio.no/smr/english/about/programmes/oslocoalition/islam/index.html
12 www.jus.uio.no/smr/english/about/programmes/oslocoalition/docs/justice-through-equality.pdf
13 For more information about the forum visit: www.wmf.org.eg/en/about-us/
14 For the evolution of the movement from a local to a global movement for ‘equality and justice in the
Muslim family’, Musawah, see Anwar 2013, 107–124.
15 www.musawah.org/knowledge-building/qiwamah-wilayah/
16 For a detailed examination of the role of translation into Arabic, English and French in the Center, read
Laghzali 2017, 208–222.
17 www.annisae.ma/Article.aspx?C=5612
20 https://equitas.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/research_EQUITAS_Sharia.pdf
21 http://arabstates.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/men-and-women-
for-gender-equality
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495
37
Feminist strategies in women’s
translations of the Qur’an
Rim Hassen
Introduction
The scarcity of reliable records and academic research about Muslim women translators has
made evaluating the extent of their involvement in Qur’an translation throughout Islamic his-
tory a challenging, if not an impossible, task. Some Muslim women scholars, such as Bouthaina
Shaaban (1995), have suggested that this could be the result of a deliberate strategy to silence
women’s voices and to exclude them from producing Islamic knowledge. The aim of this paper
is to discuss how, despite efforts to exclude, silence, and marginalize them, a number of women
translators are challenging patriarchal norms and values through their translations of the Qur’an.
It also aims to highlight the different feminist textual and linguistic strategies they have adopted
to achieve women’s visibility, to offer a feminist perspective and to challenge patriarchal inter-
pretations of the Qur’an.
First, it is necessary to introduce the Qur’an as a source text and discuss some of the chal-
lenges it presents for translators in general and women translators in particular. Some of these
challenges lie in its divine origin, as Muslims believe that their Holy Text is the direct Word
of God and it is therefore immutable, inimitable, and untranslatable. Even though translation
of Qur’anic verses and chapters was occurring during the life of the Prophet of Islam, early
Muslim scholars, such as Imam Shatby (c. 1133–1193, cited in Mehanna 1978), opposed the
idea of translating the Qur’an on the premise that the specific meanings embedded in the form
and content of the Holy Text cannot be conveyed in any other language (Mehanna 1978).
The debate over the translatability of the Qur’an continued to divide Muslim scholars over
the centuries. It reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, when Islamic religious
institutions such as Al-Azhar University set up guidelines for translating the Qur’an. This, in
turn, had a major impact on the production, distribution, and reception of Qur’an translations,
including those by women.
To this date, there are six translations of the Qur’an undertaken independently by women,
four into English and two into French.1 These translations present two different approaches: one
approach aims to present specifically women’s perspectives and the other reflects the mainstream
patriarchal norms and values2. The first approach, which is the focus of this paper, can be found
in three translations, namely L’Alkoran! (Le Livre par Excellence) (1861) by Fatma-Zaïda, The Light
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Women’s translations of the Qur’an
of Dawn (2000) by Camille Adams Helminski and The Sublime Qur’an (2007) by Laleh Bakhtiar.
To illustrate the key feminist strategies adopted by the three translators, I will briefly discuss their
paratexts as a space for asserting Muslim women’s visibility and the translator’s female gender.
Then, I will focus on their approaches to the sacred text and highlight some of their subversive,
innovative, and creative feminist strategies, such as the insertion of new feminist ideas, feminiza-
tion of language and re-interpretations of key gender-related terms. For the sake of clarity, I will
discuss each translator individually, following the chronological order of publication.
The Qur’an as a source text

The Qur’an, the Holy Text of Islam, is believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Moham-
med through the Angel Gabriel in the early 7th century (610 AD) in intervals, over a period
of 23 years. The term ‘Qur’an’ is derived from the Arabic root word ‘qaraa’ meaning “to recite”
or “to read,” which was the first word addressed to the Prophet of Islam. Before the complete
version was compiled during the reign of Othman Ibn Affan between 644 and 656 AD, the
revelations were transmitted orally or written down by different scribes. In most contemporary
editions (known as the Uthmanic Recension), the Qur’an is about 600 pages in length and
consists of 114 chapters (surat) which are divided into passages or verses (ayat). These chapters
are organized according to their length rather than their chronological order, and they all, except
one (sura 9), begin with the formulation Bismillahi ar-Rahmani ar-Raheem, often translated as
“In the Name of God, the Most-Merciful, the Compassionate.” This expression has become
significant in exploring the gender-egalitarian aspects of the Qur’an, as will be discussed later.
In terms of content, the Qur’an deals with both universal matters and temporal and specific his-
torical incidents. Early Muslim scholars divided the Qur’an into two types of chapters: “Mec-
can” (revealed in the city of Mecca) and “Medinan” (revealed in the city of Medina). Meccan
chapters are considered to deal mostly with matters of faith, such as the fundamentals of Islamic
dogma and the principles of ethics and religious practice. The Medinan chapters, revealed after
the creation of the first Muslim community, deal mostly with the legal, political, and social
organization of Muslim society.
As a source text, the Qur’an presents various challenges for translation, not only because of
its divine origin, but also because of its multi-layered and complex language. The sacred text
of Islam was revealed in Arabic, the language of the people who lived in the Arabian Penin-
sula. However, its literary form is unique because it combines both metrical and non-metrical
composition (Abdul-Raof 2001, 37). Unlike Modern Arabic, which has evolved over time,
Qur’anic Arabic has remained a fixed language; its archaic, classic, and static nature can make
the Holy Book a challenging text to read/translate even for native Arabic speakers. To help
access the meaning of the Qur’an, Muslim scholars, interpreters, and translators often rely on
the Sunnah and Tafsir. Both supporting texts were developed after the Prophet’s death in order
to help believers access the Qur’an. The Sunnah consists of various narratives about the Prophet
Mohammed’s life and of statements attributed to him (Hadith). The Tafsir is an exegesis of the
Qur’an.3 Both texts were transmitted orally through many Muslim figures before being finally
written down predominantly4 by male Muslim scholars. One of the key challenges that emerges
here is that Islamic religious institutions such as Al-Azhar consider the Sunnah and Tafsir as
paramount references in Qur’an translation. As a result, translations that are not based on these
texts are rarely recognized and could even be censored.
Islamic feminist scholars of the late 20th century such as Fatima Mernissi (1991a, 1991b,
1996), Amina Wadud (1992), and Asma Barlas (2002) have been very critical of the male-
centred nature of medieval supporting texts including the Sunnah and Tafsir. They argue that
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these texts were manipulated by male scholars in order to serve their own interests and they
stress the need to verify their accuracy and legitimacy. This raises various questions about the
possibilities and difficulties of applying feminist strategies to the sacred text of Islam. Consider-
ing the importance given to the notions of accuracy, transparency, and faithfulness in translating
religious texts, how can women translators deliver their own perspectives without distorting,
transforming or rewriting the source text? What strategies can they adopt in order to make
women visible in/through their translations? How can they translate the Qur’an without relying
on the Sunnah and Tafsir and without risking censorship?
Fatma-Zaïda: intervention and insertion of feminist ideas

Fatma-Zaïda was a Muslim slave and the wife of a Turkish dignitary in the 19th-century Otto-
man Empire. According to Madeline Zilfi, slaves in the Ottoman Empire were often acquired
through conquest in Europe, around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. She also points out
that slavery was officially configured along religious and geographical lines, which meant that
by law Muslims, regardless of their country of origin, could not be reduced to slave status (in
Ágoston and Masters 2009, 531). This suggests that Fatma-Zaïda could not have been of Mus-
lim or Turkish origin, but was probably a European captive or a Christian who was sold to be
part of a harem, where she converted to Islam. This could explain her knowledge of various
European languages, including French and Italian (Sheikh al-Shabab 2003, 32–34). Due to the
scarcity of reliable records about Zaïda’s life, writings and other translations, we have to rely on
the paratexts of her translation to build a picture of her social and religious background and,
more importantly, to determine her reasons for translating the Qur’an, her position as a transla-
tor, and the strategies she adopted.
The cover of Zaïda’s translation is very simple with minimal decorations. Just underneath the
title, we read the translator’s name: Fatma-Zaïda, which could be a pseudonym or the name she
adopted after her conversion to Islam. What is striking here is that the translator did not include a
male name and chose only two highly symbolic feminine names. The first, Fatma or Fatima is an
Arabic name, which means the one kept away from evil, bad character, and forbidden things. It is
also the name of the Prophet’s favourite daughter, the only one to survive him. She is an impor-
tant and powerful figure in Islam with whom the prophet of Islam had a very special relationship.
The second name Zaïda, means the “one who adds.” It is not commonly used in Arabic and could
be a misspelling of the name Zahida. It could also be a deliberate choice by the translator to dis-
tinguish herself and assert her visibility by using a unique name that reflects her role as a translator.
Another interesting element about the cover can be found just under the publication details,
where we read that this translation is “Propriété du traducteur” [“property of the translator.”] Gram-
matically correct, it should read “Propriété de la traductrice,” because the translator is a female. This
is, nevertheless, a significant and interesting detail, which could have been inserted to protect the
translator’s intellectual rights. It could also be a strategy of “appropriating” the text. More revealing
and interesting details can be found in the preface, where Zaïda provides some information about
the Qur’an and its origins, and then presents her reasons for embarking on this project:
J’ai entendu en France, et j’entends au Portugal, de même qu’en Italie; que les femmes sont
très malheureuses en Turquie, (O mesdames les européennes, vous nous porteriez bien
envie, si vous nous voyiez dans les harems).
I heard in France and I hear in Portugal as well as in Italy, that women are very unhappy
in Turkey, (O European ladies, you will envy us, if you see us in the harems).
(My translation)
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It is interesting that Zaïda frames her translation within Western representations of Islam and
uses her work to challenge orientalist perceptions of Muslim women, who are often depicted as
subdued, helpless, and passive.
As for the translation, Zaïda does not specify whether she translated from the original Arabic
text or from other languages. She however reveals that she read, studied and compared various
French and Italian translations of the Qur’an and found that they are full of mistakes, inconsist-
encies, and discrepancies. This presented another reason for her to translate the Qur’an. Interest-
ingly, in her discussion of the resources she read, studied and compared, Zaïda does not refer to
any medieval sources such as the Sunnah or Tafsir.
In order to challenge Western representations of Muslim women, to emphasize women’s
rights and to correct the inconsistencies she found in previous translations of the Qur’an, Zaïda
opted to intervene freely in the text. Her interventionist approach is first noticeable in her deci-
sion not only to rearrange the Qur’anic chapters in chronological order, but also to modify the
number of verses in each sura (chapter). She is in fact, one of the very few Qur’an translators
who amended the order of the “Uthmanic Recension.” This interventionist approach allowed
Zaïda to insert and add her own feminist thoughts, interpretations, and reforms in various areas
such as marriage, divorce, and education. For instance, while the Qur’an encourages education
for men and women (39:9; 35:28), Zaïda instructs families to allow young girls to be educated
in free schools run and organized by the state (1861, 127–128). She also insists on education for
men, as a way of protecting women and ensuring that they are well treated:
Comme je ne veux point que les femmes souffrent de la brutalité des hommes, j’ordonne
que tout croyant sache lire, écrire, calculer, connaisse la division et la position des pays, afin de
se guider dans ses relations de commerce et dans ses voyages, et sache écrire correctement sa
langue. La lecture instruit ainsi que les voyages.
(1861, 128)
As I do not want women to suffer from the brutality of men, I ordain that every believer
should learn to read, write, calculate, know division and the position of countries, in order
to conduct himself in his trade relations and in his travels and be able to write his language
properly. Reading instructs as well as travels.
(my translation)
Zaïda inserts various other interesting rules such as forbidding men from taking money or
gifts from women. Women on the other hand are allowed to accept all that is given to them
including gifts and rewards (1861, 122). Another addition, which illustrates Zaïda’s intervention-
ist approach, is the instruction to restrict the number of children men can have with each wife.
L’homme est faible dans la souffrance, la femme est plus courageuse;? regardez l’enfanter,
hommes! Et taisez-vous dans vos souffrances! La femme, cet être si délicat souffre par vous
o hommes! Épargnez-lui le plus possible les horribles douleurs de la maternité; et lorsque
vous êtes atteints d’une maladie, souvenez-vous que le plus bel ornement du monde, que
le plus gracieux objet du genre humain, souffre vingt fois plus que vous, quand, pour la
satisfaction d’un plaisir non modéré, vous lui imposez les tortures de l’enfantement. N’ayez,
autant que possible, qu’un enfant de chaque femme.
(128)
Men are not good at enduring pain, women are more courageous, watch her give birth
men! and keep quiet in your suffering! The woman, this highly delicate being, is made to
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suffer by you, o men! Spare her as much as possible the horrible pain of motherhood, and
when you are suffering from an illness, remember that the greatest ornament of the world,
the most gracious purpose of mankind suffers twenty times more than you, when for the
satisfaction of an immoderate desire, you impose on her the torture of childbirth. Do not
have, if possible, more than one child with each woman.
(my translation)
The original Quranic text does not limit the number of children men can have with each
wife; however, Zaïda inserted this measure in order to highlight the suffering that motherhood
brings to the health of women and to question the view that women’s role is defined by having
and raising children. Zaïda’s “one child policy” not only aims to give women more freedom,
but also places all responsibility on men who are unable to control their “immoderate desire.”
Perhaps one of Zaïda’s most interesting additions is the instruction to castrate those men who
trade in female slaves:
Exigez, la castration des marchands des femmes.

Faites-le, o croyants, et suivez les préceptes du livre sacré; mes promesses sont immuables,
et les parvis célestes vous sont destinés. Qui est plus vrai que Moi dans ses paroles.
(1861, 140)
Require the castration of merchants who deal in female slaves.

Do it, O believers, and follow the precepts of the sacred book; my promises are immuta-
ble, and the celestial courts are destined to you. Who is truer than Me in his words.
(my translation)
In this verse, Zaïda imitates the Qur’anic style and introduces the rule of castrating trad-
ers who sell female slaves. She makes it a requirement and repeats the order twice. Then, as
encouragement, she offers believers attractive rewards for their obedience. Zaïda resorted to this
strategy because, in a male-dominated society, such a rule will be very difficult to implement.
However, the fact that she invented, introduced and insisted on implementing such a rule illus-
trates her inventive and creative approach, which is aimed at protecting women from abuse.5
Finally, to achieve her goal of writing back to orientalist perceptions of Muslim women and
expressing her perspective, experience, and voice, Zaïda adopted an interventionist strategy,
which allowed her to be visible on the book cover, in the preface and in the content of her
translation. However, in the process of transforming and appropriating the source text to fit her
own feminist agenda, Zaïda may have undermined the credibility, legitimacy, and reception of
her own work. The changes she brought to the sacred text were probably too unconventional,
subversive and radical for her era. This could explain why her translation, which remains largely
unknown, never received the same reception, recognition, and popularity as Denise Masson’s
rendition. In fact, Masson is often introduced as the first woman to translate the Qur’an into
French, even though Fatma-Zaïda published her version almost one century earlier.
Camille Helminski: challenging patriarchal language and imagery

Camille Adams Helminski, an American convert to Islam, is the writer of several books on the
history of women in Sufism and the translator of several volumes of Sufi literature into English.
Her rendition of the Qur’an, The Light of Dawn: Daily Readings from the Holy Qur’an, is a partial
translation, which contains 365 selected verses for daily meditation. There are various feminist
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elements in Helminski’s translation, which are visible in the book cover, the preface, and the
translated text. The key element in the cover is the dominant white colour, a symbol of purity,
peace, and innocence in Islam. This colour is also believed to be the colour of angels and the
beautiful women of Paradise, which could suggest a reference to women and femininity.
In the preface, Helminski devotes a major section to discussing the issue of Muslim women’s
position in Islam by emphasizing the feminine elements embedded in the Qur’anic message. She
writes that:
As the Qur’an, the Holy Book of Islam proclaims over and over again at the commencement
of each chapter or surah, Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem . . . in the Name of God, the infinitely
Compassionate and Most Merciful . . . this message is coming to us from the compassion-
ate womb of Creation. The root to the words Rahman and Raheem is the word for womb.
(2000, x)
Helminski’s reference to the expression ‘Rahman’ and ‘Raheem’ is very significant, as these
particular expressions have come to represent the gender egalitarian message of the Qur’an. As
the translator explains, these terms are derived from the Arabic root ‘Rhm’ meaning the womb, a
body part specific to women. Moreover, a number of Muslim scholars, particularly Islamic femi-
nists, are using the origins, the meaning, and the presence of these expressions in every chapter,
to argue that gender equality is a central message of the Qur’an. Further in the preface, when
discussing the supporting texts, she used in her translation, Helminski reveals that she relied
on different sources including previous translations of the Qur’an by two popular translators,
namely Yusuf Ali6 and Muhammad Asad. She does not, however, mention any specific classical
Islamic religious sources such as the Sunnah or Tafsir.
In her approach to the source text, Helminski chose not to intervene freely and to remain
as close as possible to the original. She, however, focused on challenging patriarchal language
and imagery by avoiding male-oriented language and by using gender-inclusive nouns and pro-
nouns. For instance, in the following examples, in comparison to translations by Saheeh Interna-
tional (Umm Muhammad) (1) and Taheerah Saffarzadeh (2), Helminski (3) consistently avoids
exclusionary terms and opts for the gender-inclusive terms “humankind” instead of “man,” and
“parent” and “child” instead of “father” and “son”:
(1)O mankind, worship your Lord, who created you and those before you, that you
become righteous (Saheeh International 1995, 4).
(3) O Humankind!
Worship your Sustainer, who has created you (Helminski 2000, 2).
(2) I swear by this [Makkah] City

And you are native of this city
And the Father and the Son*
Verily, We created man [Adam] in
The space [somewhere between the sky and the earth]
Does man think that Allah the One [the Ahad] has no power over him? (Saffarzadeh
2006, 1164).
(3) I call to witness this land
In which you are free to dwell
And the bond between parent and child
Truly, we have created the human being to labor and struggle (Helminski 2000, 196).
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In addition to disrupting patriarchal language, Helminski shows a clear sensitivity to women’s

visibility by adjusting the translated text. For instance, she replaces the masculine word “Lord” by
“Sustainer.” Although the Arabic text uses masculine generic nouns and pronouns, Helminski
uses the combination “he/she” as well as the generic “he” to refer to human beings and to God.
To make explicit to the reader that Allah is beyond gender or genderless, Helminski introduces
a new pronoun Hu borrowed from Arabic and given a new gender-neutral meaning in English,
as is demonstrated in the following example:
Such is God, your Sustainer: there is no god but Hu,

the Creator of everything: then worship Him/Her alone –
for it is He/She who has everything in His/Her care.
No vision can encompass Him/Her,
but He/She encompasses all human vision (2000, 27).
Helminski’s use of the pronoun Hu and the combination of the Arabic “Huwa” [he] and
“Hiya” [she] to refer to God can be viewed as an inventive and a significant feminist strategy,
which highlights the role of language in creating gender hierarchies. Her strategy also mir-
rors the fact that the idea of God as male is being criticized by many feminist theologians,
who argue that the masculine conception of God has been created by and in the language of
a male patriarchy, which has, in turn, contributed to the marginalization and subordination of
women. Moreover, Helminski’s use of the pronoun Hu shares similarities with Mary Orovan
and Marge Piercy’s and many other feminists’ attempts to replace the generic “he” by alterna-
tive inclusive pronouns. Similar techniques are employed in Bible translations, as Judith Plaskow
points out: in order to re-establish an egalitarian image of God, many feminists have adopted
an aggressive program for replacing masculine pronouns for God with gender‑neutral or even
explicitly feminine forms. God is now referred to as “She,” “She/He,” “S/He,” or by alternating
“He” and “She” in different paragraphs (Plaskow 1990, 141–142). Finally, Helminski’s approach
demonstrates that it is possible to use feminist strategies in the sacred text without transforming
or rewriting its content. Her translation is, however, incomplete and does not deal with all the
content of the Qur’anic text, especially specific gender-related verses.7
Laleh Bakhtiar: re-interpretation of gender-related verses

Laleh Bakhtiar is an American author and translator. Like Helminski, she has devoted much of
her work to the role of women in Islam and Islamic history. In her translation of the Qur’an, her
focus on women’s perspective is first noticeable in the bright and colourful flower motif of the
book’s cover. It is very rare to find flower motifs on the cover of Qur’an translations, which makes
Bakhtiar’s translation stand out from other Qur’an translations, including those by other women.
More importantly, these motifs could be a reference to the translator’s gender and to women’s
position in Islam. Even though they do not carry the same religious importance as the colour,
white, flower motifs carry a religious significance, especially in Iranian culture, where flowers
and roses convey ideas of both spiritual and physical refreshment and imply heaven. For instance,
flowers in Iranian carpets imply abundance and an ever-blooming garden that a person might
enter after death. The roses can also symbolize divine perfection and beauty, and according to
some Islamic traditions, the beautiful women of paradise resemble the rose (DelPlato 2002, 138).
When we read Bakhtiar’s introduction, her concern with gender issues in Islam becomes
more apparent. After introducing herself and her work, she dedicates a major part to highlight-
ing the problem of male bias in the interpretation and translation of the Qur’an and emphasizes
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the lack of women’s perspectives throughout Islamic history. When she lists the various sup-
porting materials she used in her work, Bakhtiar reveals that she relied mostly on dictionaries
and previous translations, but does not show great reliance on classical religious Islamic sources.
Moreover, in her approach to the text, Bakhtiar adopts a very similar strategy to Helminski’s, as
she does not intervene freely and remains as close as possible to the source text. She also pays a
lot of attention to the impact of patriarchal language on the reader and employs various strate-
gies to avoid male-oriented terms. The following examples illustrate how she avoids the use of
exclusionary and male-centred words such as “man,” “son,” and “father”:
(4) Oh humanity! Worship your Lord

Who created you
And those that were before you
So that perhaps you would be God-fearing (Bakhtiar 2007, 3).
(4) No! I swear by this land;

You are a lodger in this land;
By one who was your parent,
And was procreated
Truly We created the human being in trouble.
What? Assumes he that no one has power over him? (Bakhtiar 2007, 697).
Bakhtiar does not use gender-inclusive pronouns in her translation, probably because she
introduces an interesting strategy to make the feminine visible in the text by inserting the letter
(f ) after feminine words and pronouns. She justifies this strategy by explaining that “when words
in a verse refer directly to a woman or women or wife or wives and the corresponding pronouns
such as (they, them, those), I placed an (f ) after the word to indicate that the word refers to the
feminine gender specifically” (2007, xli). This technique, a form of compensation, not only allows
the translator to make up for the linguistic losses between the gender-marked Arabic and the
English language, but also to make the feminine visible in the text. It is worth pointing out that
the strategy of inserting the letter (f ) was first used by Mohamed Ahmed and Samira Ahmed, a
father and daughter team, who published their translation of the Qur’an into English in 1994.8
Perhaps, Bakhtiar’s most innovative contribution lies in her re-interpretation of verse 4:34 or the
Wife Beating verse, which occurs in chapter an-Nisa (women). This verse is one of the most contro-
versial and contested verses in the Qur’an because of its implications for women and gender roles
in Islam. There are several key gender-related words in this verse, which are qawwamuna, qanitat,
nushuz and idhribuhunn. Qawwamuna is the plural form of the singular word qa’im, which in Arabic
can be used as an adjective or a noun. Qa’im means “in charge of,”“responsible for,”“provider,” and
“carer.” Qanitat is an adjective in plural feminine form, it has no equivalent meaning in English, but
it can convey the meaning of religiously obedient or devout. The term nushuz is a singular noun;
it conveys the meaning of rebellion, ill will, disobedience, deliberate bad behaviour, desertion, and
infidelity. Finally, idhribuhunna, a verb from the root word daraba has numerous meanings including
“to travel,” “to get out,” “to strike,” “to beat,” “to set up,” and “to give examples.”
The Wife Beating verse covers two main themes: gender roles and husbands’ right to dis-
cipline their wives. Concerning the first theme, conservative scholars have argued that the first
half of the verse refers to male superiority over women. They interpret the word qawwamuna
as a divine declaration of men’s superiority over women. Sayyid Abul A’La Maududi, a highly
respected traditional commentator, explains that this verse affirms that “man is governor, direc-
tor, protector, and manager of the affairs of women” (1967, 333). With regards to the second
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theme of this verse, conservative commentators argue that women should be obedient to their
husbands. They read the word qanitat as obedience to the husband. Because qanitat is understood
as obedience to husbands, the word nushuz has been interpreted as a wife’s ill will and a deliber-
ate, persistent breach of her marital obligations. Moreover, nushuz, or a wife’s disobedience, is a
punishable offence. That is why conservative scholars interpret the word “daraba” as “to beat”
thus giving husbands permission to physically punish their wives. This is how Bakhtiar translates
this verse:
Men are supporters of wives

Because God has given some of them an advantage
Over others
And because they spend of their wealth
So the ones (f ) who are in accord with morality
Are the ones (f ) who are morally obligated,
The ones (f ) who guard the unseen
Of what God has kept safe.
But those (f ) whose resistance you fear,
Then admonish them (f )
And abandon them (f ) in their sleeping place
Then go away from them (f );
And if they (f ) obey you
Surely look not for any way against them (f );
(Bakhtiar 2007, 94) (my emphasis)
Bakhtiar seems to have creatively studied and experimented with the key terms of the Wife
Beating verse to produce a women-centred interpretation. She opts to translate the word qawwa-
muna as “supporters,” rather than “governors,” which suggests that men should provide financial
and moral support instead of governing or controlling women’s lives. In the absence of an equiv-
alent term for the word qanitat, Bakhtiar translated it as “morally obligated” to avoid the mean-
ing of obedience and to exclude any reference to husbands. She translates the word nushuz as
“resistance” rather than “arrogance” or “ill conduct.” The key and most significant contribution
is the translation of the word daraba as “to go away.” This translation challenges the patriarchal
view that men have the right to discipline and to punish their wives. In her article “The Sub-
lime Quran: The misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34,” Bakhtiar elaborates further on her
choices and even uses the Sunnah to justify her translation of the word daraba. She writes that:
If the interpretation of 4:34 as ‘beat them (f )’ was accurate, this would mean that the
Prophet did not carry out God’s command. This in itself suggests that ‘beat them’ is a mis-
interpretation. He clearly believed that it was not within his Sunnah to do such a thing.
Therefore, he showed by his behavior that 4:34 and the use of the word daraba means ‘go
away from them (f )’ and let the emotions subside, rather than ‘to beat.’
(2011, 433, emphasis by Bakhtiar)
Bakhtiar’s translation divided opinions between opponents and supporters among Muslim
scholars, including at Al-Azhar University. Surprisingly, her work was also criticized by female
scholars such as Omima Abou-Bakr, a professor at the University of Qatar, who disagrees with
Bakhtiar’s translation and even expressed her criticism in a US televised debate in Everywoman
broadcast in April 2007. Perhaps, Bakhtiar’s main opponent was Dr Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, a
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professor of interpretation at the Al-Azhar University and the former President of the Al-Azhar
Scientific Committee, who described her new interpretation as part of a “Western conspiracy”
to damage the image of Islam and an attempt to justify the stereotypes and misconceptions
accusing Islam of oppressing women (Mohamed 2007).
Conclusion
Fatma-Zaïda, Camille Adams Helminski, and Laleh Bakhtiar adopted various feminist strategies
to challenge patriarchal readings and translations of the Qur’an. Zaïda’s interventionist strategy
allowed her to insert her own vision of Muslim women’s rights and position in society. What
is interesting is that Zaïda, which means the “one who adds,” made the decision to add innova-
tive, unconventional, and sometimes radical rules, not only to challenge Western perceptions
of Muslim women, but also to give her feminine voice credibility, authority, and legitimacy in
a male-dominated society. In doing so, Zaïda defied conventional norms, which in turn might
have undermined the reception and acceptance of her unique contribution.
Helminski, on the other hand, followed a different approach and remained very close to the
original. Her translation was especially concerned with the idea that women were silenced,
made invisible and alienated by patriarchal language. She therefore focused on challenging male-
centred language and imagery. In addition to using gender-inclusive nouns and pronouns to
refer to Allah, Helminski introduced a new pronoun to stress the idea that God is genderless.
These strategies allowed the translator to question conventional language by using an existing
Arabic pronoun in a new way and creating a new meaning in English to reverse and downplay
the male imagery associated with God.
Similarly, Bakhtiar adopted innovative feminist strategies to make the feminine visible in the
text and to challenge the use of male-centred words. The insertion of the letter (f ) is a very
interesting strategy, which allowed the translator to solve the problem of reflecting the gendered
nature of the Arabic text and to make it clear to the reader that the text concerns women. Bakh-
tiar’s main innovative contribution lies in her reinterpretation of gender-related terms in light of
women’s experiences. Her translation of the Wife Beating verse not only discovers new meanings
but also questions male-bias in the interpretation and translation of the Qur’an.
Finally, the two English translations (Helminski and Bakhtiar) demonstrate that it is pos-
sible to insert feminist ideas, challenge patriarchal norms and stress women’s visibility without
distorting, transforming or rewriting the source text. What is also revealing is that, even though
Zaïda, Helminski, and Bakhtiar have different social, cultural and religious backgrounds, they
adopted very similar strategies (1) they all included feminine elements in their book covers; (2)
they all highlighted the issue of Muslim women’s position in their prefaces and introductions;
(3) and in listing the various supporting materials they used, the translators did not show great
reliance on classical religious Islamic sources. These shared strategies made it possible to read the
Qur’an from a woman’s perspective and revealed the possibilities of social change by including
women in Islamic knowledge production.
Future directions
This chapter discusses how translation of the Quran could provide a space for women to explore
alternative readings of the Sacred Text and to introduce various strategies to challenge male-
centred interpretations. However, more research is needed to determine whether women have
translated the Quran into other European and non-European languages. This will allow us to
compare and contrast translations from different cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.
505
Rim Hassen
It will also help build a better understanding of women’s involvement in the translation of the
Quran and the various strategies they employed. Another important thread would be to inves-
tigate the reception of Quran translations by women and to study their impact on audiences in
different parts of the world.
Suggested reading
Barlas, Asma. 2002. “Believing Women” in Islam: unreading patriarchal interpretation of the Qur’ān. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Barlas discusses how interpretations of the Qur’an have, for centuries, been manipulated to serve patri-
archal ideology. She therefore stresses the need for women to interpret religious texts for themselves.
Shaaban, Bouthaina. 1995. The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters, in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and
Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World. London, New York: IB Tauris Publishers, 61–77.
Shaaban gives an insight into Muslim women’s contribution to the interpretation of Islamic religious
texts and discusses how their voices have been deliberately marginalized.
Wadud, Amina. 1992. Qur’an and Woman. Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Kuala Lum-
pur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn.
Wadud presents a woman-sensitive reading of the Quranic text by challenging patriarchal interpreta-
tions of key gender-related verses.
Notes
1 I am only concerned with French and English translations for two main reasons: first, my limited knowl-
edge of other European and non-European languages, and second, the lack of records about women’s
contribution in Qur’an translations. More research is needed to determine whether there are more
translations of the Qur’an by women into other languages.
2 Three out of the six translations of the Qur’an by women are not discussed in this paper because the
translators seem to conform to conservative norms and do not employ any feminist strategies to chal-
lenge male-centred readings of the source text. These translations are: Denise Masson. 1967. Le Coran.
Paris: La Pléiade, Gallimard; Saheeh International. 1995–1997. The Qur’an, Arabic Text with Corresponding
English Meaning. Riyadh: Abul Qasim Publishing House; Taheereh Saffarzadeh. 2006. The Holy Qur’an:
Translation with Commentary. Tehran: Alhoda.
3 Tafsir or exegesis according to Abdul-Raof could be divided into six main categories of exegesis: Lin-
guistic Exegesis, which is concerned with the grammar, syntactic analysis, and rhetoric of the Qur’an.
Philosophical and Rationalistic Exegesis is concerned with explaining and refuting philosophers’ views and
arguments on religious matters. Historical Exegesis deals with Qur’anic parables and the history of nations
and people mentioned in the Qur’an. Intertextual Exegesis attempts to interpret the Qur’an through the
Qur’an or Hadith. Jurisprudence exegesis studies jurisprudence matters and the different views of Muslim
theologians. Finally, Independent Judgment Exegesis which supports interpretation of the Qur’an based on
one’s own judgment and personal point of view (Abdul-Raof 2001, 175).
4 Some Muslim scholars and writers such as Assia Djebar, Laleh Bakhtiar, and Fatima Mernissi are inves-
tigating the possibility that Muslim women (using pseudonyms or their real names) might have partici-
pated in collecting and writing down Qura’nic recitations and traditions.
5 For further discussion on Fatma-Zaïda’s translation see Hassen 2018, 211–223.
6 Abdullah Yusuf Ali is an Indian scholar, who lived in England, where he died in 1952. His English
translation of the Qur’an is one of most widely distributed in English speaking countries.
7 For further discussion on Helminski’s translation strategies see Hassen 2011, 221–230.
8 Their translation The Koran, Complete Dictionary and Literal Translation (1994) is only available online.
References
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. 2001. Qur’an Translation: Discourse, Texture and Exegesis. Surrey: Curzon.
Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Alan Masters, eds. 2009. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Facts
on File.
506
Ahmed, Mohamed and Samira Ahmed. 1994. The Koran, Complete Dictionary and Literal Translation [pdf].
Vancouver. Available at: www.koranlitranslateandtheconspiracy.com/M.%20Ahmed%20Translation.
pdf [Accessed 2 Feb. 2018].
Bakhtiar, Laleh. 2007. The Sublime Quran. Chicago: Kazi Publications.
Bakhtiar, Laleh. 2011. The Sublime Quran: The Misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34. European Journal
of Women’s Studies, 431–439.
DelPlato, Joan. 2002. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875. Madison
and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Fatma-Zaïda. 1861. L’Alkoran! (Le Livre par Excellence). Lisbonne: Imprimerie de la Société Typographique
Franco-Portugaise.
Hassen, Rim. 2011. English Translation of the Quran by Women: The Challenges of ‘Gender Balance’ in
and Through Language. MonTI, 3, 221–230.
Hassen, Rim. 2018. From a Slave to a Translator: Conflicts and Mediation in Fatma-Zaïda’s Translation of
the Quran, in Diana Roig-Sanz and Reine Meylaerts, eds., Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in
‘Peripheral’ Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 211–223.
Helminski, Camille Adams. 2000. The Light of Dawn: Daily Readings from the Holy Qur’an. Boston: Shambhala.
Masson, Denise. 1967. Le Coran. Paris: La Pléiade, Gallimard.
Maududi, Sayyid Abul A’La. 1967. The Meaning of the Qur’an. Lahore: Islamic Publications.
Mehanna, Ahmad Ibrahīm. 1978. Dirāsa hawl tarjamat al-Qur’ān al-Karim [On Translating the Noble Qur’ān].
Cairo: Al-Sha’b Publications.
Mernissi, Fatima. 1991a. Woman and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mernissi, Fatima. 1991b. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. New
York: Addison Wesley Publishing Company.
Mernissi, Fatima. 1996. Women’s Rebellion & Islamic Memory. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.
Mohamed, Abdel-Moneim. 2007. Tabayun ara ulama al-Azhar tujaha Tafsir ameriki be al-englizia lilQur’an
bishan al-mara [Al-Azhar Scholars Differ on an American English Interpretation of the Qur’an About Women].
Asharq Al-Awsat Online. Available at: https://aawsat.com/english [Accessed 25 Jan. 2008].
Plaskow, Judith. 1990. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Sheikh Al-Shabab, Omar. 2003. The Evolution of Translation Culture: Translating the Holy Quran into
French. Language & Translation, 15, 21–48.
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38
Translation and women’s health
in post-reform China
A case study of the 1998 Chinese
translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves
Boya Li
Introduction
This chapter aims to uncover the role translation has played in the advancement of feminist
knowledge about women’s bodies and health in China after socio-economic reforms were
introduced in 1978.
Since the late 1960s, women’s bodies have been a site of feminist politics in North America
and some European countries as part of Second Wave feminism. During the women’s health
movement that emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s, women criticized the medical system’s
ignorance of women’s needs, pressed for legal access to contraception and abortion, started
women-centred clinics, and advocated women’s control over their bodies (Turshen 2007, 2–3).
Women’s health movements focus on women’s empowerment and agency in (self-)care and
emphasize the importance of praxis and activism to feminism.
Literature in feminist translation studies has begun to look at the role translation plays in
mainstreaming women-centred, feminist concepts of sexual and reproductive health for women
in different parts of the world. This chapter presents a case study on the Chinese translation of
Our Bodies, Ourselves [OBOS], a book on self-care written by American women in the early
1970s. By examining the intentionality of Chinese translators and their translation choices, this
study shows how the Chinese translation can be seen as a socially engaged translation, and what
translation can and cannot do for feminism.
Historical context
In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaopeng implemented the Open Door Policy that encouraged foreign
companies and capital to enter the Chinese market, and changed China’s planned economy to a
market economy. Since then, Chinese society has been undergoing major transformations. The
opening up of the market gradually led to a series of changes in Chinese people’ lives on the
economic, social, and cultural levels, and Chinese feminists started to think about the problem
of gender inequality that Chinese women face in a time of transition. Given the influx of trans-
lated foreign-language texts into the local book market, Western feminist classics such as The
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Translation and women’s health in China
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir or 第二性 – 女人 (The Second Sex–Women) (Sang and
Nan 1986), 第二性 (The Second Sex) (1986 Zheng; Shu 2009), 第二性 (全译本) (The Second
Sex: Complete Translation) (Tao 1998), and 第二性女人 (Women the Second Sex) in Chinese
(Tang 2009), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan or 女性的奥秘 (The Feminine Mystique)
in Chinese (Cheng et al. 1988; reprint in 2005), and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer or
女太监 (The Female Eunuch) in Chinese (Ouyang 1990, reprint in 2011) were translated into
Chinese. Women’s research institutes were established at different universities across China, and
these created a space for research activities by Chinese feminist scholars. Translation activities,
including workshops and seminars organized by Chinese scholars, foreign feminists in China
and overseas Chinese feminists, became important to the dissemination of feminist thought in
Chinese academia. The Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing in 1995
was a unique opportunity for women’s rights advocates and NGOs from all over the world to
come to China to exchange ideas. In order to reduce communication barriers and to bridge
the terminological gap between China and the West, Chinese women organized workshops on
how to translate Western feminism into China (e.g. Ge and Jolly 2001).
The concept of reproductive health was first introduced into the social sciences in 1990s
China, and received attention from government agencies for public health, maternal and infant
health and family planning, women’s organizations, and social sciences researchers (Zheng
2011/1986, 4). Under the influence of transnational feminist movements, women’s reproductive/
sexual health, rights, and empowerment became the focus of many international conferences on
women, population, development, and public health in the 1980s and 1990s. The ideas around
women’s health and empowerment travelled to China through international conferences and the
collaborative projects between Chinese and foreign agencies focused on women’s health, popula-
tion, and development. More specifically, two international events, the International Conference
on Population in Cairo (ICPC) in 1994 (see McIntoch and Finkel 1995) and the Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, had a major impact on the advocacy for individual
reproductive rights and women’s health in 1990s China. All these created a good environment for
translating women’s health texts, and made the travel of OBOS to China possible.

The scholarly literature on feminist translation used to focus on how feminist translators ‘take
back’ literature by challenging misogynist attitudes in language (Flotow 1997). For example,
when Suzanne Jill Levine translated work by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whose writing seemed
sexist and paternalistic to her, she changed the wording of the text to undermine its implica-
tion that women are willing rape victims (Flotow, 26–27). More recently, the scholarship has
extended its scope and turned to the impact of gender on what gets translated, why certain texts
are translated, how they are translated, and disseminated and etc. (Alvstad and López 2017, 4).
Early scholarship on feminist translation has recently been seen as too narrow and even Euro-
centric, for not addressing the unequal power relations between the Global North and the
Global South, or how feminists in the Global South mediate feminist thought developed in the
West (e.g. Slavova and Phoenix 2011; Spivak 1992/2004; Susam-Sarajeva 2006).
Research on the translation and circulation of women’s health texts such as the various trans-
lations of Our Bodies, Ourselves points to the issues of localization and culturally sensitive adapta-
tion of the book during its travels. Some translators found it hard to find a positive vocabulary in
their mother tongue for translating women’s sexuality, while others deemed some of the book’s
discussions to be too US-specific and thus not useful for their target readers (Davis 2007). In
order to make the book accessible and useful for readers in a new cultural context, its translation
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Boya Li
has often involved far more than finding linguistic equivalences. In the case of health feminism
travelling to China, it is thus important to examine how the Chinese translators have read and
adapted US discourses about women’s health and sexuality.
Translation and women’s health in the Chinese context

“Translation and gender” is a relatively new subject in Chinese translation studies. Academic
papers in Chinese translation studies tend to be prescriptive and mainly concerned with set-
ting up guidelines for translators, and it is not until recently that a growing body of litera-
ture – including a large number of dissertations and theses – has begun to engage with feminist
translation theories (Yu 2015, 35). However, most studies of women and translation in Chinese
academia focus on literary translation, and the lack of work on the translation and circulation of
women’s health texts in China accounts for a sizeable gap in current literature.
Only very recently has some literature in China begun to address gender politics in the pro-
duction of knowledge on women’s sexual/reproductive health. Weiyi Rong (2000) criticizes
the state of sexology in Chinese academia as paternalistic since it tends to exclude women and
women’s sexuality from the discussion. Pei et al. (2007) looked at the development of sexology
in contemporary China and found that while Chinese sexology had become more interested in
the social configuration of sex-related issues, it lacked a critical feminist perspective. Compared
to mainland China, there seems to be more research on body politics and women’s health in
Taiwan. For instance, Hsiu-yun Wang (2007, 2017) has done work on gender politics in the
production of women’s health manuals in Taiwan since the 1970s, and found that translated texts
from Japan and the US had certain influences on the formation of popular discourses about
women’s health and self-care in Taiwan. More specifically, these translated texts helped recon-
figure sex education for women and girls in 1970s Taiwan through the lens of Western sciences
and medicine (Wang 2017). However, these studies did not further explore the linguistic aspects
of women’s health text translation. Nor did they pay close attention to the people who translated
and disseminated these texts. We have not learnt anything about how things change and shift
during the translation process or about Chinese translators as agents in the process.
Given this lack of interest, it is not surprising that not much has been written on translating
OBOS into Chinese. In mainland China, a paper by Xueyang Chen and Wenpei Tang (2018)
refers to the history of OBOS in the US and briefly mentions three Chinese translations. But
the authors do not further discuss how word choices and rhetorical strategies of the translator(s)
may have changed the book. However, at the 2012 Annual Conference on Sociology in Tai-
wan, Hsiu-yun Wang (2012) has presented work on rhetorical strategies used by the translator
in translating OBOS In this paper, Wang examined the linguistic shifts in a ‘pirated’ Chinese
translation of OBOS produced in Taiwan in the 1970s, a translation that was not done by
feminist or women’s health advocacy groups, but by a women’s magazine. After a close textual
analysis, Wang argues that the feminist message of the translated book was ‘toned down’ by the
translators’ rhetorical strategies. For example, the title of the book was changed from Our Bod-
ies, Ourselves to “Your Body, Yourself ” (妳的身體和妳自己), from first person plural to second
person singular. This kind of change also happens in the chapter on birth control. According
to Wang, this type of rhetorical strategy frames the reader as a patient who is isolated and
authority-abiding, and thus contradicts the American book’s intention of empowering women
through organized feminism. Moreover, the American book’s discussions of rape, abortion, and
pregnancy were deleted from the translation, because they ran counter to dominant narratives
510
about women’s sexuality and reproduction in the local society. These changes explain why this
Taiwanese book “was not a feminist success story” (2012, 9).
Wang’s work shows that translator’s interference has a great impact on how well a feminist
message is carried forward in the translation. It follows that the background and intentions
of the translator(s) need to be studied in order to find out why they made certain translation
decisions. In her monograph on the travel of OBOS, Davis (2007) acknowledges that feminist
groups and women’s NGOs have played an indispensable role in translating and domesticating
the book, and the American authors have ensured that only women’s groups translate this book,
as a way to protect the book from being exploited and appropriated by commercial publishers.
Thus, the intentions and backgrounds of translators seem to determine whether the translation
carries on the feminist tone of the American book.
The agents of translation also play a role in transnational feminism. For example, a study by
Dongchao Min (2017) presents an analysis of a reproductive health advocacy NGO in 1990s
China and its role in “translating” health feminism into China following the Open Door Policy.
Min found that the NGO played a major role in mainstreaming women-centred notions of
reproductive health in China at a time when there was no such notion as “reproductive health”
(2017, 100). Members of the NGO carried out community-based research on women’s repro-
ductive health in rural China. In this way, they ‘translated’ Western feminist theories into research
and practice in the local Chinese context. Although Min’s research does not focus on translation
as textual transfer, she suggests that translators are agents who make the passage of ideas possible.
Case study of the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS
Methods
In order to find out more about how translation solutions weaken or strengthen the feminist
message of the book, this chapter takes a descriptive approach to examining what has changed
in the translation when compared against the American book (see Toury 1995; Hermans 1985,
1999, for more information about descriptive translation studies). However, focusing exclusively
on the translation product does not offer full insight into the process or how the intentional-
ity of translators can make a difference. Thus, in order to find out more about what happened
during the translation, I reached out to people who took part in the translation and interviewed
the person who initiated and coordinated the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS. Liu Bohong
is deputy director of the Women’s Studies Institute of China at Griffith University (Our Bodies
Ourselves: Information Inspires Action, n.d.) and also teaches at the Chinese Women’s University
in Beijing. She initiated the 1998 Chinese translation having learnt about it at a Women’s Stud-
ies conference, and she served as the coordinator of translation project. My interview with her
reveals many things that are “hidden” behind the translation and her testimonial serves as an
interesting complement to the findings in the textual analysis.
Findings: socially engaged feminist translation and its “power”

to change perspectives on Chinese women’s health
OBOS, originally published in the USA in the early 1970s, was first brought to the attention of
Chinese researchers during a seminar on the history of Western feminism at the University of
Tianjin in 1993. The book was recommended by overseas Chinese scholars as worth translating.
For Chinese feminist scholar-activists, OBOS provided a new approach to women’s health issues
by extending beyond medical studies. Its approach of empowering women by educating them
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Boya Li
about their bodies was also refreshing to Chinese feminists. Thus, a Chinese women’s NGO
called “Chinese Women’s Health Network” (中国妇女健康网络) applied for funding from the
US-based Ford Foundation to translate OBOS into Chinese.
A textual analysis of the translation shows that the Chinese translators used certain strategies
to make the book more culturally sensitive for Chinese readers. For instance, in the chapter on
Sexuality, “masturbation” is translated as “self-consolation” (自慰) rather than the more popular
Chinese term “hand lewdness” (手淫). In a footnote, the translators explain that they made this
decision because masturbation is not about “lewdness” but sexual autonomy, and thus invokes a
sense of agency for women (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Liu (Chinese translation),
1998, 119). In doing so, they also de-stigmatize masturbation in the target social-cultural context.
However, changes made by the translators do not always strengthen the book’s positive atti-
tudes towards sex and women’s sexuality. For example, the chapter on homosexuality is com-
pletely deleted, along with certain excerpts in chapters on sex education and prostitution. In the
section on masturbation, despite the fact that translators have added notes to de-stigmatize this
notion, many details on how women have experienced masturbation and the different forms the
act can take are deleted, while an instruction that cautions the reader not to over masturbate is
kept as an abrupt and overpowering statement that comes at the end.
Another example is the changes made to an image (see Figures 38.1 and 38.2). Figure 38.1 is
the original one, demonstrating how different contraceptive methods work. Figure 38.2 is the one
from the Chinese translation. The original image shows the whole bodies of a couple in sexual
intercourse. What is interesting about this image is that it shows not only how contraception works,
but also the affective and intimate aspects of sex, and thus is kept consistent with the book’s emphasis
on viewing sexuality positively. However, in the Chinese translation, the image is cropped from the
waist of the couple, so that the elements of physical intimacy are sanitized. These changes raise some
doubts on how positive the Chinese translation actually is towards sex education, and seem to run
counter to the way the translators try to de-stigmatize sexuality in the earlier example.
Figure 38.1 Original OBOS image in the US version
512
Figure 38.2 Modified OBOS image in the 1998 Chinese translation
These paradoxes in the translation strategies foreshadow tensions that existed behind the
production of the book. The interview with Liu Bohong revealed these tensions, notably power
relations between editors/publishers and the translators which affected the actual translation.
In the first place, the Chinese translation group had to find a publisher who was willing to
produce the translation. They encountered a strong conservatism in the publishing industry
towards sexually and politically sensitive texts. Publishers were generally unwilling to publish a
book focused on gender politics. One publisher turned them down because they deemed the
book “too political.” In 1980s–1990s China, publishers were held legally responsible for the
translations they published, and thus they often acted as agents of censorship, mostly on sexu-
ally and politically explicit material (Yu 2015). Thus, even when the Chinese translators found
a more open-minded publisher willing to publish the book, they had to fight for the book not
to be sanitized. A variety of negotiation strategies were used, including comparing the book
to birth planning brochures produced in China to justify its legitimacy as a sex education text.
However, concessions had to be made, which explains the paradoxical translation strategies
discussed earlier.
In the interview, Liu said she had to argue with the editor about very specific little details
in the book over whether they were acceptable in a published book in China at that time. She
used the example of the cropped image of human anatomy to show how the translation was
affected by cultural differences between China and the US. She framed the translator cropping
the image as a concession to the demand of editors and publishers to sanitize erotic elements.
Thus, it seems that while the Chinese translators were trying to popularize women-centred
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Boya Li
views on sexual health, they still needed to fit into the “master narratives” of what is acceptable
and not acceptable, which affected the ability of the Chinese translation to advocate positive
views of women’s sexuality.
Moreover, the translators were not a homogeneous group; this group consisted of people
from diverse backgrounds. Some of them were literary translators, some were researchers in
humanities and social sciences, and others were physicians and medical experts. At the begin-
ning of the project they all had different understandings of how women’s health should be
approached. The translation process thus created a unique space for dialogue that reflected
the different ideologies of the translators. For example, the male doctors involved in the pro-
ject translated the book’s references to “women” as “patients.” However, feminists in the group
rejected this translation, because the use of the term “patients” in certain circumstances medi-
calizes women’s life experiences such as pregnancy and childbirth, and the medicalization of
women’s bodies is one of the most important criticisms that OBOS has made of the medical
system. Thus, translating OBOS is about vitalizing a women-centred framework of analysis on
women’s health, which was absent in 1990s China.
Despite the constraints under which they worked and the divergent opinions among the
translators on the use of language on women’s health, the Chinese translators took action to
maximize the positive effects of the book on readers. The publication of the book is not the end
of story – they were also concerned with the potential impact of the book on local gender and
health politics. Unhappy about the publisher’s demand to delete the chapter on lesbianism from
the Chinese book, the translation group produced an underground translation that included
this chapter. This underground version was not for sale in bookstores, but disseminated among
Chinese universities and gay rights NGOs. The 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS was quite a
socially engaged activity.
The Chinese translators worked under the constraints of the local system and negotiated its
parameters to make the passage of health feminism into China possible. However, the group
failed to produce a second translation more focused on Chinese women’s own experiences (c.f.
Plafker 1998). Besides the fact that most of the translators were volunteers and thus could not
devote themselves to a second lengthy project, Liu also expressed doubts about the usefulness
of continuing the translation project. While she acknowledged the importance of women’s
empowerment through collective knowledge creation and sharing as in the OBOS project, she
argued that it is not as useful in the Chinese context. Liu sees the realm of health research and
services as a domain reserved for the Chinese government, while women’s NGOs do not have
the capacities or the resources to improve women’s health conditions on the larger scale. Thus,
it is more urgent to produce knowledge on gender and women’s health that can translate into
policy than empowering women individually, and more useful to produce knowledge with the
clear purpose of improving the delivery of social services by the government.
While this is a rather simplistic explanation why a second translation of OBOS would not
be useful in China, it reveals the challenges inherent in trying to apply a feminist praxis devel-
oped under one social system to another system. Liu and the China Women’s Health Net-
work’s solution was to move away from the community-based approach of the Boston Women’s
Health Book Collective, and to focus more on research-based work that produces knowledge on
women and public health in the Chinese context. While an inquiry into why Chinese NGOs are
not resourceful enough to spread health feminism is beyond the scope of this study, these find-
ings reveal that the usefulness, the possibilities for dissemination, and the readability of travelling
feminism must be considered in line with the structure of the social system at the receiving end.
In conclusion, the 1998 Chinese translation demonstrates the gender awareness of Chinese
feminists working on women’s health issues in 1990s China. It may be seen as an example of
514
how translators act as activists, and how they use translation to promote changes in the Chinese
society by mainstreaming women-centred notions of health (c.f. Baker 2013). However, the
feminist scholar-activists who took part in the translation also claimed that there are limits to
translating feminism. More specifically, the grass-roots, community-based approach of advocat-
ing women’s health did not spread on a large scale in China as it did in the US. In this sense, this
particular “way of doing” health feminism seems less translatable than women-centred knowl-
edge on health.
Future directions
The “untranslatability” of community-based health feminism in OBOS into 1990s China
raises questions about how useful travelling feminism can be. This has both theoretical and
practical implications for feminist translation studies. It has been said that China’s sociopoliti-
cal structure is largely premised on a collectivist ideology, which reserves the round of health
research for the Chinese government (Liu et al. 2009, 531). This may be why the Chinese
Women’s Health Network gave up the follow-up project and opted for more collaborative
projects with the government on women’s health. Thus, future research might focus on how
to make translated texts more easily distributable, useful, and readable in a context such as
present-day China.
Moreover, although this study is focused largely on the linguistic aspects of translation,
the findings suggest that translating feminism is not only about linguistic transfer. To make
women-centred approaches to health useful in China, the translators themselves were trans-
formed as some of them learnt to see women’s health differently; in the end they continued
their work not through interlingual translation, but by conducting research on public health
and making women-centred notions of health accessible and understandable for Chinese
policymakers. This suggests that the notion of translation implies all kinds of efforts that
will help move ideas and let them come to life in a new geographical, social, and cultural
context. As Min’s study on the role of reproductive health NGOs indicates, agents of transla-
tion include not only translators, but also actors who facilitate intercultural exchanges and
communications.
Lastly, the numbers and types of health manuals have multiplied in the Chinese book market
since the 1998 Chinese translation of OBOS. In the early 2000s, the SARS epidemic created a
growing demand for popular health manuals (Li 2003). How the proliferation of such popular
discourses on health and self-care affect the society’s conceptualization of women’s bodies and
health is worth investigating. Moreover, what role translation has played in this process – e.g. the
availability of other translated Western health manuals and their impact on the production of
local texts – also needs to be studied and discussed.
Further reading
Du, Jie. 1999. The Gender Perspective of ‘Women and Care’ and ‘Mechanisms of the Improvement of
Women’s Status. Funv Yanjiu Luncong ( Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies), 2, 49–52.
This article provides a comprehensive explanation of how women’s health relates to wider issues of
social development and gender relations.
Liu, Bohong. 1998. Translator’s Preface. Translated by Zhengping Liu, in American Women’s Self-care Classic:
Our Bodies, Ourselves. Beijing: Zhishi Chubanshe, 1–4.
The Translator’s Preface for the 1998 Chinese version provides useful information on the domestic
social and historical context of the translation, and explains the feminist agenda of the translation group.
515
Boya Li
Liu, Bohong. 2000. Look after Our Bodies, Care for Ourselves, an Intriguing and Inspiring Book for
Women–American Women’s Self-care Classic: Our Bodies, Ourselves. Kaike Zhishi (Encyclopedic Knowl-
edge), 4, 64.
This book review explains why a Chinese translation of the book is useful and necessary for Chinese
women from the perspective of the translators.
Min, Dongchao. 2017. Translation and Traveling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China. London and
Min’s study examines the connection between translation flows and the development of Chinese femi-
nism within the context of China’s opening up at the macro level.
Wang, Hsiu-yun. 2017. Postcolonial Knowledge from Empires: The Beginnings of Menstrual Education in
Taiwan, 1950s-1980s. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 11(4), 519–540.
Wang looks into the development of menstrual education for girls in Taiwan from 1950s to 1980s from
a postcolonial perspective, and includes a fair amount of discussion about the role that translated health
education and medical texts from the US and Japan have played in the process.
References
Sources in Chinese
Cheng, Xilin, Hui Zhu, and Xiaolu Wang, trans. 1988/2005. The Feminine Mystique. Chengdu: Sichuan-
renmin Chubanshe.
Chen, Xueyang and Wenpei Tang. 2018. Contemporary Evolution of Women’s Conceptualization of
Health: A Case Study of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Medicine and Philosophy (Study of Medical Humanities
Theories), 39(592), 58–62.
Li, Jing. 2003. Alarm as SARS Epidemic Spreads, Increase in Demand for Health Books. China Post News,
008, 17 May.
Liu, Zhengping, trans. 1998. American Women’s Self-care Classic–Our Bodies, Ourselves. Beijing: Zhishi Chubanshe.
Ouyang, Yu, trans. 1990/2011. The Female Eunuch. Shanghai: Shanghaiyiwe Chubanshe.
Rong Weiyi. 2000. Gender Perspective on Women’s Sexuality Research. Zhejiang Xuekan (Zhejiang Aca-
demic Journal), 6, 77–90.
Sang, Zhuying and Nan Shan, trans. 1986. The Second Sex–Women. Changsha: Hunanwenyi Chubanshe.
Shu, Xiaofei, trans. 2009. The Second Sex. Beijing: Xiyuan Chubanshe.
Tang, Yi, trans. 2009. The Second Sex: Women. Beijing: Yanshan Chubanshe.
Tao, Tiezhu, trans. 1998. The Second Sex: Complete Translation. Beijing: Zhongguoshuji Chubanshe.
Wang, Hsiu-yun. 2007. Medical Knowledge for the Wife: Popular Health Manuals in Taiwan, 1950s-2000s.
Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, 67, 119–178.
Zheng, Kelu, trans. 1986/2011. The Second Sex. Shanghai: Shanghaiyiwen Chubanshe.
Sources in English
Alvstad, Cecilia and Herrero López. 2017. Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational
Reception. An Introduction, in Isis Herrero López, Cecilia Alvstad, Johanna Akujärvi, and Synnøve
Skarsbø Lindtner, eds., Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Translational Reception. Montréal:
Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre, 3–30.
Baker, Mona. 2013. Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action. Social Movement Studies, 12(1), 23–47.
Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Ge, Youli and Susan Jolly. 2001. East Meets West Feminist Translation Group, in Hsiung et al. eds., Chinese
Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers. Oxford and New York: Berg, 61–78.
Hermans, Theo. 1985. Introduction: Translation Studies and a New Paradigm, in Theo Hermans, ed., The
Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 7–15.
Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained. Manches-
ter: St. Jerome Publishing.
Liu, Meng, Yanghong Hu, and Minli Liao. 2009. Travelling Theory in China: Contextualization, Compro-
mise and Combination. Global Networks, 9(4), 529–554.
516
McIntoch, C. Alison and Jason L. Finkel. 1995. The Cairo Conference on Population and Development:
A New Paradigm? Population and Development Review, 21(2), 223–260.
Pei, Yuxin, Sik-ying Ho Petula, and Ng Man Lun. 2007. Studies on Women’s Sexuality in China Since
1980: A Critical Review. Journal of Sex Research, 44(2), 202–212.
Plafker, Ted. 1998. Our Bodies, Ourselves’ Hits Shelves in China Patient Becomes Her Own Advocate. City ed.
Boston Globe: A.49, 20 Dec.
Slavova, Kornelia and Ann Phoenix. 2011. Living in Translation: Voicing and Inscribing Women’s Lives
and Practices. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18(4), 331–337.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1992/2004. The Politics of Translation, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Transla-
tion Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 397–417.
Susam-Sarajeva, Sebnem. 2006. Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benja-
mins Publishing Co.
Turshen, Meredeth. 2007. Women’s Health Movements: A Global Force for Change. London and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism.’ Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Wang Hsiu-yun. 2012. How Did Our Bodies Become Your Body? Our Bodies, Ourselves in Taiwan. Annual
Meeting of the Taiwanese Sociological Association, Tunghai University [pdf]. Available at: http://
tsa2012.thu.edu.tw/20121125papers/A59.pdf [Accessed 11 Dec. 2017].
Routledge, 35.
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39
Translating feminist texts
on women’s sexual and
reproductive health
Introduction
Women’s sexual and reproductive health is concerned with women’s reproductive life cycles,
including pregnancy, menstruation, birth control, abortion, menopause, but also intimacy, rela-
tionships, sexuality, and socio-legal factors that influence women’s experiences of sexual and
reproductive health. Most texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health have traditionally
been written by medical doctors, usually male, and have underscored women’s roles as mothers
and wives (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Kuhlmann and Babitsch 2002; Löwy 2005; Vuille et al.
2006; Salle and Vidal 2017). Thanks to a large extent to feminist movements, the last decades
of the 20th century saw a significant rise in interest in the topic, and consequently a growing
number of publications of feminist texts on women in general, and on women’s reproductive
health, in particular.
This chapter provides an overview of some of the research focusing on feminist texts about
women’s sexual and reproductive health and their transnational circulation through translation.
We dedicate considerable space to the translations of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which has inspired a
large number of studies. While feminist texts on women’s health remain a minority compared
to many popular medical manuals, their cultural and social impact has been profound, and their
political message far-reaching. The chapter will briefly examine the context of women’s libera-
tion in the United States and Western Europe and the accompanying women’s health move-
ment out of which feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health arose, and will
focus on some examples of contemporary research on the role of translation in the dissemina-
tion of feminist political messages around women’s bodies: how are feminist texts on women’s
health translated and by whom, and what are some of the challenges faced by feminist transla-
tion scholars studying women’s health texts?
From the 17th to the 19th century, medical professions led by male doctors in Western Europe
and North America, in their efforts to gain recognition and establish their authority, constructed
a view of the female body as inherently flawed, and vehemently disparaged any knowledge on
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Translating feminist texts on health
health and the body produced by healers and midwives (Ehrenreich and English 1973). It is
only in the 20th century that a feminist critique of medical discourses acquired a prominent
place in discussions of sexual and reproductive health. This critique was rooted in practices that
questioned the very production of knowledge in the area of health. In the 1960s and 1970s,
women reappropriated their bodies and their sexual health by openly sharing their experiences
in consciousness-raising groups. The self-help movement that was formed at that time con-
sisted of numerous women’s groups and collectives, and actively strove to deconstruct medical
knowledge viewed as patriarchal and in many respects coercive, as well as to develop collective
knowledges based on lived experiences (Morgen 2002; Norsigian et al. 1999). The so-called
self-help groups were originally developed within the context of the American women’s lib-
eration movement and were based on the notion that women should explore their own bodies
and sexuality, and that liberation was to be found in a new relationship to the body (Bracke
2015, 562).
Through consciousness-raising groups, women gathered and shared their deeply personal
stories and experiences, producing one of the most recognizable slogans of the 1960’s American
political era: “The personal is political.” In this way, the practice of sharing experiences and
knowledge served as the foundation for critical analysis of social structures and medical institu-
tions. In contrast to self-help groups, which often rejected all that was produced or proposed by
biomedicine, women’s health groups developed a more pragmatic stand. Indeed, the women’s
health movement articulated a bifocal position whereby technological advances and devices
for improving women’s health were accepted as long as their physical, psychological, social, and
ideological impacts were closely and critically examined. Both self-help groups and the women’s
movement opened a path for the emergence of a feminist epistemology (Kuhlman and Babitsch
2002; Davis 2007). This epistemology is rooted in the concept of “situated knowledge” (Hara-
way 1988) and brings forth the idea that knowledge is never neutral because it always reflects a
particular context and the particular perspectives of the subject producing it.
Today, feminist critiques of medical models of knowledge continue to highlight the problems
created by relying solely on supposedly “objective” knowledge production that views individu-
als as objects of study. They suggest that subjective knowledge produced by individuals and
shared as situated knowledges about their health and well-being must be taken into account.
This criticism can be seen in action, for example, in the case of oral contraception. While oral
contraception has allowed many women to take back control of their fertility, it is regularly
presented by the health industry as a safe option that has no consequences (so-called objective
knowledge). It has taken a great deal of reporting and sharing by women on their personal and
serious secondary effects of the pill (subjective/experiential knowledge) in order to push phar-
maceutical companies to develop safer options such as the minipill (progestin only).
Similarly to feminist literary works that set to deconstruct the “objectified, obscured, vili-
fied or domesticated female body” (Flotow 1997, 17), texts on women’s health have tackled
the notion of the body as the “object” of medical knowledge and constructed the view of
women as active agents and knowledge producers. In contemporary research on feminist
translation, one can glean insights into and acknowledgements of the contributions made
by Canadian feminist translators in the 1980s and 1990s whose translations unapologetically
incorporated feminist theory in order to “free language and society from their patriarchal
burden” (Castro 2009, 3). Canadian feminist translations and translation studies from this
period (Godard 1990; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Flotow 1991, 1997; Simon 1996) remain
an important foundation for the current development of the so-called feminist translation
studies of which feminist translations on women’s health are very much a part (Castro 2009;
Castro and Ergun 2017).
519
Contemporary research: case studies of Our Bodies, Ourselves

and the Birth Control Handbook
Much like the Canadian feminist literary translations of the 1980s and 1990s, current research
and feminist translations of women’s health texts also draw inspiration from women’s activism
of the 1960s and 1970s. A key study on feminist translation of women’s health texts is Kathy
Davis’s work on Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS). Arising from the second-wave women’s libera-
tion movements in the United States, the women’s health movement produced one of the most
iconic feminist texts. Focusing on women’s sexual and reproductive health, OBOS combined
biomedical knowledge with personal accounts of women’s experiences to critically assess infor-
mation made available to women on their health and bodies. OBOS also took a strong stance
against capitalism and capitalist exploitation of biomedical and pharmaceutical knowledge. It
was rooted in the American context of the 1960s marked by the Civil Rights Movement, anti-
war movements against the war in Vietnam, the New Left activism, as well as the burgeoning
women’s liberation movement. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (hereafter the
Boston Collective) began as a small group of women (the membership fluctuated in the early
years but eventually 12 women became the group’s official founders), who were critical of the
doctors’ condescending and paternalistic treatment of women (OBOS 1979, 11). Published in
1971, OBOS quickly became a bestseller, selling 200,000 copies in the first few weeks. Since
its first edition, OBOS has sold more than 4.5 million copies and carved a place for itself in
American popular culture and history.
More than 30 translations of OBOS have been produced since the early 1970s. Kathy Davis’s
book The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders, which appeared
in 2007, marks the first major study of the OBOS translations and their significance around
the world. In addition to tracing the book’s social and cultural impact as well as the history of
the Boston Collective, Davis’s work is a rare examination of a non-literary text and its transla-
tions. Davis underscores the potential of translation to build feminist alliances across borders
and personal differences while at the same time she situates the Boston Collective’s origin and
evolution within the context of second-wave feminism and women’s health movement in the
United States.
Davis researches the trajectory of OBOS and argues that global translation projects had the
effect of “decentring” OBOS as a Western feminist project (2007, 197–201). Feminist activists
involved in these projects were not passive recipients of the American text but were actively
engaged in its adaptation and revision. In the process, they became agents themselves in the pro-
duction of feminist knowledge. Davis argues that OBOS is an excellent illustration of how texts
can travel through translation. Through global circulation, OBOS was “decentred,” as the book
“appeared (and reappeared) in new contexts, both carrying its original meanings and acquiring
new ones as it was taken up and adapted” (Davis 2007, 77). However, Davis contests the claims
that OBOS translations are indicative of Western imperialism. Rather than being an imposition
of American feminism upon others, OBOS translations have provided a platform for activists
involved in the translation to demonstrate their “creative agency” by choosing what information
to include and what to omit, contingent upon the “local political and cultural climates” (Davis
2007, 78). This editorial freedom accorded to the local translation groups by the Boston Collec-
tive set OBOS apart from most other translation projects.
As the scope of international translation projects expanded, and the American OBOS became
submerged in countless other feminist and non-feminist publications on women’s health, its
global trajectory grew in importance. As OBOS started to lose its influence domestically, it
increasingly took on a new role as the “facilitator of its life outside the United States” (Davis
520
2007, 79; our emphasis). OBOS and its global trajectory became an excellent example of the
ways in which translations come to sustain the afterlife of the original. Although German liter-
ary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s influential concept of the original’s afterlife has been
applied mostly to literary works, OBOS and its translations illustrate the way in which “a specific
significance inherent in the original texts expresses itself in their translatability” (Rendall 1997,
153). While most translations of OBOS are adaptations sensitive to local and cultural contexts,
the one constant that has travelled to all global projects – or was always translatable – was the
idea “of a small group of laywomen talking about their embodied experiences and critically
assembling useful information about their health needs” (Davis 2007, 79).
Following in the footsteps of Davis’s The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves, a number of other
studies have focused on the complex process behind the travels of OBOS to other countries
and languages. As Davis outlines in her book, the first translations were published in Western
Europe and Japan in the 1970s, followed by translations that appeared in Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s. The late 1990s and the early 2000s saw a wave of transla-
tions in post-Communist Eastern European countries. The fall of Communism and the rapid
growth of feminist and women’s organizations in Eastern Europe was accompanied by a flurry
of translation activity and particularly translations of feminist classics from the West (see Kor-
nelia Slavova’s chapter in this volume). In the early 2000s, translations were published in Poland,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Moldova, and Russia (Bogic 2016). A Bulgarian scholar, Kornelia Sla-
vova, completed the Bulgarian version in 2001, together with a number of health experts, recast-
ing “the whole book within the perspective of gender justice, providing a special chapter about
Bulgarian women’s issues in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as addressing the introduction
to both men and women” (2001, 15). Slavova’s subsequent academic writing provides poignant
analyses of gender and translation issues and of feminist translation as a dynamic but also conten-
tious meeting point between Western and Eastern European feminists. Slavova asks:
How can a feminist position – uniting white and black women, Hispanic-American and
other hyphenated-Americans, men and women, lesbian and straight, young and old, healthy
and disabled – be conveyed in a form that sounds natural and inviting enough for a Bulgar-
ian or East-European woman reader to identify with? Where do we draw the demarcation
line between individual and collective agency/ subjecthood, between the increasing glo-
bality and cultural specificities?
(2001, 16)
Looking at another Eastern European translation, Anna Bogic traces the story of the Serbian
translation entitled Naša tela, mi (NTM) as part of her doctoral research (Bogic 2017). Against
the background of the Yugoslav wars and the influence of ethno-nationalism in the 1990s,
Bogic examines the development of domestic and transnational feminist networks and assesses
the extent to which NTM serves as oppositional discourse to the changing politics of reproduc-
tion and pronatalist discourses around abortion and fertility in Serbia in this period. This study
assesses to what extent the Serbian translation is able to contribute to local feminist knowledge
on women’s reproductive health, rights, and sexuality while simultaneously acknowledging une-
ven translation flows across shifting and unsettling geopolitical borders and the East-West divide.
In many ways, the Serbian translation spotlights the politics of translation and raises questions
about the possibility of an equal exchange and knowledge production between feminists who
are differently positioned on the geopolitical map. Boya Li studies the 1998 Chinese translation
of OBOS (chapter in this volume) and examines the historical and socio-economic factors that
influence the conditions under which the Chinese translation is produced. In her research for
521
her Master’s thesis, Li pays particular attention to the transition from a planned economy to a
“socialist market economy,” a powerful moment in Chinese history that sees the return to more
overtly traditional gender relations between women and men and an increased vulnerability of
women in the job market (Li 2018). Simultaneously, this economic transition is accompanied
by an influx of feminist literature from the West together with collaborations between Chinese
women’s groups and intellectuals as well as foreign feminists. The Chinese translation of OBOS
is a product of this nascent cultural encounter. Importantly, Li also shows how this translation
had to deal with the problem of censorship and cultural sensitivity. Ultimately, the 1998 Chinese
translation validated Chinese feminists’ attempts to criticize dominant, patriarchal, and medical-
ized discourses on women’s health and sexuality despite being forced to accept a certain amount
of censorship. Both Bogic and Li rely on interviews with the translators and on comparative
textual analysis to arrive at their conclusions, in addition to archival research and interviews
with some of the women from the Boston Collective (Bogic 2017). The use of interviews as
a research method has been gaining in popularity among translation studies scholars, perhaps
nudged by considerable work on the importance of the translator’s agency, as it offers an oppor-
tunity to validate the experiences and insights of the translators.
Esther Shapiro (2013) has been involved in the cultural adaptation of OBOS into Spanish
for US Latinas, Latin American, and Caribbean women. Her involvement is the basis for her
writing on the challenges and successes of feminist translation and women’s health. She exam-
ines the approaches to the cultural adaptation, Nuestros cuerpos, nuestras vidas, which ultimately
create a textual “trialogue” between the OBOS founders/editors, over 30 Latin American and
Caribbean feminist and women’s health groups, and the editorial team of diverse Boston Latinas
(Shapiro 2013, 23). Shapiro’s work is an important contribution to feminist translation studies
since it delves into the tremendously intricate and complex processes behind the making of a
culturally relevant translation that crosses vast geopolitical divides. These and other works on
OBOS translations and adaptations reveal the extent to which feminist translations of texts on
women’s sexual and reproductive health demand a collaborative effort setting them apart from
other feminist translations such as literary works.
New translation and adaptation projects continue to be taken up by a wide variety of wom-
en’s groups despite the fact that OBOS as an organization ceased to exist in its original form in
2018 and is now mainly run on a volunteer basis.1 One of the most recent OBOS translation
and adaptation projects, entitled Corps accord: Guide de sexualité positive and based on the 2011
edition, has recently been completed in French in Quebec. Like Shapiro, Bessaïh (forthcoming)
focuses on the process of translation and adaptation led by a collective of activists, la CORPS
féministe. She shows that this translation project fulfills another function: it brings together the
women’s health movement in Quebec. Bessaïh, also a member of the activist collective, analyzes
the process behind OBOS in Quebec and highlights the different discourses on the notion of
gender that can be found in feminist circles and that render the French text more inclusive.
The study of the collaborative translation process in Quebec highlights grammatical and ter-
minological challenges brought on by the renewal of the notion of gender. Since the late 1990s,
queer studies have been expanding on the idea that there are more than two genders or two
sexes; rather, there is a continuum where “woman” and “man” could be located at opposite ends.
In feminist circles, these issues are brought to bear by trans and non-binary folks who seek non-
gendered ways of writing. Some languages, such as Chinese, English or German, already have a
neutral grammatical gender while other languages, such as Spanish, French or Arabic, do not:
people, animals, and even inanimate objects or concepts are associated with a particular gram-
matical gender, feminine or masculine. Consequently, when trans or non-binary people speak
in French, they are obliged to use either the feminine or the masculine or to create neologisms,
522
that is, invent new grammatical and terminological forms. The activists behind the Quebec
translation of OBOS are cis-gendered women who already use non-sexist forms in their writ-
ing. In accordance with their efforts to build bridges and solidarity with the most marginalized
persons, the activists are seeking to strike a compromise between non-sexist writing practised
by women’s groups in Quebec (and more widespread and accepted in official publications in
Quebec) and neutral writing promoted by trans and non-binary feminist communities. Bessaïh
(forthcoming) applies the genocritique methodology when studying translation drafts in order
to analyze the writing process and the negotiations that take place between the desire to ren-
der the feminine more visible (non-sexist writing) and the project to neutralize the language
(neutral writing).
In another translation studies publication on OBOS, Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic (2016)
trace the evolution of the usage of a popular expression “we women” (“nous les femmes”) across
three versions of OBOS in French: France 1977, Senegal 2004, and Quebec 2019. Historically,
this expression has served as a slogan, symbolizing the condition of oppression assumed to be
common among all women. The pronoun “ ‘we’ as a discursive element hails women reading the
book and invites them to join the feminist movement. It constitutes a perlocutory act [. . .], that
is, a speech act that calls women readers to action” (Bessaïh and Bogic 2016, 45).2 In the French
translation published in France in 1977, the expression is used, among others, as a way to gather
and mobilize women. However, more than a decade later, in feminist circles, the appearance
of the theory of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) bolsters the critique of the assumed
homogeneity of women’s lived experiences and oppressions. Indeed, the use of the expression
“we women” risks erasing oppressions experienced by the most marginalized women (racialized
women, Aboriginal women, LBTQ women, etc.). Within the Quebec context, intersectionality is
increasingly being adopted in academic feminist circles but is still facing obstacles when it comes
to the practical application of its principles by feminist groups. Issues of greatest importance to
the most marginalized women are still not easily recognized in feminist circles, and this remains
the case in women’s health groups. For example, some issues include the institutionalized and sys-
temic racism in health and social institutions, lack of informed consent experienced by disabled
women, the misgendering of trans women, the invisibility of lesbians in the medical literature,
to name just a few. Bessaïh and Bogic (2016) argue that in this context of a fractured women’s
health movement, the OBOS translation and adaptation project in Quebec serves as a catalyst for
a better understanding of marginalized women’s claims, and therefore, for greater cohesion and
solidarity between diverse women’s groups. The feminist activists behind the translation project
use OBOS as a communication and advocacy tool that allows them to create greater visibility
around marginalized women’s concerns about their sexual and reproductive health.
While considerable research has been conducted on OBOS and its translations, a study
of the Birth Control Handbook (Feingold and Cherniak 1968), published in a field outside of
translation studies, provides some fascinating insights into the predecessor to OBOS and opens
the door to further studies into this important story of Canadian activism. Christabelle Seth-
na’s “The Evolution of the Birth Control Handbook: From Student Peer-Education Manual to
Feminist Self-empowerment Text, 1968–1975” (2006) traces the roots of the wildly successful
and trailblazing Handbook in student politics and activism at McGill University, and links it to
the growing women’s liberation movements. Sethna’s historical study focuses on the political
context that gave rise to McGill students’ contestation of repressive reproductive policies and
general lack of knowledge about the body, sex, and contraception. Following her examination
of the original English-language text, particularly the introduction to the Handbook that sets the
tone for the rest of the text, Sethna presents the French-language translation, Pour un côntrole
des naissances, that was set within the Quebec context of the 1960s and early 1970s. While the
523
editorial commentary to the English-language source text engaged with the topics of racism,
population control politics, and anti-Americanism and offered a more global perspective, the
French-language edition “concentrated squarely on Quebec” (108). Given the political context
of the time, it dealt with the topics of nationalism, Quebec independence, language politics,
and the Catholic Church, showing how women’s reproductive rights were intricately tied to
the larger national project. Sethna’s research is rich in historical and contextual information and
sets the stage for further examinations of this fascinating, and somewhat overlooked, translation
case study.
Conclusion: current challenges in feminist translation

Translation studies scholars who work on women’s health texts in translation currently face a
number of different challenges. The first and more conceptual challenge touches on the very
definition of translation. The idea that a translation needs to remain faithful to the source text
is a largely Western approach to translation, and translation practices that deal with sexual and
reproductive health texts tend to encourage translation scholars to expand their definitions. For
example, Bessaïh and Bogic show that the activist translators of OBOS in Quebec integrate local
research in health and social sciences into their translation (2016, 67). In an attempt to broaden
the Western definition of translation, Zhongli Yu (2017) takes up the notion developed by Hu
Gengshen in 2001 that treats translation as a process of selection and adaptation: “Based on ori-
ental wisdom and occidental concepts, it [the notion of translation as adaptation and selection]
has gradually developed into eco-translatology, [that] takes translation as a selection activity of
the translator’s adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment” (Yu 2017, 49). For example,
Yu studies the strategies of Ai, one of the translators of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in China.
Ai presents the texts in her classes and integrates stories told by her students about their first
menstruation experiences. She then replaces the stories in the source text written by Ensler on
the experiences of American women with local women’s testimonials. In another case, Şebnem
Susam-Saraeva with her case study on Turkish Mommy blogs about pregnancy and childbirth
shows how these bloggers employ a translation strategy similar to that used in the Ottoman
Empire. Highlighting the history of terceme, Susam-Saraeva suggests that this term may be more
useful for understanding blog translations due to their “emphasis on retelling, rewriting, saying
again, reinterpreting and repeating for a new audience” as well as on intertextuality and unclear
boundaries (2017, 79). These bloggers supplement their text in order to integrate knowledge
or elements they judge relevant: “They are more prepared to innovate, play around with the
material in hand, retell it in a way that will be more interesting and intelligible for their audi-
ence” (2017, 81).
The second challenge is related to the fact that women’s health is often highly politicized, a
situation which encourages translation scholars to integrate activist dimensions in their work and
research. Translations of women’s health texts are often completed by non-professional transla-
tors who are involved as activists in a cause they deem important. These lay translators engage
in social activism as part of their translation and adaptation process. For example, the OBOS
translators in Quebec, la CORPS féministe, apply knowledge mobilization and co-construction
methods that originated in social and political activism, such as project distribution, the choice
of an editorial and coordinating board, collection of personal accounts, and mobilization of
social and academic knowledge (Bessaïh and Bogic 2016, 65–66). It is suggested that just like
consciousness-raising groups, these translation collectives are able to share their life experiences,
their impressions of the text, and their personal accounts (Baldo and Inghilleri 2018; Bessaïh and
Bogic 2016). In the same vein, analyzing the ten-year long collective translation and adaptation
524
process of the Spanish version of OBOS, Shapiro (2013) underscores frameworks and methods
linking personal and social change, illustrating the ways in which translation and social activ-
ism can be imbricated together. Translating texts on women’s health then requires an activist
engagement that consequently demands that translators dedicate even more time and energy to
their translation projects.
Finally, an important challenge faced by feminist translation studies scholars is that women’s
health texts are increasingly made available solely online in a digital format. In the 1960s and
1970s, the women’s health movement mainly used home-made publications or self-published
material to disseminate its revolutionary ideas. Those publications included pamphlets, news-
papers, magazines or even zines during the 1980s and the 1990s. Today, the easiest way to self-
publish material is to post it online through blogs, videos or virtual communities. Indeed, the
development of interactive communication technologies (web 2.0) allows the creation of online
communities gathered around issues that stem from the members’ values, habits, and interests.
In the field of sexual and reproductive health, these communities enable knowledge and
experience-sharing that is at the origin of the women’s health movement. Together with the
blogs on sexual and reproductive health, they deconstruct medical discourse and produce a
counter discourse. For example, in her work on blogs, Susam-Saraeva underscores the way blog-
gers use experience-sharing to build a public narrative (Baker 2006) that challenges dominant
narratives on pregnancy and birth:
[T]hese personal narratives [. . .] are circulated with a view to challenge the deeply ingrained
public narratives on women’s bodies and social position within the Turkish society, which limit
women’s access to the maternal care they deem appropriate for themselves and their family.
(Susam-Saraeva 2019, 85–86)
In this context, translated narratives co-exist side by side with local narratives and contrib-
ute to a transformation of the public narrative. According to Susam-Saraeva, these online texts
are mainly translated by non-professionals. This phenomenon highlights the need to develop
parameters and methods of study different from those applied to texts translated by professionals.
Moreover, the very nature of the web (chaotic, uncharted, and diachronic) provides a challenging
environment for scholars to identify a significant and relevant corpus. Translation studies scholars
thus face the challenge of developing new and creative tools to process the data stemming from
blogs and online communities. For all these reasons, Susam-Saraeva reminds us that these online
texts are valuable and unavoidable data in the study of the circulation and transformation of
knowledge across borders. Likewise, the study of translations of feminist texts on women’s sexual
and reproductive health provides a much-needed platform for new and innovative analytical
methods that have the potential to enrich the field of translation studies as a whole.
Further readings
Bessaïh, Nesrine and La CORPS féministe, eds. 2019. Corps Accord: Guide de Sexualité Positive. Montréal:
Éditions du remue-ménage.
One of the most recent translations and adaptations, Corps accord is the first translation made in Canada
and speaks specifically to francophone Canadians. This 2019 publication is a product of feminist activ-
ism by a women’s health collective that adapted a section of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves.
This edited volume sets out to give more concrete contours to a burgeoning sub-field of feminist
translation studies.
525
Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
The first in-depth study of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, its landmark book Our Bodies,
Ourselves as well as its many translations since the 1970s.
This edited volume gathers articles that combine translation studies and feminist studies with a global
perspective. The volume follows in the footsteps of the 2011 Translating Women that also called for more
engagement with feminism in translation studies.
Notes
1 In 2018, the founders of the Boston Collective announced that after almost 50 years the organization
was going to transition to a volunteer-based entity and will no longer update or publish further editions
of OBOS. Available at: www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story/whats-new/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019].
2 Translated from the French original: “Le ‘nous’, en tant qu’élément discursif, interpelle ainsi les lectrices
et les invite à joindre les mouvements féministes. Il constitue un acte perlocutoire, c’est-à-dire un acte
de parole qui provoque l’action en incitant les lectrices à agir.”
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40
Children’s literature, feminism,
adaptation, and translation*
Handegül Demirhan
Children’s literature is often likened to women’s writing. Taking Perry Nodelman’s statement
that “children’s literature, like women’s literature, is merely a response to repression-a literature
whose specific sort of femininity depends on [. . .] an alternative way of describing reality”
(1988, 33) as a starting point in this chapter, I will discuss the secondary status of these two
marginalized fields in conjunction with each other. I want to start by reflecting on the intersec-
tion of children’s literature, women and translation in hierarchial terms. If there is one common
denominator in these three areas, it is that they are all devalued and pushed to the margins. In
Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) terms, they become ‘Other’ and end up in a secondary position in
literary and social systems: adult literature over children’s literature, men’s writing over women’s
writing, source text over translation. From a game-changing feminist standpoint, this chapter aims
to make these three others visible, and more importantly, to elaborate on how translation and
feminism can be brought into close dialogue with children’s literature.
This chapter starts with a discussion of children’s literature and its relation to gender and
feminism; it consists of five sections: (1) historical origins and current perspectives, reflecting on
the history of feminist criticism in children’s literature; (2) feminist adaptations, shedding light
on experimental feminist adaptation strategies, trends and theories on gender and translation; (3)
criticisms of feminist adaptations, and feminist pedagogy, exploring the critiques of adaptations
and subversions as well as the importance of feminist pedagogy; (4) current contributions and
research, narrating gender and feminism in the translation of children’s literature in different
contexts; (5) research methods in analyzing translations of feminist children’s literature, discussing
possible research procedures in examining translations of this genre. This contribution concludes
with ‘future directions’ where the trajectory of the subject is opened up for discussion. In an
attempt at inclusivity and pluralism, this chapter will refer to the many shades of feminist under-
standings of gender in children’s literature and its translation in different contexts in the world.
The aim of this section is not to give fixed and abiding definitions but instead, to reflect
on the possible definitions and nature(s) of feminist children’s literature. Children’s literature
is generally identified by different criteria: by categorization based on age groups and genre;
by its purpose to be written ‘for’ children or ‘by’ children’ (Lesnik-Oberstein 2005, 15), or
read by children (Oittinen 2000, 61), or adapted for children (O’Sullivan 2005, 13). The con-
cepts of feminism and gender, and their relation to children’s literature are assigned different
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Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation
interpretations by different scholars and these differences complicate any attempt at a rigid
definition of feminist children’s literature. In the simplest terms, feminist children’s literature is
a literature for children informed by a feminist perspective. It has been defined as a newborn
literature “for free children” (McDowell 1977) or a “triumphal” one that uses a protagonist who
“is empowered regardless of gender” and overcomes patriarchal oppression (Trites 1997, 3–4).
It is about the feminist autonomy and ideology of the characters behind the actions, not about
their female sexual identity. Feminist protagonists, like Pippi Longstocking, are not silenced
characters; instead, they fulfill their inner potential: they are liberated, outspoken, and in every
feminist way, they prove their woman-self: a self-awakened, self-realized, and self-made woman.
Historical origins and current perspectives

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) is commonly considered to be the first British children’s book
published in England. This book opens with two letters: one addressed to boys – ‘Little Master
Tommy’ – and the other addressed to girls – ‘Pretty Miss Polly’. Many such books were targeted
at boys or girls, with adventure stories for boys, domestic and family stories for girls. Children’s
literature in the 18th and 19th centuries peddled stereotyped gender roles. Snow White (1812)
and The Little Mermaid (1837) are among the best known of this kind of gendered children’s
literature in which the feminine ideal is generally passive, weak and submissive.
Feminist readings of children’s literature have revealed several critical issues and topics: (1) first
and foremost the need to address conventional gender stereotypes; (2) the need for feminist adap-
tations, subversions and retellings; (3) the need to develop new forms of language, new voices and
subjectivities; (4) the need to break taboos on such topics as women’s sexuality and gender-based
violence; and (5) the need for feminist pedagogy in children’s literature and its translation.
It all started with fairy tales, and feminist criticisms of stereotypical gender roles in such classic
fairy tales as Cinderella (1697), Snow White (1812) and Sleeping Beauty (1917). Numerous scholars
in different contexts (Zipes 2012a; Sezer 2010; Lieberman 2012; Rowe 2012; Dworkin 1974)
have pointed out with considerable consistency that these traditional fairy tales display rigid fem-
inine and masculine roles. Other scholars ( Jabeen and Mehmood 2014; Nilsen 1971; Scott 1981;
Muhlen et al. 2012; Kortenhaus and Demarest 1993) have shown that besides fairy tales, gender
clichés have also appeared in subgenres of children’s literature such as picture books. These
‘socially desirable’ gender clichés are listed in detail in John Stephens’ schema (1996, 18–19)
where masculinity comes with the characteristics of being strong, aggressive, unemotional, active,
protective and rational while femininity is related to being beautiful, submissive, emotional, pas-
sive, vulnerable and intuitive. Womanhood is associated with marriage, motherhood and the
domestic sphere whereas manhood runs wild with autonomy and courage in the public sphere.
Female characters take the back seat while male characters drive the plot of the books. Jack
Zipes (2012a, 15, 33) defines these classic fairy tales as sexist works that reflect “atavistic forms
and ideas.” For Marcia R. Lieberman (2012, 185), these fairy tales “serve to acculturate women
to traditional social roles.” For Karen E. Rowe (2012, 209, emphasis in original) they “perpetuate
the patriarchal status quo by making female subordination seem romantically desirable.”
Feminist adaptations
Feminist thought began to have an effect on children’s literature in the late 20th century, with
the work of Kate Millett (1970) introducing feminist criticism into the realm of English-
language children’s literature. The book, The Paper Bag Princess (1980), echoes the ideas in her
Sexual Politics (1970), and criticises the patriarchally defined concept of beauty and sexuality
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Handegül Demirhan
with the main character rejecting the dress of a conventional, fancy princess, and instead, wear-
ing an unfancy paper bag. This accelerated questions about the representation of gender in
children’s literature for the patriarchal messages it incorporated and the influences these might
have on the female subject. The consciousness-raising agenda of feminist groups during this
period reverberated in the adaptation of children’s literature, subverting old stories, creating new
versions, and rewriting on a massive scale with Jack Zipes describing this sea-change from tradi-
tional to contemporary/feminist views as a transformation from a submissive woman to an awak-
ened and emancipated one. “Created out of dissatisfaction with the dominant male discourse
of traditional fairy tales” says Zipes, the feminist fairy tale offers an “alternative aesthetic terrain
for the fairy tale genre,” “conceives a different view of the world and speaks in a voice that has
been customarily silenced” (Zipes 2012a, xi, my emphasis, 2012b, xi). Some feminist collections
are of particular importance: Ethel Phelps’ The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around
the World (1981), Alison Lurie’s Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980) and Melek
Sezer’s (2010) analysis of an Anatolian folk tale, “Müskürümü Sultan,” where female protagonists
choose their partners, create their desired men in a godlike manner, and have authority over
their fathers and husbands, basically over patriarchy.
Zipes (2012a, 6–7) states that Cinderella was never a passive character until Charles Perrault
(1977) transformed her image “into a passive and obedient young woman” in the late 17th cen-
tury, and his version led to “dainty and prudish Cinderellas [including Grimm’s version] en masse
in the nineteenth century.” Then he lists some of the experimental feminist fairy tales in the
American and British context: Jane Yolen’s Sleeping Ugly (1981), Angela Carter’s The Donkey
Prince (1970), and Transformations (1971) by Anne Sexton. Zipes reviews contemporary feminist
fairy tales that revoke traditional gender roles and make readers think about gender and power
from a feminist viewpoint.
One of the trends in feminist approaches to children’s literature has been to make visible
women authors and écriture (d’enfant) féminine lost in history. In this respect, Louisa May Alcott
and Maria Edgeworth are two of the more prominent 19th-century authors who emerged
from obscurity and became visible. Throughout the 20th century, gender-liberated characters in
different contexts came to the fore, gradually increasing in number, and reaching a peak in the
early 21st century. Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (2014), Annie’s Plaid Shirt (2015) and
Reaching the Stars: Poems about Extraordinary Women & Girls (2017) are among such remarkable
feminist children’s stories and poems.
As for the adaptation and translation of children’s literature, it is relevant to reflect on the
main ideas revolving around gender and translation. The studies on the intersection of gender
and translation have been compiled by Pilar Godayol (2013) and can be summarized briefly as
viewing feminist translation and adaptation as a process that seeks to counteract conventional,
institutionalised language – an instrument that serves for the oppression of women – and develop
new solutions as well as “a new language for women,” (Flotow 1997, 14–15), for example, in the
creation of feminist puns, neologisms and spellings. These feminist inventions are echoed in transla-
tions, particularly in translations based on patriarchal source texts and gendered languages. Experimental
feminist translation strategies have also come into existence: translating the body, sexuality, puns,
grammatical gendered pronouns (Flotow 1997, 17–23) and complementing source texts with
prefaces, footnotes (Godard 1988) as well as personal statements, interviews and articles. All
strategies have one objective: to make the feminine visible. “[M]aking women seen and heard in
the real world” is “what feminism is all about” (De Lotbinière-Harwood 1989, 9). Seeking out
feminist texts whether they are prominent or unknown, and translating the works of feminists,
women writers and scholars is only one aspect of feminist translation. Another aspect is the
translator’s feminist intervention in patriarchal and androcentric texts. Whether it is the feminist
530
translation of a feminist source text or the feminist translation of an anti-feminist source text, as
long as the end product, in this case the translation, is inflected by feminism, it can be defined
as a feminist translation. Thus, a feminist translator dis-covers, reveals and intervenes, using her/
his feminist lens.
In Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism,’ Luise von Flotow (1997, 1)
speaks of translation as “a cultural transfer.” Translation transfers and communicates feminisms.
Flotow (1997, 86) states that “the effect of learning to be a woman” is felt in every society, even
though “it will mean something different in every society.” She emphasises the unlikeliness of
full feminist unity and labels the differences among women in terms of race, ethnic background
and religion as a “truth.” This truth is revealed through translation. Similarly, the translation of
children’s literature “provides a glimpse into the experiences and way of life of children from
different parts of the world” (Zaghini 2005, 22). In light of these ideas and Lissa Paul’s statement
that “all women once were children” (1990, 149–150), feminist children’s literature and its trans-
lation is a prolific ground upon which one can instill gender awareness in children, for them as
future women and men, and also communicate feminist notions across cultures since these texts
are developed in a particular feminist and cultural contexts.
One of the most likely ways to apply some of these ideas to the translation and adaptation of
children’s literature is by unearthing feminist children’s literature that presents unconventional
female characters and making this available in other languages. However, academic research
(Kwok 2016; Lathey 2015) points to the normative nature of children’s literature and its transla-
tion; it is a literature that functions within the prescribed walls of what is deemed suitable for
children in a certain place at a certain time and is surrounded by gatekeepers (teachers, pub-
lishers, translators, parents) who decide on behalf of children. While Zohar Shavit (1981, 172)
states that translators can take liberties if they “adjust the text in order to make it appropriate
and useful to the child, in accordance to guiding principles with what society thinks is ‘good for
the child’,” these liberties are still circumscribed by their own understanding of childhood and
literature which is closely related to their own education, culture and values.
Postmodern feminist criticisms and adaptations of children’s literature have gone a step fur-
ther and begun developing a new language, voice and subjectivity in terms of gender. In Waking
Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (1997), Roberta Trites links the power of
language, vocalization, metaphors, and narrativity to the subjectivity of the feminist protagonist.
The feminist children’s Künstlerroman can be considered a good example of this link: it is a nar-
rative that usually has a female protagonist who develops her agency in line with her writing,
and therefore her subjectivity and her voice, as well as her writing and her language, are inter-
related and sometimes become one. Harriet the Spy (1964) and Martha Quest (1952) are early
examples of this genre.
Feminist pedagogy has also had its effect on adaptations and rewritings of children’s litera-
ture, especially with regard to sexuality and gender-based violence. Historically, the moral and
didactic function of children’s literature and its translation caused authors to abstain from explicit
representations of women’s sexuality and gender-based violence since children’s literature is
grounded on the unspoken belief that children are naive and innocent beings who should be
shielded from these inappropriate representations. Nevertheless, studies show that these unli-
censed areas are implicitly violated in many children’s books. In The Trials and Tribulations of Lit-
tle Red Riding Hood (1994), Zipes analyzes more than 30 versions of Red Riding Hood and reveals
how sexuality and violence can be subtly reflected in such popular children’s literature. Jacque-
line Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) also touches on
adults’ value judgments about sexuality and innocence as well as adult control over children’s
fiction. Ethical questions about what is good for the child reader can hide subtle references to
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Handegül Demirhan
sexuality and violence. The following books are of particular significance in the discussion of
sexual orientation and identity: Kimberley Reynolds’ Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions
and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (2007) and Kerry Mallan’s Gender Dilemmas in
Children’s Fiction (2009), and Mallan (2009) speaks of the feminist Bildungsroman particularly
focusing on sexual identity, desire and subjectivity. In addition, Laura Mattoon D’Amore (2017)
analyzes the revisions of the American fairy tales that narrate “vigilante feminists,” a female
character who has the duty to protect herself and other women against physical violence such
as abduction and sexual abuse.
Criticisms of feminist adaptations and feminist pedagogy

Feminist adaptations, subversions and retellings of fairy tales that reverse feminine and masculine
gender roles have been subject to numerous academic studies, not all of them positive. Some
criticisms (Stephens 1996; Paul 2005; Mallan 2009; Kuykendal and Sturm 2007; Trites 1997)
assert that these feminist works replicate binary notions of gender by simply attributing mascu-
line gender roles to female characters. They maintain gender normativity where androgyny and
tomboyishness are just another form of genderism. Lissa Paul (2005), for example, argues that
gender switching does not move texts or images beyond the conservative gender agenda but
maintains the female/male hierarchy. In a similar vein, Kerry Mallan (2009) labels this gender
dichotomy a “dilemma” and such replication a “failed performance.” This is viewed as a retro-
spective tendency: such ‘would-be’ subversions still seem to see activity, strength and rationality
as masculine competencies and any strong female character just becomes a replica. Thus, they
subscribe to gender tagging. However, recent work on the reception of feminist themes in chil-
dren’s literature in African contexts seems to have a different view of the matter: Emily R. Zinn
(2000), for example, reflects on the change in the reception of fairy tales and feminism in pre-
and post-apartheid era in the South African context. Feminist themes and fairy tales are more
positively welcomed in the new South Africa and it seems that the subversion of stereotypes and
the attribution of male characteristics to female characters may work well in children’s imagina-
tions. Pierre Canisius Ruterana (2012), also writing about the African context, argues that both
female and male children respond positively to the unconventional, tomboyish female protago-
nist in the feminist fairy tale of Ndabaga. And finally, Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches
(Haase 2004) examines feminism in fairy tales in multiple cultural contexts such as Iberia, Latin
America, Africa and South Asia.
In the Anglo-American/European context of Cinderella, Karlyn Crowley and John Penning-
ton (2010, 311) emphasise the importance of “thinking gender and form anew” and producing
“feminist fraud” that stands on its own feet. Their argument is supported by John Stephens
(1996): feminist children’s literature can offer new, positive gender images, and protagonists,
freed of binary gender roles, can gain agency through their autonomy. Roberta Seelinger Trites
(1997, 6, my emphasis) states that “the feminist protagonist need not squelch her individuality in
order to fit into society, [i]nstead, her agency, her individuality, her choice, and her nonconform-
ity are affirmed and even celebrated.” However, in her focus on genders and sexual orientations,
Elizabeth Marshall (2004) views the feminist rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood as presenting
fixed paradigms of gender that hinge on “white, Western, middle class, heterosexual notions”
(Marshall 2004, 260).
Children’s literature has almost always had a didactic aspect, and feminist pedagogy can be the
core of feminist children’s literature and of its translation such as adaptation, rewriting and inter-
pretation. These narratives can be training manuals for children and help raise their consciousness
about multiple feminisms, sexual politics and many other issues affecting women. However,
532
such pedagogical objectives clash with the mainstream understanding of innocence in children’s
literature, and are seen to compromise the so-called naive and innocent nature of children’s lit-
erature. Further, differences in sociocultural values about children’s literature and feminism can
complicate but also nourish translational feminist dialogues in the context of children’s literature.
When issues from other cultures are added to the mainstream ‘Western’ struggles over patriar-
chy, social and political questions – issues such as class/caste, religion and ethnicity, or practices
such as genital mutilation – then the translation and reception of children’s literature becomes
a more complicated area. Not only does every adaptation or translation involve specific views
of childhood, it also mobilises issues around the politics and ideology of language, and differ-
ent ethical concerns, diverse taboos and the needs of the child readers. Still, the translation of
feminist children’s literature may contribute to the international dialogue between feminisms
and childhoods. It may help children of the world to step out of their local circles and travel to
other cultures’ realities. By virtue of the many shades of feminist translation such as adaptations,
rewritings and retellings, children can surely travel across cultures and be confronted with differ-
ent feminist perspectives. The question is, however, how likely such travels may be?

Context-specific research on gender in the translation of children’s literature is beginning to
appear. In China, Mingming Yuan (2016) analyzes the portrayal of gender in the first Chinese
translation of Peter Pan (Barrie 1929) which she discusses in light of the significant role the target
culture plays in translational decisions. Yuan finds that Peter Pan, the boy, becomes a gender-
less character in the Chinese translation. Other characters in children’s books are also gender
neutralised in Chinese translation which, she explains, pertains to both the understanding of
childhood and the development of feminism in China during this period. Wing Bo Tso’s study
(2011) provides another complex example of this kind. It finds that the Chinese translation of
Northern Lights (2002) sends mixed signals about gender: it creates both gender-free portrayals
and gender stereotypes. One example refers to Buddhism, where Guan Yin is a prophet who
can “take on any gender and form to save beings” (Tso 2011, 127); this implies a representation
of beyondness and ever-changing perceptions of the body. On the other hand, Pan, one of the
children’s daemons, is a male and has a fixed gender identity. Although the Chinese translator
kept the overall genderlessness of Guan Yin as it is in the source text, s/he preferred to use dif-
ferent gender pronouns such as ‘he’ or ‘it’ for Pan referring to this character as a boy (he) and an
object (it), which is not the case in the source text. This ambivalence, created by the translation,
stems from the mixing of cultural and ideological perspectives in China that derive from both
Confucian teaching and Buddhist notions of gender.
In Turkey, A Game of Genders: The Development of Translated Feminist Children’s Literature in
21st Century Turkey (Demirhan 2017) is at the intersection of feminist understandings of gender,
translation and children’s literature. It traces the development of translated feminist children’s
literature (TFCL) imported from Swedish, Spanish and Canadian source texts into 21st-century
Turkey and reflects on the sociocultural and ideological aspects of this phenomenon. It also
analyzes translation policies and ideologies of relevant publishers, and explores how publishers’
activist policies and feminist ideologies have led them to seek out resources in feminist children’s
literature from other cultures, eventually paving the way for the development of TFCL in the
local repertoire, where Western and Middle Eastern feminisms are intertwined. Even though
translations have revealed some frictions between feminisms, TFCL has contributed to the for-
mation of local feminist children’s literature in Turkey, showing once again, how feminisms can
nourish each other while maintaining a certain difference: for instance, feminism in Turkey may
533
Handegül Demirhan
be influenced by the West, but the translation of references to human bodies and their sexual-
ity is softened in some of the translations (Demirhan 2017). Still, soon after the importation of
TFCL into Turkey, independent publishers started to publish their own feminist children’s lit-
erature about extraordinary women in local history, thus holding on to local cultural values while
incorporating in-coming feminisms (Demirhan 2017).
“We are not there yet,” says bell hooks (2015, 9), “[b]ut this is what we must do to share femi-
nism, to let the movement into everyone’s mind and heart”: translate every possible example of
feminist children’s literature to other cultures and share feminist ideas.
Research methods in analyzing translations

of feminist children’s literature
There is much work to be done on the interlingual translations of feminist children’s literature,
and research methods can be diverse: for instance, in The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature,
Christine Wilkie-Stibbs (2002) applies French feminist theories in analyzing the feminine in
children’s literature. Textual and paratextual analyses, comparative study on cultural and socio-
logical aspects of feminism, and evaluations/explorations of the contexts of publishing, dissemi-
nation and reception can serve in understanding translations of children’s books. Integrating
macro-level research methods such as systemic frameworks and sociocultural models can also
be effective in understanding why a particular feminist children’s literature is translated in a
particular culture at a particular time.
Some researchers (Weitzman et al. 1972; Hamilton et al. 2007; Lynch 2016) have applied
quantitative methods to analyze gender in children’s literature. This method primarily focuses
on the statistical and numerical analysis of appearance and frequency of gender roles as well as
the analysis of gender equality. Analyzing the textual and pictoral content of award-winning
children’s books is one of the most common current research techniques. Whereas Peter B.
Crabb and Dawn Bielawski (1994) analyze gender-related illustrations and certain gender mark-
ers such as toys and clothing in Caldecott Award winning children’s books between 1937–1989,
Stuart Oskamp et al. (1996) focus on Caldecott Children’s Books between 1986–1991. There
have been many studies – in Anglo-American circles – of the books that have won awards from
associations such as the Caldecott Medal Books, Newbery Medal Books, and the National Book
Foundation for Children and Youth since they are widely ordered by schools and libraries as
well as by adults who follow these lists closely. These research methods can also be applied to
children’s books in other languages and cultures and to the translations of award-winning chil-
dren’s books, by analyzing them in the light of their source texts.
Qualitative research methods explore gender and feminist issues related to identity, agency
and voice in children’s literature. One such technique investigates the minds of children by
cognitive research methods (Connor and Serbin 1978; Jackson 2007) focusing on children’s
responses to gender and feminism in the books they read, while other work (Peterson and Lach
1990) centres on the effects of gender-motivated children’s literature on psycho-affective, cogni-
tive and gender development in children. One fruitful example is Kimberley Reynolds’ applica-
tion (1990) of feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to understand the impact of Victorian
children’s literature on the construction of gender. The study found that gender construction
in children is closely related to the different ways in which girls and boys are addressed in chil-
dren’s books as well as the gap between the expectations of adults and the needs of children in
children’s literature.
In more technical approaches, eye-tracking techniques can be used when the focus is on
children’s responses to illustrations. Tracking eye positions and movements of children who
534
look at illustrations, and measuring the targets, duration and frequency (to see on which images
and how long their eyes stop) can yield eye-opening outcomes about the reception of feminist
children’s literature and its translations.
And most recently, a psychoanalytic research method, employing feminist, queer approaches
(Earles 2017) to analyze how young readers engage with narratives in regard to gender con-
struction and agency has been noted in the domain of feminist children’s literature.
Future directions
Starting from the ‘othering’ of children’s literature, translation, and feminism, this chapter has
examined the intersection of these three areas. It can be said that examples of children’s
literature based on introducing strong female characters, subverting gender stereotypes and
twisting the conventional plot with its happy ending have become more inclusive and mul-
tifeminist, challenging hegemonic perceptions of femininity and sexuality, declaring war on
patriarchy by questioning the notion of women’s identity in every possible way regardless of
gender and independent of sex, manifesting and celebrating the empowerment of women,
their agency and their independence in their own cultural backgrounds. It is splendid to see
the development of this passionate literature and of relevant studies; however, there may still
be much to do.
More (translated) children’s books that reflect multicultural feminist thought are needed,
particularly books that are informative and tell the history of feminisms, the feminism of women
of colour, existential feminism and/or ecofeminism in different contexts. The difference and
polyphony in feminism, the unique arguments this diverse movement presents, can be told
to children in their literature and language. Besides some newly developing feminist agendas
(postcolonial feminism, third world feminism, middle eastern feminism) in children’s literature
and its translation, lesbian and queer feminism as well as other forms of feminism could find
their way into the field and engage with it. The representation of diverse, unconventional non-
nuclear families in texts could also be increased. Most importantly, it would be useful to have
the local literatures travel to other destinations via translation in order to not confine children
to a restricted knowledge of gender but to broaden their understanding of feminism. Apart
from translating feminist children’s literature to other languages, more research on translation
strategies, translation criticism and translation theory could prove fruitful for nourishing inter-
disciplinary and intercultural studies.
Gender studies, translation studies, and children’s literature studies benefit from working
together. For instance, scholars working on the subject of feminist fairy tales may be interested
in examining some works in light of translation and adaptation studies, in which case the analysis
of the complex production that is translation/adaptation can further broaden their work. Since
second wave feminism inspired feminist literary criticism in children’s literature and its transla-
tion, the field has come a long way and is still branching out into many directions which can be
organised in three lines of study: historical, intracultural and intercultural, and which includes
reception and pedagogical studies.
First, historical studies: even though there have been many studies on award-winning chil-
dren’s books, research could also be directed at more recently listed books, offering an updated
insight into the feminist as well as patriarchal content of children’s books and their translations.
Apart from textual and paratextual analyses, contextual research is quintessential for the history
of (translated) feminist children’s literature studies and social theorization of gender within that
history. The sociocultural aspects of the emergence of these translations in a particular culture at
a particular time deserve analysis. Tracing the emergence of feminist children’s literature and its
535
Handegül Demirhan
translation in specific cultural contexts may help develop more historical data in the field. The
topic is relatively recent, and therefore open to much more exploration.
Second, intracultural and intercultural studies: this field considers how the concepts of gen-
der, feminism, translation and childhood relate to each other in a particular culture. Research on
the interaction of these concepts in the ‘intra’ or same-language zone can be fruitful, while the
intercultural relationships between these same concepts provide interesting approaches to ‘other
cultures.’ The questions that may arise include: can Western feminism be transferred to other
cultures and texts, and if so, how are these concepts perceived by target cultures and readers?
Third, reception and pedagogical studies might examine the impact of imported gender ideas
and concepts on the local literary and social contexts. More research on the reception of trans-
lated feminist children’s literature may be needed and could be carried out via questionaires,
interviews, focus groups both for adults as gatekeepers and for children as readers. In a domino
effect, this might raise another question: how do the translations of feminist children’s literature
influence children’s behaviours and their understanding of gender? Reflections on how young
readers transfer feminist notions into their social life can provide more insight on the relation-
ship between (translated) children’s literature and feminist pedagogy. Alliances between cultures,
languages and feminist thinking can be effective in raising gender awareness, like sharing a com-
mitment to the power of translation in building the perception of gender and raising feminist
consciousness. Feminist alliances and commitments may further develop from such research.
The dialogue between children’s literature, feminism and translation offers infinite possibili-
ties to make these areas visible. To provide a blueprint for the future, let the children sail in the
feminist soul of children’s literature and its translation.
Further reading
Clark, Beverly Lyon and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds. 1999. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s
Literature and Culture. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
This collection brings together various scholars who write about the intersection of feminism, chil-
dren’s literature and culture. With a contemporary stance, it not only offers a history of these intersect-
ing areas, but also guides readers for future research interests.
Mallan, Kerry. 2009. Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This study emphasises multiple dilemmas related to gender and sexuality in children’s literature: beauty
dilemmas, identity dilemmas and other dilemmas caused by the binarised notion of gender. Referring
to Judith Butler’s understanding of gender, the book emphasises numerous and unfixed ways of rethink-
ing the concept.
York: Routledge.
This study is a fundamental work on the intersection of feminism, translation theory and practice. It also
focuses on cultural studies in translation.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 1997. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: Uni-
versity of Iowa Press.
This book is a good start for scholars beginning their voyage in feminist literary studies in children’s lit-
erature. It presents several examples of the feminist children’s literature and investigates feminist voices,
subjectivity and narrative structures.
Related topics
Gender and translation, feminism in children’s literature, feminist translation of children’s litera-
ture, translation of feminist children’s literature
536
Note
* This chapter uses the word ‘translation’ as an umbrella term for different translated versions such as adap-
tations, subversions, retellings, and rewritings.
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Epilogue
41
Recognition, risk,
and relationships
Feminism and translation as modes
of embodied engagement
Beverley Curran
Far from being discrete strands found within translation, feminism and gender run through
every aspect. Translation, feminism and gender share complex histories that incorporate differ-
ent cultural contexts and historical moments, informing and inflecting each other. In my own
case, as a teacher of translation I bring an eclectic range of touchstone texts that inform my
teaching of translation as a mode of embodied engagement; they include Kate Millet’s critical
reading of Henry Miller in Sexual Politics (1970); Adrienne Rich’s notion of the lesbian con-
tinuum in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1981); bell hooks’ sustained
belief that feminism is for everybody (2000); Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve
Kosovsky Sedgewick’s “Queer Performativity” (1993); the eco-mythic feminism in the works
of Ishimure Michiko; and just about anything by Nicole Brossard or Daphne Marlatt. I cultivate
the enjoyment of this pulsion that gives us agency to engage with a text, and through translation
imagine new relationships with memory and history; language and its meanings; and each other.
Teaching translation as a process and a practice, as performative and productive, raises aware-
ness of translation as a way to understand change in terms of relationships. The application of
the critical strategies of foregrounding and recognition also draw attention to the importance
of the consequences of choice, and the anticipated or unintended effects of reading, writing,
and translation. Translation takes time, requiring us to slow down and spend time with a text
to explore meaning and relationships; to swim with the words, as Nicole Brossard has described
it, allowing sensation to be translated into emotion, and to get a sense of circulating currents.
Recognition in translation is grounded in the attention paid by feminists, queer theorists, and
others, to what has been relegated to the background or left off the record through occlusion,
absence, and assumption. It challenges us to question our assumptions, look carefully into the
context of a text and attend to what is there and what may need to be imagined. Awareness of
the importance of translation as a significant cultural practice is a way to understand change.
The texts we use in the translation classroom also draw attention to the value of taking risks
and approaching translation as an experimental writing practice which can benefit from col-
laborations among translators, with readers, and multiple media in the making of meaning. In
the process of cultivating translation awareness through engaged practice, we see a deepening in
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Beverley Curran
the relationships we have with the texts we translate and the effects they can have in the world
in which they circulate.
This chapter discusses teaching translation awareness at an international bilingual (English
and Japanese) university in Tokyo where many students are interested in the link between their
linguistic and cultural identities and how they can be explored through translation practice that
includes a range of texts. Translation takes place in and out of Japanese in the classroom, but this
discussion will confine itself primarily to English translations of Japanese hybrid cultural pro-
ductions, namely Otouto no otto [My Brother’s Husband] (2015), a manga by Tagame Gengoroh;
Sora no Ito [The Thread of the Sky] (2016), Yada Eriko’s manga on environmental pollution;
and Minamata umi no koe [Minamata the voices of the sea] (1982), a memory picture book by
Ishimure Michiko, which all encourage students to experience translation as a mode of embod-
ied engagement that helps us imagine change and recognize the power of performativity, “the
power language has to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects” (Butler
2015, 28), both intended and unanticipated.
Choices and consequences: translation effects

In L’Amèr ou le chapitre effrité (1977) [These Our Mothers, or, The disintegrating chapter (1983),
translated by Barbara Godard], a work of fiction theory, Nicole Brossard wrote, “Écrire je suis
une femme est plein de consequences” [To write: I am a woman is heavy with consequences]
(53/45). This is perhaps a useful departure point for approaching any translation in order to
recognize the politics of the practice. Attention to choices and their consequences, intended and
otherwise, places weight on making informed decisions. Translators are asked to be flexible and
consider translation in terms of its possibilities. In teaching translation for professional purposes,
the learner is encouraged to recognize her linguistic strengths and translate into her ‘stronger’
language. In teaching translation awareness, it is important to translate in different directions to
feel the power shift and the different relationships that form in representing others in our own
language and ourselves in another language – or medium. Paying close attention to the words
chosen in our practice of translation alerts us to the need to pay close attention to language
generally, its effects and to whom it is addressed. As Clem Robyns (1994) has pointed out, the
way we treat texts and their discursive migration in translation is an indication of the attitudes
we bring to encounters with other people and new ideas. Translation is a chance to reassess our
approaches and change them.
Sometimes, we simply have to recognize that we have choices in translation; that what seems
inevitable or proscribed by precedents can be resisted and affected by re-readings and responses.
Feminist projects have often begun by looking for what has been left off the record or underval-
ued, but revisiting feminist thinking has been crucial to identifying its enduring strengths as well
as addressing blind spots. The translation strategy of recognition is a self-conscious one, which
makes the translator think about what she brings to the text; how the text signifies beyond the
words “on the page;” and the need for collaboration in terms of discussion and research. This
is not easy, because as with humour or irony, what we do not recognize isn’t there. However, in
teaching translation, we can start with the material text to raise the visibility of the importance
of the knowledge we must bring with us to ethically translate a text. For example, I like to use
Mizumura Minae’s example of the Japanese translation of Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “A rose
is a rose is a rose,” to consider translation choices and the possible effects of these choices.
Mizumura is not without her own blind spots about Japanese. In “On Translation” (2003),
she begins with the claim that Japanese “has no relation to Chinese,” but of course, Chinese
characters are one of the multiple writing systems Japanese employs; so there is a relationship
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Recognition, risk, and relationships
that seems to have gone unacknowledged, even though Mizumura identifies these “ideograms
(Chinese characters)” and two phonetic sign systems, which “coexist within any Japanese text”:
Ideograms are usually used for nouns and verbs, and may always be replaced with either
of the phonetic signs. Of the two phonetic signs, the more frequently used sign, hiragana,
best represents the vernacular language, whereas the other, katakana, gives the impression
of being more blatantly phonetic, and is thus often reserved for imported foreign words.
The word bara, meaning rose, therefore may be written three ways: 薔薇、ばら、or バラ.
Mizumura proceeds to give examples of five translations of how “a famous American poem A
rose is a rose is a rose” might be translated. All are phonetically identical (bara wa bara wa bara de
aru) but one is rendered in predominantly kanji (Chinese characters), one in hiragana; one in
katakana with hiragana markers; one entirely in katakana; and one which uses a mix of writing
systems:
A 薔薇は薔薇は薔薇である
B ばらはばらはばらである
C バラはバラはバラである Or,
D バラハバラハバラでアル Or even,
E 薔薇はばらはバラである
While all these translations sound the same, they look very different and have different effects
depending on how the translator chooses to render them in writing. The kanji characters are
visually complex and also appear very precise and concise, containing meaning. The phonetic
writing systems leave more space for the reader to imagine her own rose. The hiragana is
rounded. The katakana is more angular and marks the text as an import. The mix of writing
systems is an indication of the diversity of ways to translate. Mizumura prefers the hiragana trans-
lation (B) because it appears to her as “the simplest and yet, the most confounding.” The suit-
ability of this particular translation is likely connected to the translator’s awareness of Stein’s style.
Bringing this simple but confounding line to my students’ attention is often their first
encounter with Gertrude Stein. I once asked if anyone in the class knew who she was without
checking their phones. Someone thought she was the editor of Ms magazine. Misidentifica-
tion, but in the slippage a meaningful relationship, still appears between Stein and Gloria Stei-
nem. Deliberate misspelling, such as “grrl,” which “would overwrite the earlier feminist creation
‘womyn’ ” (Case 1997, 641), has been a way to take control of language, but inadvertent slippage
can also be important by initiating unexpected associations: this is how students can experience
performativity at work, even if they might be confounded by its theorization in Judith Butler
when she talks about the moments that afford an opening to recognize the regulatory discourse,
or destiny script, that shapes us:
When that field of norms breaks open, even if provisionally, we see that the animating aims
of a regulatory discourse, as it is enacted bodily, gives rise to consequences that are not
always foreseen, making room for ways of living gender that challenge prevailing norms of
recognition.
(Butler 2015, 31)
There is play at work in translation, as well, which makes space for multiple meanings to operate
together. Stein was playfully and seriously suggesting the power of iteration: “A rose is a rose is
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a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples” (As
Fine as Melanctha). The line continues to bloom in Japanese in different ways and with different
effects. Student translations extend the line in ways that are ‘excellent examples’ of the possibili-
ties that can become apparent in translation:
バラはバラでということはつまりやっぱりバラはバラでということでバラはバラ
以外のなにものでもない。
[A] rose being a rose is called a rose, that is, as expected, a rose that is a rose is nothing but a rose.
Or,
ロースはバラ、バラ、バラだよ。
Rose is rose, rose, rose.
One translation speaks of the specificity of the rose; the other translation suggests roses all over
the place. Along with the employment of an informed, associative impulse in translation comes
a willingness to nudge or more assertively womanhandle a text towards a reader in what is cer-
tainly not a domesticating operation.
Choices made about writing systems in Japanese remind us that choices of font, upper- and
lower-case letters, and spacing are not to be taken for granted in other languages. The visual
and phonic elements of a textual translation are important to be aware of and to think about.
Otouto no otto [My Brother’s Husband]: circulating

cultural knowledge in translation
The reader has always been an important part of feminist writing, specifically, the woman
writer reaching out to a woman reading. In translation of feminist texts, women readers have
sought out women writers to translate, and collaboration among translator and writer, as well
as collaborative translation has been a way to make translation an ongoing and extended dia-
logue. Applying this in a classroom and across texts of all kinds means that readers have the
opportunity to be active and interactive with the text and its effects on their own ideas; in the
engagement with Tagame Gengoroh’s Otouto no otto and My Brother’s Husband, its English
translation by Anne Ishii, they can think specifically about translation, gender, and sexual
diversity, and how ideas travel in translation. The story is about the intercultural encounter
between the single father Yuichi and Mike, the Canadian husband of Yuichi’s deceased twin
brother, who comes to Japan and winds up staying with Yuichi and his daughter, Kana. This
examination looks back and forth between Tagame’s manga and Ishii’s translation to suggest
that there is no singular point of entry into a conversation with cultural productions. Further,
it looks at the currents of circulation and what happens when they shift directions through
translation.
In beginning to look at any translation it is useful to start with the paratext, a term used
by Gérard Genette to describe all the ways that a text is framed; whatever form a text takes, it
“rarely appears in its naked state, without the reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain
number of productions” (Genette 1991, 261), such as author’s name, title, or cover illustration,
which position it to persuade a potential reader to enter the text. Looking at the paratexts that
frame the Tagame manga and its English translation shows us the translation choices that go
beyond language to place a book in a market for consumption and remind us that cultural pro-
ductions are creative works and commodities.
A comparative look at the two covers of the first volume of Otouto no otto・My Brother’s Hus-
band (Figure 41.1) gives us a sense of the complex cultural position the manga and its translation
546
Image 41.1 Two covers of Otouto no otto – My Brother’s Husband
occupy. Except for the shift in writing systems, the front covers are identical; the translator’s
name does not appear on the cover of the English translation.
The cover art shows two men and a young girl; the man on the left wears a tshirt with a
pink triangle on it, which may or may not be meaningful to a viewer as the designation of a
male homosexual in Nazi Germany or a symbol of gay pride. Who is the brother? Who is the
husband? Is the girl the two men’s daughter or one of the men’s sisters? The relationships, like
the title, appear ambiguous. Recognition, what we know and what we don’t, has an important
impact on how we read the cover as much as how we read a text. As Genette points out, con-
cerning the reading of Proust’s Recherche:
[F]or most readers [the knowledge of] two biographical facts which are the half-Jewish
ancestry of Proust and his homosexuality [. . .] creates an inevitable paratext to the pages of
his work consecrated to these two subjects. I do not say that one must know it; I only say
that those who know it do not read in the same way as those who do not.
(Genette 1991, 266)
This is certainly true of Tagame, as well. Alison Bechdel writes in her backcover notes to the
English translation, “Renowned manga artist Gengoroh Tagame turns his stunning draftsman-
ship to a story very different from his customary fare, to delightful and heartwarming effect.”
Those readers who are fans or familiar with Tagame’s ‘customary fare’ will know that this manga
for all ages is the work of a master of homoerotic art – and a bear. These readers will certainly
read the manga in a different way from those who are not familiar with Tagame. Furthermore,
the cognoscenti are recognized by the Japanese publisher, who provides gratuitous “bonus”
images (called a “service cut”) on the inside cover for fan enjoyment (Figure 41.2).
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Beverley Curran
Image 41.2 Bonus images provided by the Japanese publisher
There are additional images on the inside cover of the English translation, as well, but they
have been replaced by bodies and play framed in a very different way (Figure 41.3).
In a translation which presents Tagame’s manga as “an unprecedented and heartbreaking
look at the state of a largely still-closeted Japanese gay culture” and “how it’s been affected by the
West,” we see in the covered-up, domesticated images of the inside cover “how the translated
text can be seen to register the influence of factors peculiar to a receiving culture” (Harvey 2000,
137). My Japanese students assumed that readers of the American English translation would be
well-informed about gay culture and sexual diversity. However, the apparent censorship in the
translation to keep the images of the ‘service cut’ from anglophone readers raised student aware-
ness of social anxiety in the ‘receiving culture’ evoked by the sexually suggestive imagery and
prompted the cut.
In addition to the ‘service cut’ images replaced in the translation, sections of the Japanese-
language manga called “Mike no gei karucha-kouza” [Mike’s Lecture on Gay Culture] were omit-
ted entirely. The series of brief lectures cover such topics as the recent history of same-sex
marriage laws; an explanation of the changing meaning of the pink triangle; pride flags; and the
meaning of ‘coming out.’ In class, students again took for granted that the information in these
lectures was already known by English speakers because of their familiarity with gay culture,
making their translation into English unnecessary. Translating these lectures from Japanese to
English changed their minds about the importance of including these lectures as part of the
manga because ‘global’ emblems of gay culture and discourse do not circulate unchanged. The
lectures then are not meant or meaningful only for Japanese readers. ‘Gay culture’ is neither
monolithic nor unchanging; kamingu auto [coming out] in Japanese does not mean the same as
coming out in English. Mike discusses the difficulty of translating ‘coming out’ into Japanese.
What takes place when kamingu auto is translated into English from Japanese?
548
Image 41.3 Additional images of the English translation
On the cover and in the story, we see Mike positioned as a proud and knowledgeable mem-
ber of a gay community, but his lectures look at diversity within that community as he intro-
duces the rainbow flag, along with symbols of the International Bear Brotherhood, leather,
and transgender pride. In Japan, this recognition of diversity is important because it challenges
the image of the cross-dressing queen installed on television as spectacle and entertainment.
Mike, on the other hand, as both foreigner (new arrival in Japan) and gay, enters into the home,
embodying ideas that confront Yaichi’s heteronormative assumptions of what it means to be
a brother, father, and man and force him to rethink them, especially when his daughter Kana’s
attitude to Mike is so different from his own. For example, when Mike explains to Kana that
he is her uncle because he was married to her father Yuichi’s brother, Kana is surprised for two
reasons: (1) that her father has a brother and (2) that two men can marry each other. When she
asks if the latter is possible, Mike and Yuichi answer at the same time; in the English translation
Mike says, ‘Yes, we can’ while Yuichi says, “No, they can’t.” When Kana asks for clarification, her
father explains that in Japan it is not allowed but men can marry in other countries. Kana looks
perplexed, and responds, “Hen na no,” which can be translated as “That’s strange.” Yaichi assumes
that Kana thinks men marrying each other is what she thinks is ‘strange’, but he is startled to
find that what she is referring to why it’s good for men to marry each other in one place and
no good somewhere else.
In a classroom, the texts we translate, and how we choose to translate them, draw attention
to our own cultural assumptions, no matter where we position ourselves in terms of gender or
politics. How do we interact with other cultures, with ideas or people that are new to us, with
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languages we do not know? Classroom discussions of the micro-features of translated texts and
how they are framed draw attention to the need for wide reading and open inquiry. As Mike’s
lectures on gay culture (and their omission in translation) suggest, a text cannot begin to be
explained without recourse to “larger cultural debates and to the concepts central to the (sub)
cultures from which they have issued and into which they re-emerge” (Harvey 2000, 159).
Translation effects are not unilateral; they affect relationships.
Risk and responsibility: extending the local

through translation awareness
Feminist thought and gender awareness can inflect the reading and translation of a range of texts.
They can be particularly effective when they are applied in a translation classroom to texts that
are not explicitly feminist or queer, but certainly are working at a skew with culturally dominant
ideas about the relationship between local and global; between gender and precarity; between
economic and environmental priorities; and all the versions of our bodies. Here is where trans-
lation awareness draws our attention to relationships between feminist or gendered translation
practice and the texts we choose to translate; feminist translation techniques can serve in any
text. Collaborative translations students undertook to translate the works of Yada Eriko and
Ishimure Michiko changed how they viewed translation, and their mutual and shared engage-
ment as translators changed their relationship to each other as well as to these stories of envi-
ronmental pollution; there was recognition of how translation can operate as a form of activism.
Sora no ito [The Thread of the Sky]

Sometimes a text signals its desire to be translated. In translating Yada Eriko’s manga Sora no Ito,
students were, as always, encouraged to approach the translation not just as a language exercise
or a classroom activity, but as a mode of engagement, which meant that they would engage
physically and emotionally as well as linguistically with the text they were translating in recogni-
tion of the fact that what we bring to the text is crucial to how we understand it and how we
translate it.
To begin, this meant learning about where the story came from. That is, before circulating
knowledge, a translator needs to know where the knowledge is coming from and how it was
produced. The site of the story told in Yada’s Sora no Ito is Yokkaichi in central Japan. In 1960, a
petrochemical complex was established there, which, as anticipated, brought regional prosperity.
However, its operation also brought unexpected effects, including a sudden and serious increase
in respiratory diseases due to the sulfuric oxides released into the atmosphere.
The students did not have much prior knowledge about the history of industrial pollution
in Japan. When shown a photograph of the Kombinat, the huge petrochemical plant and its
multitude of chimneys that expelled the sulphuric dioxides into the air, most students could
not identify the image. Again, what we do not recognize is read differently than what we do.
Translation is a discovery of how we read and what we need to know.
Recognition was important because the image of the Kombinat is found on the upper half
of the young girl’s body that dominates the monochromatic cover of Yada’s manga. The image
shows the young girl’s nose and mouth, but not her eyes, so we focus on the respiratory. The
young girl’s hair is blowing; the wind makes the air “visible” – and the smoke of the Kombinat
chimneys are carried by the wind, too, to the young girl’s lungs. The girl’s body, which domi-
nates the space of the cover, is the site of the story. As Judith Butler has observed, “the body
550
[– like translation and like theatre –] is less an entity than a living set of relations, the body can-
not be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and
acting” (2015, 64). The manga is not about ‘Yokkaichi kougai’ [industrial pollution]; it tells the
story of Naoko, a little girl who dies of asthma at the age of nine.
The title of the manga is 四日市公害マンガ　ソラノイト~ 少女をおそった灰色の
空〜[Yokkaichi kougai manga Sora no ito: shoujo wo osotta hai iro no sora・Yokkaichi envi-
ronmental manga Sora no ito [The Thread of the Sky]: the grey sky that struck the little girl]
(Figure 41.4). Students speculated on why Yada chose katakana for ソラノイト [sora no ito]
and how they might translate the title into English. In discussion they noticed the specificity
Image 41.4 Cover and title of Sora no ito
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Beverley Curran
of the kanji used in the title, and the way the use of characters established a relationship among
Yokkaichi pollution [四日市公害], the little girl [少女], and the grey sky [灰色の空]. On the
other hand, the phonetic script made the reader slow down to figure out what Sora no ito was;
the phonetic ambiguity invited participation in the construction of meaning. “Sora” appears
in katakana and in kanji. Students wondered if this told us that the manga artist was resisting a
single meaning?
Growing up in Yokkaichi, Yada considered the pollution problem a thing of the past because
that was how it had been presented at school. The Kombinat that she saw everyday was just
part of the scenery, a presence she took for granted. It was not because she lived there that Yada
became interested in Yokkaichi pollution issues. Recognition of its connection to her life came
through the mediation of a friend’s documentary. This role of mediation in recognizing the local
has also been noted by Butler: “locality is not denied by the fact that the scene is communicated
beyond itself and so constituted in global media; it depends on that mediation to take place as
the event that it is” (Butler 2015, 92). How the local circulates and how we can participate in
it is an important question in stories and performances of such site-specific events as industrial
pollution.
Sora no ito is for (young) people who are drawn to manga but do not yet realize the rela-
tionship between industrial pollution and their own lives. The student translators were part
of that intended readership. Reading the manga inspired the students in a number of ways: it
demonstrated the power of stories; the ethics of practice; and the importance of engagement. As
one student commented, “The manga is about something serious. I want to take my translation
seriously, too.”
Although the manga translation project was attractive to the students, they were surprised by
the challenges. Dialogue dominates the text in a manga, so attention must be paid to the range
of voices. Students realized that they had to consider tone, stress, and volume, as well as what
was not said. The importance of voices became even more emphatic when Yada visited the
class as they began their translation work to answer questions. The manga uses Mie-ben, a local
language, in order to show that the location of Yokkaichi was an important part of the story;
all the sites of major industrial pollution have been situated in the background of the national
consciousness. When Yada said dialect was important, students started to worry: how could
they represent the Mie dialect in English? Was it possible to use a rural dialect of the American
south? In fact, they came to realize that the importance of this story as local meant that the story
resisted translation. The students began to look for characteristics of Mie-ben – pronouns, end-
ings, vocabulary – that would not be translated, that would mark the story in English translation
not just as a Japanese manga, but a Yokkaichi manga. At the same time, Yada’s decision to write
the dialogue from left-to-right instead of vertical, as well as the katakana title were explicit sig-
nals that the manga was inviting English translation and new readers.
The interlingual translation of Sora no ito was followed by an intersemiotic translation project,
which had students translate the story into another medium for the purpose of performance.
These were creative transformances, as conceptualized by feminist translators and scholars
involved in Tessera (1989) “where various translators work with, understand and perform the
same text differently” (Flotow 2011, 8). This project was not restricted by language or medium,
and student collaboration took a number of different approaches. Radio plays and songs fore-
grounded the sonic dimensions of the manga, for example, while others looked through tel-
evision and news archives for video materials documenting the pollution and its effects. The
students reread the manga, translated, and performed it, and then viewed all the transformances
of the “same” story, becoming performative assemblies comprised of readers, translators, creators,
performers, and audience members – all at once.
552
Minamata umi no koe [Minamata the voice of the sea]

Minamata in southern Kyushu and Yokkaichi in central Japan are two of four major sites of
industrial pollution in the country. The Chisso Corporation began operations in Minamata in
1909 as a carbide and fertilizer manufacturer before moving into plastics and the production of
acetaldehyde. By the late 1950s, the company directly employed one-third of the residents of
Minamata and accounted for more than 60% of local tax revenues; former Chisso managers and
union members figured prominently in the municipal government. For decades, the company
dumped mercury, a by-product of acetaldehyde manufacture, into Minamata Bay, causing seri-
ous pollution of the marine eco-system. Local residents, as well as other sentient beings, who ate
contaminated fish were affected by methyl-mercury poisoning and its devastation of the central
nervous system. Translation awareness and embodied engagement were brought to the collabo-
rative translation of Ishimure Michiko’s memory picture book Minamata umi no koe [Minamata
the voice of the sea], which expands the story of industrial pollution to mythic proportions. Like
Yada’s manga, it uses dialect to mark the locality, but it is also a story of the ocean and genera-
tions and troubled spirits, and evokes a different kind of time. It is about Minamata, but this story
of environmental pollution is a performance of kotodama (word spirit), found both in the poet’s
use of local Kumamoto dialects and a non-linear narrative.
Ishimure was a poet and a feminist as well as committed environmental activist. She is not
explaining what happened through a detailed history or neat chronology. What the reader-
translator does not know has to be imagined. This is what Daphne Marlatt has called “listening
through the body,” feeling the rhythm of the text, and being inspired by the illustrations done by
Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri. In the slow process of translation, it is possible to make space for
thinking about how the practice of translation can support “the development of deeper nuanced
understandings of the fluid relationships between people and environments in specific places
and moments, as well as over time and across spaces” (Thornber 2011, 210).
The memory picture book begins and ends with the expression shuuririenen. In her after-
word, Ishimure suggests that it is a word on the verge of being music, the energy of a higanbana
(the flame-coloured spider lily, which is the flower of death and the afterlife), the flower’s prayer.
As students worked and imagined their way through the translation they learned the names of
different kinds of sea life and mountain plants, and felt the rich diversity of life before the ocean
was polluted. Then they learned the names of the chemicals that were emptied into the ocean
and entered the bodies of those who lived and fed there. By the end of the translation, shu-
uririenen was full of significance. As one student put it, “Shuuririenen means nothing but means
everything. It’s about the mountains crying, [. . .] the beauty of the mountain, and about lives
that die and come back again.” The writing challenges the reader; in the spirit of collaboration,
this translator has no desire to corral the meaning of a word or hurry its significance, leaving it
suggestive and open to associations.
On 10 January 2018, while students were in the process of translating Minamata umi no koe,
Ishimure died at the age of 90. There was a renewed sense of importance among the young
translators to circulate a text that testified to a life of environmental engagement. They recog-
nized that feminism, gender awareness, and the world we live in are all interactive.
Conclusion
This chapter has looked at teaching translation as an embodied mode of engagement and
how feminist thought and gender awareness are important components to critical and crea-
tive encounters with any cultural production. There is nothing that limits this pedagogy to a
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translation classroom in Japan. Recognition of how we negotiate the interaction of language,

images, and technologies and how these interactions affect meaning in the classroom study of
translation helps us see how we tend to negotiate these complexities in our lives. Terms, such as
‘gay culture’ or ‘women’ are not homogeneous “any more than the categories ‘men’, ‘humans’,
‘citizens’, or ‘poor people’ (Harding 2015, 57). There are always other versions of a term or text
and other ways to be in the world. Thinking about the directions our translations take through
our choices grounds an ethical practice of translation and a process for understanding (and
potentially initiating) change and shifting social relationships anywhere.
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Index
Note: Numbers in bold indicate a table. Numbers in italics indicate a figure.
Abd El-Jawad, Hassan 393 al-Hibri, Azizah 486, 488

Abdo, Diya 75 – 77 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi 180, 481
Abdullah, Ibtisam 49 – 50 Ali, Kecia 481
Abdul-Salam, Siham bint Saniya wa 487 Allende, Isabel 93
Abou-Bakr, Omaima 481, 488, 504 Allen, Jeffner 225
Aboubakr, Randa 488 – 490 Alliance of Arab Women (AAW) 403
Abou Rached, Ruth 48 – 63 Alloula, Malek 72
Abouzeid, Leila 65, 68 – 70, 70, 73, 75 – 77 Al-Mala’ika, Nazik 49
Abreu, Caio Fernando 321 Al-Mana, Samira 49 – 52
Abu-Ayyash, Emad A. 463 Al-Nasiri, Bouthayna 49 – 52
Abu-Haidar, Farida 54 – 55 Al-Qazwini, Iqbal 55
Acker, Elizabeth van 164 Al-Qur’an wal mar’ah: i‘adat qira’at al-nas al-Qur’ani
Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika 113 min manzūr nisa’i see Quran and Woman
Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM) (Poland) 1 Al-Ramadan, Raidah 393
Adams, Ernest 447 al-Saadawi, Nawal 212
Adnan, Samia 484, 492 Al-Safadi, Dalal 49
Adorno, Theodor 113 Alsharekh, Alanoud 208, 216
Africa 133, 138, 521; civil war 93; North 65 – 66, al-Shihabi, Ibrahim Yahia 485
69, 71, 406; South 180, 484, 532 Altoma, Salih 79
African-American 27 Alvarez, Sonia 319
African languages 187 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 27 – 28, 338
Afrique du nord française see Maghreb Ambedkar University 187
Agorni, Mirella 119 American University in Cairo 72
Ahmad, Hadil A. 53 Americas, the 133, 153, 240; decolonizing 342n3
Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin 36 – 37 Amin, Qassim 402
Ahumada, Mónica 83 – 92 Amireh, Amal 76
Ai Xiaoming艾晓明 311 Amortajada, La (Bombal) 85
Akkawy, Rehab 209 – 211, 219 Amrouche, Taos 66
Al-Ali, Nadje 55, 402 Ananieva, E. 283
Al-Amir, Daizy 49 – 52 And Other Stories 127 – 128, 130, 138, 143
Alarcón, Norma 10 Angelou, Maya 37
Al-Azhar University 485, 492, 496 – 497, 504 – 505 Angles, Jeffrey 256
Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 34, 35 Anjuman, Nadia 93
Alcott, Louisa May 34, 530; Little Women 34 Anneke, Mathilde 180
Al-Dulaimi, Lutfiya 49 – 52 Anne of Austria 107
Algeria 64 – 74 Anthony, Susan B. 24
Algerian People’s National Assembly 404 Anveshi 20, 21, 27
Algerian war of independence 93 Anzaldúa, Gloria 239 – 247, 337; Borderlands 2,
al-Ghazali, Zaynab 402 239 – 247; see also Spanish langauge; gender
al-Hajjaj, Raad 485 Appiah, Kwame 270
555
Index
Apter, Emily 353 Balchin, Cassandra 37

Apukhtin, Aleksei 256 Balderston, Daniel 83, 85
Arab Gulf region 208, 436 Baldo, Michela 257, 320
Arabic literature 56, 64; see also Abouzeid Bandia, Paul 67, 150
Arabic language: dialects 54; in the Maghreb Bantu 363, 365 – 366
65 – 76 Barazangi, Nimat 486
Arabic translation 2 – 3, 48, 390 – 400; and Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 110
audiovisual translation (AVT) 429 – 443; of Barchunova, Tatiana 276 – 290
Beauvoir 205 – 223, 219; into English 51, 54 – 55; Barlas, Asma 481, 488, 497
Iraqi stories in 49 – 50, 57 – 58; sexist labels in Barral, Carlos 151 – 152
390 – 400 Barrie, J. M. 533
‘arabophone’ writing 65 Bartosiewicz, Edyta 296
Arab women: feminist activism of 401 – 412; Basaure, Rosa 83 – 92
Muslim 64; novelists 65; writers in Iraq 48 – 63; Basile, Elena 257
see also Maghreb; Mosteghanemi Basset, Mary Clarke 120
Archive of the Administration (AGA) (Alcalá de Bassi, Serena 324, 331
Henares, near Madrid) 151 Bassnett, Susan 39
Ardilli, Deborah 327 Bator, Joanna 296
Argentina 85, 93, 95, 99, 143 – 144 Battlefield 4 (video game) 445, 447, 449 – 451
Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol 323 Baudelaire, Charles 110
Ashgate Early Modern Englishwoman Facsimile Bauer, Diann 325
Library 117 Bauer, Heike 256
Asia 138, 154, 181, 346, 521; East 357; languages Bauer, Nancy 225, 231
spoken in 133, 363; South 132, 338, 532; see also Beaufort, Margaret 120
China; Hong Kong; Taiwan; Orientalism Beauvoir, Simone de 2, 258, 268, 296 – 299, 302;
Asimakoulas, Dimitris 256 in Arabic 205 – 217, 218, 219 – 220; in China
Asmita 18 – 19, 20, 21, 28 309, 314, 509; Djmilah Boupacha 34; in English
Atkins, Bowman 161 224 – 235; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 186,
Attayib, Abdul Majeed 394 219, 230; and the ‘Other’ 528; Reflections on a
Atwood, Margaret 44; Handmaid’s Tale,The 37 – 38, Very Easy Death 35; in Russian 282; sang des
41 – 44 autres, Le 230, 298; see also belles images, Les;
audiovisual translation (AVT): gender in 417 – 424; Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée; Sartre, Jean-Paul;
and subtitling 404; studies in 413; and Second Sex,The
translation 401; and women, Arabic context Bebel, August 280
429 – 437, 433 Bechdel, Alison 547
Augustus II the Strong 110 Becker-Cantarino, Barbara 120
Austen, Jane 39, 416; Emma 36 Beek, Wouter 391
Austin, John Langshaw 374 Behn, Aphra 117, 119
author, modern concept of 6 – 7 Béji, Hélé 66
authorship 2, 5 – 9, 11 – 13, 118 – 122, 268 Belarus, Republic of 277
autocracy 34 Belausteguigoitia, Marisa 243
autoeroticism 262; see also eroticism belles images, Les (Beauvoir) 208, 220, 230; Arabic
autohistoria-teoría 241, 247 translation of 214 – 215; in Polish 298
Belli, Gioconda 95; País bajo mi piel. Memorias de
B (the Blogger) 338 amor y Guerra, El (The Country Under My Skin.
Babloyan, Zaven 284 A Memoir of Love and War) 95, 100 – 102
Bacardí, Monserrat 153 Bell, Quentin 188
Bachner, Andrea 356 Benhabib, Seyla 268
Badr, Hossam 487 Benmessaoud, Sanaa 64 – 82
Badr, Lina 208 Benta-Djebel see Durand-Thiriot, Berthe
Baer, Brian James 256 Berber dialect 66, 73, 78
Baeta, Henrique Xavier 180 berehynia 8
Baisantry, Kausalya 96 Berque, Jacques 69
Baker, Armand 83, 85 Berrada, Mohammed 65
Baker, Mona 322, 401, 432, 515, 525 Bessaïh, Nesrine 518 – 527
Bakshi, Sandeep 336 – 344 Bhagat, Manjul 193
Bakhtiar, Laleh 497, 502 – 505 Bhandari, Manu 193
556
Index
Bhumika magazine 20 Burgos, Elizabeth 95; Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y

Bible 471 – 279; translations of 472 – 473 así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An
Biblioteka Warszawska 111 Indian Woman in Guatemala) 95, 97 – 98
Bichet, Marlène 224 – 238 Butler, Judith 216, 268, 281, 374; “Contingent
Bielawski, Dawn 534 Foundations” 284; Notes Toward a Performative
Biggs, Maude Ashurst 111 Theory of Assembly 545, 550 – 552; see also Gender
Billiani, Francesca 148 Trouble
Bing see Microsoft Bing (MB) Byrkjeland, Bo 84
Birch, Eva Lennox 32 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 110
birth control 510, 513, 518; see also childbirth
Birth Control Handbook 520 – 524 Califia, Pat 323
BLA collective 328 – 330 Califronia, Rosa 179
‘black feminism’ 27, 269 Caliskan, Aylin 462
Blair, Dorothy S. 74 Cameron, Deborah 375, 382
Bloomfield, Leonard 356 Camões, Luís Vaz de 110
Bogić, Anna 231, 518 – 527 Campaña, Andrea 83 – 92
Bohowitynowa, Zofia (née Czartoryska) 108 Camus, Albert 205, 212, 297
Bolukbasi, Tolga 463 Camus Camus, Carmen 151, 152
Bombal, María Luisa 83 – 88 Cantú, Norma 239, 243 – 246
Bonn, Charles 65 Caraza, Xanath 243
book cover 7, 40, 74, 112, 115 Carey, William 473
book market 71, 77, 130, 136 Carpenter, Edward 348
book, the: as cultural artefact 71 – 74; history and Carr, Joanna 160
materiality of 121 – 123 Carson, Margaret 129, 138
books: distribution of 40, 147; feminist, translations Carter, Angela 530
of 39; male-authored in translation 135, 137; Casanova, Pascale 72, 79
woman-authored in translation 133 – 134, 136; Casares, Adolfo Bioy 84
see also censorship Cassin, Barbara 226 – 227
Booth, Marilyn 71 caste and caste system 27 – 28, 96 186, 188,
Borch, Jørgen 178 336 – 342, 533; anti-caste critiques 337 – 338,
Borde, Constance 209, 230 – 235, 294 341; and womanhood 234
Borderlands see Anzaldúa, Gloria caste, gender, and sexuality 338 – 340
Borges, Jorge Luis 84, 112, 187, 294 Castellet, Josep Maria 151
Boroditsky, Lera 391 Castro, Cristina Gómez 151
Bosnia, Bosnian 103, 135, 145 Castro-Klaren, Sara 84
Bouraoui, Nina 256 Castro, Olga 34, 268, 380, 384, 392, 432; and the
Bourdieu, Pierre 37 Year of Publishing Women (UK) 127 – 146
Bour, Isabelle 178 Catholicism, Catholic Church 107, 216; gender
Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz 112 wars 299, 478, 524; guilt 87; Roman 83, 117,
Brantenberg, Gerd 11 472 – 474; in Poland 477; in Québec 478;
Bridges, Judith S. 315 theology 474; vulgate 472
Bridges of Constantine see Dhakirat al-Jassad Causse, Michèle 458
Briet, Marguerite 121 censorship 297; of books 152 – 153; in China 206,
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 36 311, 316, 513, 522; in Iraq 48 – 58; in the Islamic
Broomans, Petra 72, 74 Republic of Iran 40 – 41, 43 – 45; in Italy 419,
Brossard, Nicole 543 – 544 423; in Poland 113; religious 497 – 498; of sex
Brown, Hilary 117 – 126 and sexualities 230, 332, 513, 548; in Soviet
Büchler, Alexandra 70, 128 Union 287; in Spain under Franco 147 – 154,
Buck, Pearl S.: The Child Who Never Grew 35; The 206
Good Earth 34; Imperial Woman 36, 37 Center for Women’s Studies in Islam (CERFI)
Buddhism 346, 533 (Morocco) 488, 490 – 491
Budrewicz, Aleksandra 111 Center of Egyptian Woman’s Legal Assistance
Bulgaria 2, 266 (CEWLA) 403
Bulgarian language 268 – 272; translation of Our Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 266 – 273
Bodies, Ourselves 272, 366, 521 Cervulle, Maxime 261 – 262
Bullock, Julia 196 – 204 Chądzyńsk, Zofia 112 – 113, 115
Bunin, Ivan 297 Chamberlain, Lori 118, 149, 187
557
Index
Chandra, Shefali 340 – 341 338; French 64 – 65, 78; Islamic critique of 75;
Chang Hsiao-hung 張小虹 353 and masculinism 186; neo- 69; postcolonialism
Chateaubriand, François-René de 110 74, 77, 322, 336, 352
Châtelet, Isabelle 262 Combahee River Collective, the Combahee River
Che Guevara 21 Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing
Chen, Xueyang 510 in the Seventies and Eighties (Kombahi River
Chesler, Phyllis 37 Collective Prakatana–Nallajathi Strivaadhula
Chian, Fahimeh Godaz 37 Swaram) 27
Chiang, Howard 350, 354, 356 communism, Communist Party: in Central and
Chicana writers 239, 243 – 244, 247; feminist 10 Eastern Europe 266, 272, 521; in China 310,
Chicanos 246 – 247; feminism 269 312, 350, 356; discursive register of 278, 356;
childbirth 198, 200, 478, 499, 514, 524 – 525; see of India (Marxist–Leninist) 20; of Iran 45; in
also pregnancy Poland 297 – 299, 302; post-communist 270,
children’s literature and translation 112, 528 – 540 273, 299; scientific 279
Chile 85, 143, 145, 154; Pinochet coup 93 Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) (Soviet
Chilean Spanish 138 Union) 278
China 21, 143; normative sexualities in 345; Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories see Klein
woman interpreter, perceptions of 160, Concilo, Arielle A. 320
162 – 166; see also censorship; feminism; Confuciansism 199; 310, 533; Neo- 346, 350
lesbianism; homosexuality; Marxism-Leninism- Congo, Democratic Republic of 103
Maoism; May Fourth Movement; Second Sex, Conrad, Joseph 112, 114
The Constantine the Great 72
China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI) Contreras, Marcela 83 – 92
311 Cooke, Anne 120
Chinese language, translations into 133, 135, 139; cooke, miriam 52, 55, 74
of European sexology 348 – 350; Gender Trouble Cooper, Robert 376
(Butler) 257; men, works by 145; of Sinophone Cornelia before the Mirror see Ocampo, Silvina
queer literature 355 – 356; of Our Bodies, Cornelia frente al Espejo see Ocampo, Silvina
Ourselves 508 – 515, 512 – 513, 521 – 522; of Peter Cornell, Sarah 228
Pan 533; of Western feminist works 308 – 316; Correa, Isabel 119
women, works by 143 Cortázar, Julio 112
Chitnis, Rajendra 129 – 130 Costa, Claudia de Lima 242, 319
Chodorow, Nancy 281 Costa-Jussà, Marta 463
Cho, Jinhyun 162, 166 Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War
Chopin, Kate 37 see Belli, Gioconda
Chou Wah-shan 351 Crabb, Peter B. 534
Chukovskaya, Lydia 93 Crawford, Julie 120
Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文 355 Crenne, Hélisenne de 121
‘chutnification’ 257 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 241
Chutnik, Sylwia 296 Cresson, Edith 380
Cielecka, Małgorzata 296 Cristoff, Maria Sonia 10
Cinelli, Delfino 368 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 163, 166,
Cintas-Peña, Marta 417 390 – 394, 397 – 399, 436, 519; see also feminist
cis-gender 523 critical discourse analysis
Cisneros, Renato 145 Cronin, Michael 12
Cisneros, Sandra 10 Crowley, Karlyn 532
citizenship 315, 353; see also cultural citizenship cultural citizenship: in China 354
Civil Rights Movement (US) 520 Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth
civil war: Nigeria 93; Somalia 93 Britain: An Online Analytical Catalogue of
Cixous, Hélène 54 – 55, 216, 224, 227 – 229, 259, Translations, 1641 – 1660 (online) 123
282 cultural identity 69, 77, 544
Clancy-Smith, Julia 66 cultural memory: in Iraq 49; queer 341; see also
Claramonte,Vidal 149 memory
climate change 12 ‘cultural otherness’ 206
Clinton, Hillary Rodham 37 cultural transfer 173 – 174, 417; cross-cultural
colonialism 34, 241, 329; and caste 341; and transfer 417, 419, 425; in the Maghreb 72;
decolonial critiques 339 – 340, 342n3; European translation as 473, 531
558
Index
‘cultural turn’ 17, 206 Díaz Cintas, Jorge 404, 419

Curran, Beverley 543 – 554 Dickinson, Emily 262
Curtius, Francis 109 Dikötter, Frank 350
Cybele 210 – 211 dirigisme 266
cyberspace 354, 357 Diriker, Ebru 162
cyborg 284 – 285 Di Sabato, Bruna 363 – 373
Czartoryska, Izabela (née Flemming) 109 Disch, Lisa Jane 258 – 259
Czartoryska, Zofia 109 Djebar, Assia 65 – 68, 70, 70, 74, 76 – 78, 93
Czartoryski, Adam Kazimierz 109 Dohra Abhishaap (Doubly Cursed) (Baisantry) 96
Czech language, translations in: feminist works Downs, Edward 445
268, 303; ‘gender’ in 269 – 271; of Wollstonecraft Du Bartas, Guillaume Saluste 120
179; of Woolf 294 Du, Biyu (Jade) 159 – 169
Czech Republic 266, 270 Ducos, Basile-Joseph 176
Durand-Thiriot, Berthe 73
Dabishi, Hamid 55 Dutta, Aniruddha 256, 340
Dąbrowska, Maria 113 Dvorkina, O. 284
Dacier, Anne 117 – 118, 122
Daini no sei see Second Sex,The Ebrahimi, Niloofar 37
Dalit movement 20, 26 Eco-Translation (Cronin) 12
Dalit Panthers 338 eco-translatology 524
Dalit writers 26, 336, 338 – 341; see also Dohra Écriture inclusive movement 367, 370
Abhishaap (Doubly Cursed) Edelman, Lee 257
Dallal, Jenine Abboushi 77 Edgeworth, Maria 530
Dalloway, Jinny 326 Egalias Døtre (Egalia’s Daughters) (Brantenberg) 11
Damanhouri, Miramar 393 Egypt 1 – 2; AVT translation in 436; cleaners and
Damm, Jens 351 discourses of cleanliness in 392 – 394; feminist
Damascus I (Pope) 472 activism in 401 – 410; feminist works translated
D’Amore, Laura Mattoon 532 in 205 – 208, 216, 491 – 492; Islamic feminism
Danek, Theodora 139 in 485
Daskalova, Krassimira 267 Egyptian Revolution 401, 432
Da‘ūnā natakallam see Windows of Faith Ehrlich, Susan 376
Dave, Naisargi 337 Einhorn, Barbara 267
Davies, Peter 96 El Gouli, Sophie 66
Da Vinci, Leonardo 368 Eligedi, Rajkumar 17 – 31
Davis, Kathy 131, 520 Eliot, George: Mill on the Floss 36
Dawood, Sama 390 – 400 Elizabeth I of England 117
Debèche, Djamila 66 Ellis, Havelock 348
Dębska, Karolina 114 El Nashar, Mohamed 393
decolonization see colonialism Elsadda, Hoda 402
Defrancq, Bart 161 El Tarzi, Salma 406
Déjeux, Jean 65, 73 Embabi, Doaa 481 – 495
Delacroix, Eugène 74 Emirates see United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Delille, Jacques 109 Emirates Foundation (Abu Dhabi) 56
Delphy, Christine 259 – 260 Ensler, Eve 311; Vagina Monologues,The
De Marco, Marcella 419, 431 – 432 311, 524
Demirhan, Handegül 528 – 539 Epstein, B. J. 255 – 256; In Other Words 255 – 256
Deng Xiaoping 508 Erasmus of Rotterdam 123, 473
Derbyshire, Katy 128 Ergun, Emek 5 – 14, 103, 242, 268, 391
Derrida, Jacques 122, 268, 458 eroticism: queer 256, 262; sanitization of 514; see
Deshpande, Sushma 18, 28; Nenu Savitri Baini 28 also autoeroticism; homoeroticism
deuxième sexe, Le see Second Sex,The Esplin, Marlene Hansen 242
Devika, J. 17 Etaugh, Claire A. 315
Devi, Mahasweta 186 ethnographic frame 74 – 76
Dhakirat al-Jassad (Bridges of Constantine) Euromaidan Revolution 8
(Mosteghanemi) 72 existentialism 224 – 227, 230 – 232, 297 – 298
Dharmasiri, Kanchuka 235 Ezati, Abbas 41
Dialectics of Sex (Firestone) 21 Ezell, Margaret J. 120
559
Index
fairy tales 529 – 530, 532, 535 Fotopoulou, Aristea 403

Fallaci, Oriana 24 Foucault, Michel 174, 258, 262, 348, 350
fansub groups (Sinophone) 356 Fountain, Bill 368
Faqir, Fadia 51 – 52, 54 Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW)
Farahzdad, Farzaneh 268 509
Farid, Farnak 37 France (country of) 6, 117, 144 – 146; Arabic
Fassin, Eric 258 – 259 literary titles in 69 – 72; Butler’s work in
Fatma-Zaïda 496 – 500, 505 258 – 260; female translators in 108 – 109,
Faustyn, Mikołaj 108 119; language reforms in 376; Our Bodies,
Felman, Shoshana 268 Ourselves in 523; Protestant Reformation in 6;
Feminine Mystique,The (Friedan) 21, 33, 37, 153, Wollstonecraft’s work in 173 – 174, 177 – 180;
216, 281, 293; in China 314, 509 Women’s Movement in 259; see also colonialism;
feminism: in China 308 – 316; in Iraq 57; Western French language
308 – 309; Western into Chinese, translation of Franco, Francisco (General) 93, 148, 154; death of
311 – 312; see also Islamic Feminism (IF) 153
feminism, first wave 276; iconic texts of 309 Francoism 147 – 158; and censorship 152 – 153
feminism, gender, and translation, field of 216, francophone writers: in Africa 65; in the Maghreb
239 – 240 66, 67 – 69, 73, 77; and queer literature 355
feminism, second wave 293, 299, 535 François I 6
feminism in/as translation 271 – 273 Frank, Anke 461
feminisms 12, 235, 255, 532 – 533; Chicanx Frase, Lucca 325
240, 269; Chinese 308, 316; hegemonic 239; Frechtman, Bernard 230
international 314; Latin American 242, 247; ‘French Feminism’ 259 – 260
transnational 5; Western 266 – 269, 272 French language 272; American gay novels in 357;
feminism, third wave 276, 299, 309 – 310, 374 into Arabic 206 – 216, 482, 487 – 490; dubbing
Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of in 432; and gender 367, 458; source texts in 3,
Knowledge and Reform 488 6, 33, 38, 65, 132 – 133, 136, 151 – 152, 303; into
feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) Dutch 161, 173; into Japanese 196 – 203; and
390 – 392, 394, 397 – 399 machine translation 463 – 465; and Maghrebi
feminist ethnographic frame see ethnographic women writers 66 – 69, 72 – 73, 77; male authors
frame translated in 135, 145 – 146; in Poland/Polish
feminist neologism, translation of see philosophy, 108 – 110, 112; in pragmatic texts aimed at
translation of fighting sexism 375, 377 – 387; Quran translated
feminist philosophers see philosophy, translation of into 496, 500; and reform 376; as ‘transit’
Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature 121 language 56; translations into 72, 77; in UN
Feminist School,The (website) 36 – 37 documents 377 – 387; Wollstonecraft translated
Feminist Study Circle 20, 26 into 174 – 181; women authors in 143 – 144;
feminist thought: historical perspectives on 20 – 21 Woolf in 187, 294
feminist translation studies (FTS) 267 – 268 French, Marilyn 37
feminist translation (FT) 391 French philosophy see philosophy
Ferrán, Jaime 153 French Revolution 309
Ferrante, Elena 9 ‘French Theory’ 258
Fiedorczuk, Julia 114 Friedan, Betty 21, 37, 198; see also Feminine
Filipiak, Izabela 295 Mystique
Firestone, Shulamith 21, 200 Friedman, Leonard 230
Floresta Brasileira Augusta, Nisia 180 Frizzi, Adria 321
Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de 109 Funk, Nanette 267
Flotow, Luise von 1 – 4, 45, 123, 148 – 149, Furukawa, Hiroko 391
206 – 207, 268; and audiovisual translation
401 – 402, 418, 430 – 431; and Christianity, Gadamer, Hans-Georg 113
discourse of 471; and gender 458; on ‘hijacking’ Gallop, Jane 227
382; on feminist translation 392, 490; and Gal, Susan 267
language and women 391; Routledge Encyclopedia Gamal, Muhammad 433
of Translation Studies 348; and supplementing, game localization 446
strategy of 406; Translation and Gender 531 Gandhi (Mahatma) 340
Fontanella, Laura 319 – 335 Garadja, Alexei 284
Font, Joel 463 Garcia-Caro, Olga 162
560
Index
García Meseguer, Álvaro 375 Germany 93, 117; censorship in 148, 154;
Garg, Mridula 193 Enlightenment in 174; National Socialist (Nazi)
Gatti, Claudio 9 103, 148, 547; Wollstonecraft in 177, 179
Gauch, Suzanne 76 – 77 German language: men in translation 145 – 146;
gayspeak 420 women in translation 143 – 144
Geertz, Clifford 346 Gervais-Le Garff, Marie-Marthe 376
Gellner, Ernest 279 GETCC (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
gender: absence of 325; asymmetry 110, 392; 150
in AVT 401, 413, 417 – 424; and the Bible, GETLIHC (University of Vic–Central University
translations of 471 – 479; and Borderlands of Catalonia) 150
246 – 247; and caste 27, 96, 338; as a category Ghazoul, Ferial 53 – 55, 58
185 – 186, 243 – 244, 299; and censorship Gibbels, Elisabeth 173 – 183
150 – 151; and children’s literature 528; and Gibbons, John 162
class 98; concept of 21, 299; in Egypt 404; Gillet, Robert 255 – 256, 258
and feminism 255, 543; fluidity of 270; Gilligan, Carol 281
grammatical 212, 363 – 366, 370, 458, 471, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 24
482; and identity 58, 74, 165, 240 – 241, 261, Giustini, Deborah Elena 321
328, 330; and interpreting as a profession Glyn, Elinor 151
159 – 166; and language 406; as linguistic Godard, Barbara 55, 391 – 392, 544
category 363 – 364; and machines 12; and Godayol, Pilar 147 – 158, 206, 242, 530
machine translation 457 – 458; metonymies that Godwin, William 177 – 179
construct 93 – 103; in Polish language 110 – 111; Goethe Institute 138
politics and politicization of 22, 25, 56, 64, 324, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 297
512 – 515; and publishing 127 – 139; and the Goldblatt, Howard 355
Quran 496 – 506; and religion/faith 488 – 489; Goldman, Emma 24
and sexuality 257, 299, 320, 324; and social Goldstein, Ann 9, 144
movements 17; and/in translation 118 – 124, Gomola, Aleksander 473, 475, 477 – 478
196, 322, 326, 357 – 370, 509, 528; translations Gomułka, Władysław 298
of the word 258, 260, 268 – 273, 486 – 487; in Gonzaga, Marie Louise 110
UN texts 374 – 387; and video games 444 – 454; González-Iglesias, David 151
violence 71, 94; see also cisgender; transgender Google Translate (GT) 11, 457, 461 – 464
gender awareness 350; in AVT 430, 432 – 437; in Gottsched, Louis 174
children 531, 536; in China 515; and feminist Govaert, Marcel 226
thought 550 Graff, Agnieszka 295 – 296, 299, 302
Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law 486 Gramling, David 256
gender constructs 200, 202; translation of 188 – 189 Greer, Germaine 21, 315
gender discrimination 28, 328, 330, 391 Greiffenberg, Catharina Regina von 117, 120
gender in/equality 44, 266 – 267, 309; in China Gross, Nina 9
311 – 316, 508; and language 390 – 399; legal Grosz, Elizabeth 227
frameworks (Egypt) 407; and the Quran 408; in Grünberg, Laura 267
South America 83 – 91, 96, 101 – 102 Grzybowski, Konstanty 268
gender justice 484, 489, 491 Guan Yin 533
gender norms 41, 164 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 119
gender relations 26, 99, 483 – 485; in China 310; Guillou, Liane 463
construction of 103 Guthrie, Alice 70
gender roles 11, 485, 529 – 530; binary notions of Guo, Ting 256
532 Guo, Wangtaolue 256, 345 – 357
gender, publishing, and translation 129 – 132 gynocriticism 121 – 122, 431
gender stereotypes 98, 163
gender studies 17, 148, 184, 239 – 240, 292, 327; Habermas, Jürgen 113
and AVT 413, 417 – 424; in Russia 276 – 277 Haddadian-Moghaddam, Esmaeil 45
gender theory 197, 260; in Russia 276 – 288 Hadi, Maysalun 49 – 50
Gender Trouble (Butler) 257 – 261, 543; in Polish hadith see Prophetic traditions
291, 294, 300 – 302 Hahn, Daniel 128
Genette, Gérard 205, 215 – 16, 546 – 547 Haitian diaspora 8
Genlis (Madame de) 108, 178 Halberstam, Jack 257
Gerini, Isabella 323 Hall, Radcliffe 151
561
Index
Halperin, David M. 262, 268 Hjelmslev, Louis 365

Hamelsveld,Ysbrand van 178 Hobsbawm, Eric 187
Handmaid’s Tale,The see Atwood, Margaret Hoffmanowa Klementyna (née Tańska) 110
Hannay, Margaret P. 118 Holmes, James S. 256
Hannotel, Philippe 108 Holmes, Janet 161
Haraway, Donna 284 – 285 Holocaust 93, 96
Hardmeier, Christian 460, 463 Ho, Loretta Wing Wah 354
Hartman, Michelle 77 Holst, Amalia 179
Hartmann, Heidi 281 homoeroticism 191, 262; in art 547; in China
Hartwig, Julia 113 345 – 349, 351; female 346
Harvey, Keith 7, 255 homosexuality 25, 244; in China 315, 345 – 357,
Hassan, Mozn 406 512; under communism 274n7; in France
Hassen, Rim 74 – 75, 393, 496 – 507 259, 262; and gender 383; hidden 325; as
Hatto, Majeda 53 homosexualism 282; in India 337, 339, 341; in
Havelková, Hana 267 Iran 40; and the pink triangle 547 – 548; of
Hawthorne, Melanie 230 Proust 547; in Room of One’s Own, A 190 – 191;
Hayes, Julie Candler 122 in Spain under Franco 151; of Woolf 188; see
Hay Literature Festival 127 also LGBTQI; lesbianism; queer
Hays Code (US) 424 Hong Kong 162; normative sexualities in
Hays, Mary 179 345 – 350; queerness in 350 – 353, 356 – 357;
Heaney, Seamus 114 Zhang Lu in 164 – 165
Hedenberg, Johanna 9 hooks, bell 534, 543
Heidegger, Martin 227, 230 Hora, Josef 458
Heilbron, Johan 71 Horkheimer, Max 113
Helminski, Camille Adams 497, 500 – 502, 505 Horney, Karen 315
Henley, Nancy 379, 383 – 384 Hosington, Brenda M. 120, 122 – 123
Hennesy, Rosemary 257 hostage narrative 71
Henry-Tierney, Pauline 255 – 265 Houdebine, Anne-Marie 376
Hernández-Pecoraro, Rosalie 119 Houlding, Elizabeth A. 296
Herz, Henriette 180 Hughes, Geoffrey 414
Hesse, Herman 296 Hughes, Sophie 138
Hester, Helen 325 Hui, Isaac Ting-yan 355 – 356
heterogeneity 53, 241, 245, 268 Hu, Kaibao 161 – 162
heteroglossia 241 Hungary 154
heteronormativity 191, 259, 277, 324 – 325, 327; in Hungarian language 257, 303, 463
children’s literature 532; in China 348, 350; elite Hungarian Uprising 297
340 – 341; queering 369 Hu Shu-wen 胡淑雯 353
heteropatriarchy 5, 320 – 321, 330, 338 – 339 Hu Qiuyuan 胡秋原 349
hetero/sexism 11 Hussein, Hadiya 52 – 53, 55
heterosexuality 191, 244, 259; in China 350 – 352, Hutchins, John 461
356; see also homosexuality Hutchinson, Lucy 117
Heuvel, Katrina van den 281 hybridity 67, 73, 353; paradigms of 77
Hedva, Johanna 325
Heydel, Magda 114 I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala
He Zhen 何震 (aka He-Yin Zhen 何殷震) 312 see Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú
hierarchies 10; caste 338, 341; colonial 67; cultural Ibn Affan, Othman see Othman Ibn Affan
68; gender 502; and the internet 311; and Ibrahim, Mona 487, 491
language 337, 377; patriarchal 98; social 85; Ideasdestroyingmuros 322 – 325
subversion of 77; and transfeminism 323, 329; ideograms 545
and translation 528 Idrīs, Aida Matarji 218
Hindi language: gender, expressions of 363; Idrīs, Suhayl 205
queerness, new vocabularies for 337; Ikas, Karin 244
“transgender” translated into 331; Woolf Ikushima, Ryōichi 196 – 203
translated into 184 – 194 Ilaiah, Kancha 26
Hinsch, Bret 346 – 347, 349 – 350 Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera 113
Hirshfeld, Magnus 348 illiteracy 66, 75, 83
Hite, Shere 315 Inclúyanme afuera (Cristoff) 10
562
Index
India: feminism, history of 20 – 22; literary works Jakobson, Roman 95, 375
set in/about 96, 191, 256; postcolonial 336; Janasahiti (People’s Literary Organization) 20
queerness and nonconformity in 336 – 342; see Jangnam, Chinnaiah 338
also Anzaldúa; Baisantry; Burgos; caste and caste Janion, Maria 292
system; Dalit writers; Hindi; Room of One’s Own Jansen, Hanne 7
(Woolf); Savarna movement; Telugu;Volga Japan 312, 345; China’s conflicts with 350;
Indian languages 193 – 194 literature/manga set in 550; Our Bodies,
Infante, Guillermo Cabrera 84 Ourselves in 521; queer readership in 256 – 257
Inoue, Takako 201 Japanese language 2; Beauvoir translated into
intercultural encounters and exchange 68, 159, 196 – 203; English translations of 544 – 554; male
163, 515, 546 authors translated into 135; personal pronouns
intercultural studies 56, 347, 535 – 536 in 364; source texts in 510; testimonials written
interculture 345, 351 in 103, 145 – 146; women writers translated into
International Association of Translation and 133, 144; writing systems in 544 – 546; see also
Interpreting Studies (IATIS) 256 Beauvoir; Ikushima; manga
International Center for Human Rights Education Jardine, Alice 227, 259
(Equitas) 491 Jary, David 282
International Committee on the Rights of Sex Jary, Julia 282
Workers in Europe (ICRSE) 323 Jauss, Hans Robert 207
International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 56 Jin Tianhe 金天翮 312
International Woman’s Year 21 Jiresch, Ester 72, 74
interpreter 9 – 10; female 159 – 163, 165 – 166; Johnson-Davies, Denys 51 – 52
literary representations of 56; male 160 – 162, Jordan 205, 433, 433
166; media representations of 159 – 166 Josephy-Hernández, Daniel 401, 417 – 418,
interpreting 76; collectives engaged in 322, 430 – 431
328 – 329; community (public service) 159, 162, Jungeon, Hwang 144
263; gender imbalance in 160; as a profession Jyoti, Dhrubo 338, 341
160
interpretive theory of translation (ITT) 226 – 227, Kachachi, Inaam 52, 54, 56
235 KAFA (Lebanon) 407
Interprise collective 322, 329 Kahf, Muhja 487
intersectionality 10, 12, 57, 131, 241, 523; of Kaindl, Klaus 256
sexuality 348, 353 Kaloustian, Joseph 209 – 211
intersectional feminism 320, 322, 331 Kalverkämper, Hartwig 369
inxile 93 Kamala, N. 17, 186, 193
Ireland 70, 127 Kamal, Hala 1 – 4, 20, 208, 392 – 393, 402, 430
Ireland, Amy 325 Kang, Han 140, 144
Iribarne, Manuel Fraga 152 Kang, Wenqing 349 – 350, 356
Irigaray, Luce 216, 228, 259 Karamitroglou, Fotios 432
Iran see Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) Karman, Tawakkol 404
Iron Curtain 112, 292 Kašić, Biljana 267
Ishaq, Maliha 49 Katz, David 365
Ishii, Anne 546 Keenaghan, Eric 256
Ishimure, Michiko (Ishimure Michiko) 543 – 544, Kong, Travis S. K. 353 – 354
550, 553 Kannabiran,Vasantha 27
Islamic Feminism (IF) 74, 76, 268, 481 – 492 Kaniewska, Bogumiła 114
Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) 32 – 44; feminist Karpiński, Franciszek 109
books in translation 39; Ministry of Culture and Katherine Parr (Queen of England) 117
Islamic Guidance (MCIG) 40 Kaufman, Michael 37
Islamic Research Academy 484 – 485 Kaur, Rupi 37
Islamic Sharia 406 – 408, 481 – 485 Keller, Evelyn Fox 284
Khatibi, Abdelkebir 65, 67
Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim 50 Khomeini (Ayatollah) 32, 39
Jackson, Stevi 260 Khorasani, Noushin Ahmadi see Ahmadi
Jacquemond, Richard 68, 70 – 71 Khorasani, Noushin
Jaggar, Alison M. 284 Kierszys, Zofia 112
Jagose, Annamarie 257 Kilito, Abdelafattah 77
563
Index
Kimura, Nobuku 201 Latin American Spanish 247

King, Ruth 376 Latinx: feminism 247; literatures 240, 242
Kirkup, James 230 Lauretis, Teresa de 257
Kita-Huber, Jadwiga 114 La Vallière, Louise de 109
Klaw, Barbara 230 Lawrence, Margaret 151
Klein, Hilary 11 Lazar, Michelle 391 – 392
Klingman, Gail 267 Lebanon 72, 205 – 206, 208
Kłosińska, Krystyna 300 Lebensborn 103
Kłosiński, Krzysztof 300 Lederer, Marianne 226
Koehn, Philip 463 Lee, Francis 165
Kollontai, Alexandra 18, 24 – 25 Lee, Harper 151
Kołodziejczyk, Ewa 114 Lee, Hermione 188
Komarnicka, Wacława 112 Lefevere, André 39
Konopnicka, Maria 112 Lemsine, Aïcha 93
Kopeć, Barbara 300 Le Nagard, Roland 463
Korsak, Mary Phil 474, 476 – 477 Lenin,Vladimir 21
Koyama, Emi 320, 322, 325 – 326 Lesage, Alain-René 108
Kozakiewicz, Mikołaj 298 lesbianism: in China 309, 345, 348 – 349, 354,
Kozak, Jolanta 113 – 114 357, 514; in Hong Kong 351; in India 341; in
Kozłowska, Jolanta 114 medical literature 523; in Poland 295; and queer
Kozyra, Katarzyna 296 theory 257, 270; in Russian language 321 – 322;
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 348 – 349 in Spain/Spanish 323; in Taiwan 352 – 353;
Krasińska, Ewa 295 – 296 in Woolf ’s writing 191; see also Anzaldúa;
Kraskowska, Ewa 1 – 2, 114, 291 – 307 Brantenberg; LGBTQI community; Rich;
Kraus, Cynthia 258 – 261 Sappho; Wittig; Woolf
Krasuska, Karolina 300 – 301 LesBitches 325 – 327
Kripper, Denise 5 – 14 Leśniewska, Maria 296 – 297
Kristeva, Julia 216, 228, 258 – 259, 268 Lessinger, Enora 374 – 389
Krontiris, Tina 118 Letter to a Child Never Born (Puttani Biddaku Talli
Kubińska, Olga 114 Uttaram [Telugu]) (Fallaci) 24
Kuciak, Agnieszka 114 Leung, Ester 162, 166
Kumari, Popuri Lalitha see Volga Levant, the 206, 436
Kumar, Nita 186 Le Vay, David 229
Ku Ming-chun 古明君 353 Levinas, Emmanuel 122
Kuo, Szu-Yu 433 Levine, Suzanne Jill 84, 509
Kurahashi,Yumiko 199 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 258, 282
Kurz, Ingrid 159 LGBTQI 320; in China 256, 350, 357; feminism,
Kurz, Iwona 300 alliances with and differences from 322 – 324,
332; in Hong Kong 348; language 331; in
Laboratorio Smaschieramenti 257 Poland 302
Laboria Cuboniks collective 325 Li, Boya 508 – 517, 521 – 522
Lacan, Jacques 258 Liddle, Ann 228
Lacroix, Paul 110 Lieberman, Marcia R. 529
La Follette, Clara 24 Life on Mars see television shows
Laghzali, Bouchra 482, 490 – 492 Lim, Song Hwee 351 – 352
Lakoff, Robin 161, 374 Linde, Samuel Bogumił 111
Lalitha, K. 21, 30n5, 186 linguistic invisibility 110
Lamrabet, Asma 481 – 482, 490 linguistic sexism 273, 375 – 376, 378, 381, 383 – 384
Landheer, Roland 226 linguistics 95, 256, 278; Arabic 492; descriptive
Larkosh, Christopher 255 – 256 363, 365; feminist 374; historical 364
Laroui, R’kia 65 Lin, Huang 311
Larraz, Fernando 147, 153 Lin, Sylvia Li-chun 355
Latin America: Anzaldúa in 242 – 243; books and Lindstrom, Naomi 84
publishing in 132 – 133; Our Bodies, Ourselves Lionnet, Françoise 77
in 522; queerness in 256; Rights of Women Lispector, Clarice 83 – 84, 228
(Wollstonecraft) in 180; women writers 84 – 85, Liturgiam Authenticam 471, 473
93 – 103; Woolf in 187 Liu, Bohong 511 – 514
564
Index
Li Yinhe 李银河 311 and the Soviet Union 297; and women, theory
Lloyd-Jones, Antonia 145 of 316
Lloyd-Jones, Ian 143 Marxist-Leninism 267, 279, 282 – 283, 287 – 288
Locke, Anne 117 Marxist-Leninism-Maoism 310, 312 – 313
Longino, Helen E. 286 Marxist Leninist (ML) movement (India) 20 – 22;
Loredan, Giovanni Francesco 108 see also communism
Lorris, Guillaume de 6 Marxist-Leninist Party (M-LP) (India) 21
Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de 122, 458 masculinism 186
Louar, Nadia 367 Masmoudi, Ikram 55
Louis XIV (king of France) 109 Mason, Marianne 162
Lugones, María 242 Massa, Manuel María 153
Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata 113 Massardier-Kenney, Françoise 58, 130
Lumet, Sidney 153 Mass Effect 4 (video game) 450, 451 – 453
Luong, Ngoc Quang 460 Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI)
Lurie, Alison 530 programmes (China) 163
Lu, Zhang see Zhang Lu Materyns’ka moltyva (Maternal Prayer) 8
Lynch, Teresa, 445 Matthiessen, Francis Otto 118
Matute, Ana María 93
machine translation (MT) 11, 457 – 468 Mauriac, François 297
Mackay, Louis 11 Mauron, Charles 294
Mackie,Vera 348 May Fourth Movement 309 – 313, 349 – 351, 356
MacLaine, Shirley 415 Mazzei, Cristiano 256, 321
Magdy, Rana 402 McCarthy, Mary 151 – 153
Maghreb, the 64 McConnell-Ginet, Sally 364, 367
Maghrebi literature and women’s writing 65 – 77; McElhinny, Bonnie 366
Arabic 68 – 71; francophone 67 – 68; see also McLelland, Mark 348
ethnographic frame McMurtry, Larry 151
Magnifico, Cédric 161 McRuer, Robert 257
Mahila Margam (Women’s Path) magazine 20 Mechakra,Yamina 66
Mahmoody, Betty 71 Medal of Honor Warfighter (MoHW) (video game)
Mahmoud, Fatma Abdallah 218, 220 447, 447 – 449, 553
Maier, Carol 119 Mehrez, Samia 67 – 68, 77, 486
Ma Junwu 马君武 312 Meï, Siobhan Marie 5 – 13
Makarska, Renata 114 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia
Malabou, Catherine 7, 11 (I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in
Malecka, Wanda (née Fryz) 110 Guatemala) (Burgos) 95, 96 – 98; see also Menchú,
Malinche, La 10 Rigoberta
Mallan, Kerry 532 memes 173 – 181; Wollestonecraft’s rise to a 180
Malovany-Chevallier, Sheila 209, 230 – 235, 294 Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful
Mamdouh, Alia 50 – 52, 54 – 56 Daughter) (Beauvoir): Arabic translation of
Man Booker Prize 128 – 129, 138 215 – 216, 219
Mandarins, Les (Beauvoir): Arabic translation of memory 543; of the body 72; collective 74, 206,
212 – 214 286; countermemory 74; and erasure 226, 339,
manga 544, 546 – 553 355; in literature 41 – 42, 45, 51, 93, 178 – 179;
Mankiewicz, Joseph 419, 423 picture book 544, 553; queer 341, 354 – 355; in
Mansour, Nihad 401 – 412 testimonial texts 94; of women in the history of
Mao Zedong 21; post-Mao era 351, 356 translation 149; see also cultural memory
Marivaux, Pierre de 110 Men and Women Gender Equality Programme
Marlatt, Daphne 543, 553 491
Márquez, Gabriel García 112 Menchú, Rigoberta 84, 93; see also Me llamo
Marshall, Elizabeth 532 Rigoberta Menchú
Martínez, Antonio 151 Meng, Lingzi 161 – 162
Martin, Fran 354 – 355 Men in Charge (Al-qiwāmah al-turāth al-Islāmi) 489
Marx, Karl 21; Communist Manifesto 299 men in translation (MIT) 133, 135, 137
Marxism and Marxist theory 24, 186, 269; and Menon, Rukmini 21
Christianity 285; and existentialism 298; and Merkle, Denise 45, 147
feminism 272; and political correctness 414; Mernissi, Fatema 66, 69 – 70, 70, 76 – 77, 497
565
Index
Merrill, Christi 96 Mudu Taralu (Three Generations) (Kollontai, trans.

metonymy 74, 93 – 106 Volga) 18, 22, 25 – 26
Meun, Jean de 6 Mueller, Magda 267
Mezei, Kathy 45 Muhammad, Harbiya 49
Michałowska, Mira 112 Mullaney, Louise 45
Michaud, Mathilde 471 – 480 Müller, Catherine M. 119
Michel, Mozez 187 multiple authorship (concept of) 7
Microsoft Bing (MB) 461, 463 multiple translatorship (concept of) 7
Middle East 3, 68, 70 – 71, 75, 154; feminism in Mulvey, Laura 268, 281
406, 533, 535; translation issues in 492, 521 Munday, Jeremy 150
Mignolo, Walter 339, 341 Munro, Alice 38
Milani, Farzaneh 71 Murray, Judith Sargent 24
Miller, Henry 543 Musawah (Malaysia) 488 – 489
Millett, Kate 21, 33, 200, 268, 293, 529; in China Mustafa, Shakir 50, 52
315; reading of Henry Miller 543 MUTE (University of Valencia) 150
Mill, John Stuart 21 Muzaffar, May 50
Mill on the Floss see Elliot, George Mycielska, Gabriela 296
Mills, Sara 45, 414 – 415, 420
Milne, A. A. (Alexander Alan) 112 Naguib Mahfouz Medal 56, 65, 69 – 70
Milton, John 109 Nahuatl 239
Min, Dongchao 511 Nakajima,Yukiko 162, 166
Minamata umi no koe (Minamata the voice of the Nakwaska, Anna (née Krajewska) 110
sea) 544, 553 Nancy, Jean-Luc 122
Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance Nanda, Serena 337, 342
(MCIG) see Islamic Republic of Iran Napier, John 122
Mir-Husseini, Ziba 481 Napierski, Stefan 112
miroir des âmes simples et anéanties, Le (The Mirror of Narbuttowa, Anna (née Grozmani) 108
Simple Souls) (Porete) 6 Nashaz Law 406 – 407
Mistral, Gabriela 84 Nasrin, Taslima 188
mistranslation 10, 75, 181, 197, 202, 229 – 231, 235, Nathanaël (poet) 257
484; of gender in machine translation 457, 460, National Assembly, France 259
463 National Book Trust (NBT) 19
Miszalska, Jadwiga 108 National Catholicism 153
Mizumura, Minae 544 – 545 National Council for Women (NCW) (Egypt) 403
MohamiatMisr 407 national identity 69, 73, 354
Mohammed, the Prophet 485, 489, 496 – 499, 504 nationalism 54, 66, 75, 266, 299, 252
Moi, Toril 216, 231 – 232, 259, 294 National Library & Archives of the Islamic
Mokeddem, Malika 66, 74 Republic of Iran 32, 36 – 37, 39
Molière 108 – 109 National Taiwan University 351
Molza, Tarquinia 123 Navarre, Marguerite de 6
Montalembert, Charles de 110 Naxalbari movement see Srikakulam Naxalbari
Montenay, Georgette de 119 movement
Monti, Johanna 457 – 468 Nayef, Heba 393
Moore, Lindsey 77 Nazi Germany see Germany
Morales, Maria Luz 151 Nehru, Jawaharlal 240
Morocco 64 – 69, 73, 75 – 77; and Irish 328; and Nesbit, Edith 112
women 393; see also Laghzali Neopolitan series (Ferrante) 9
Mortada, Leil-Zahra 401, 432 Nevalainen, Terttu 364
Moses, Claire 259 New Woman Research Center (NWRC) 403
Mosteghanemi, Ahlem 65, 69 – 72, 70 Ng Siu-ming 吳小明 see Xiaomingxiong
Mostowska, Anna (née Radziwiłł) 108 Niazi, Salah 52
motherhood 17, 22; Beauvoir’s position on Niedzwiecki, Patricia 380
197 – 198, 200 – 202, 233, 235; exalted 312; in Nielsen Book 136
literature 25, 83 – 91, 101, 191; and womanhood Nietzsche, Friedrich 113
529; Zaïda’s position on 500 Niranjana, Tejaswini 17, 186, 188, 337
Moyse,Yvonne 230 Nissen, Uwe Kjær 369, 376
Mshvenieradze,Vladimir V. 279 Nodelman, Perry 528
566
Index
Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) 337 Pérez, María 151

Nord, Christiane 486 Perrault, Charles 530
Norma, Carolina 162 Perri, Antonio 363 – 373
Norway/Norwegian 9, 143, 145 Pettini, Silvia 444 – 456
Norwood, Robin 314 philosophy 5 – 6, 122; 20th century 196; of
Nwapa, Flora 93 Beauvoir 196 – 203, 205, 224 – 238; of Butler
258; feminist 229 – 230, 239, 276, 280; French
Obank, Margaret 52 122; liberal 174, 282; Marxist 20; political 181,
O’Barr, William 161 267, 278; publishing houses specializing in 244;
Ocampo, Silvina 83 – 84; Cornelia frente al Espejo of translation 23, 282; translation of, special
(Cornelia Before the Mirror) 85, 88 – 90 challenges posed by 224 – 238, 259, 303; Western
Ocampo,Victoria 55, 295 188; see also existentialism; Heidegger; Sartre
Odyssey,The (Homer) 11 Phule, Jyotirao 28
Offen, Karen 173 Phule, Savitribai 28
Okabe, Itsuko 199 Pickford, Susan 73 – 76
Okin, Susan Moller 282 Pillai, Meena 186, 193
Orientalism 74, 346 Piller, Ingrid 160
Ortúñez de Calahorra, Diego 118 Piotrowczy, Andrzej 108
Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief Piotrowczykowa, Anna Teresa (née Pernus) 108
(OC) 486 Piotrowczykowa, Jadwiga 108
Ostrowska, Bronisława 112 “plasticity” 7
O’ Sullivan, Carol 418 Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Malabou) 7
Oswald, Alice 114 Plumas Traidoras 325
Othman Ibn Affan 497 Pöchhacker, Franz 159
Othman, Mustafa 491 Poe, Edgar Allan 368
Otouto no otto (My Brother’s Husband) (Tagame) Pokojska, Agnieszka 114
544, 546 – 550, 547 Poland 1 – 2; Anzaldúa’s influence in 240; Bible
Our Bodies, Ourselves 520 – 525; Chinese translation translation in 473, 476; Catholic Church of 477;
of 508 – 517; in Russia 281 censorship in 154; feminist discourse and works
translated in 291 – 303; Latin American prose
Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇 354 – 355 in 112; men translated in 145 – 146; Our Bodies,
país bajo mi piel. Memorias de amor y Guerra, El (The Ourselves in 521; women translators in 107, 110,
Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and 114; women translated in 143
War) see Belli, Gioconda political correctness see sexism
Pakszys, Elżbieta 299 Polish October 297
Palekar, Shalmalee 257, 331 Polish United Workers Party 297
Pan, Feng 161 Poole, Roger 188
Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 Pope, Alexander 109
Pan Tadeusz 111 Popescue-Belis, Andrei 460
Parhiz-kari, Samaneh 37 Porete, Marguerite 6
Payne, Matthew 444 Potocka, Maria (née Katska) 109
Pennington, John 532 Pradhan, Gopalji 187 – 188
Pérez, Efrén 391 Prates, Marcela O. 463
Perez-Gonzales, Luis 405 Preciado, Paul B. 323
Pérez, Maria 151 pregnancy 24 – 25, 511, 514
Parhiz-kari, Samaneh 37 Progressive Organization for Women
Parkes, Bessie 179 (POW) 21
Parshley, Howard Madison 196, 231 – 232, 294 Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género
Pattnai, Devdutt 338 (PUEG) 239, 243
Pauwels, Anne 160, 376 Project Plume 138
Pavlenko, Aneta 160 Prophetic traditions 481, 486 – 487
Pears, Pamela 74 Prophet of Islam see Mohammad, the Prophet
Pedro Ricoy, Raquel de 95 Prophet, the see Mohammad, the Prophet
Penrod, Lynn Kettler 228 Proto-Indo-European languages (PIE) 365
People’s Republic of China (PRC) 308; see also Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Anna 112
China Puar, Jasbir K. 257
Perdita Manuscripts database 117 Punt, Jeremy 477
567
Index
Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) 463 Rehak, Bob 445

Pym, Anthony 20, 345 Renaissance 117, 119; English 118
Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue 122 – 123
QAF fan group 357 Reverzy, Jean 112
Qanbar, Nada 429 – 443 Reynolds, Kimberley 532
qanitat 503 – 504 Rich, Adrienne 131, 543
Qantara 483 Robertson, William 109
Qiu Jin 秋瑾 312 Robinson, Douglas 119
Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns 118, 122 Robinson, Nick 448 – 449
queer, queering 244, 369; category of 340; concept Robyns, Clem 544
of 345; and feminism 431; and gender 315; in Rochefort, Christiane 34
India 336 – 342; in Sinophone culture 345 – 358; Rodríguez Carmen 153
sexuality 355; and the social sciences 277; in Roederer, Pierre-Louis 178
Spain 324; term, meaning of 249, 331, 341; and Rofel, Lisa 354
translation 255 – 265; violence against 336 Rogers, Mary 37
queer scholars 337 Rogoszówna, Zofia 112
queer studies 239 – 240, 242, 294; in Poland Rollings, Andrew 447
301 – 302; see also Butler Romaine, Suzanne 366
queer theory 201, 257 – 258, 261 – 262, 268; Romanian language 268
attempts to delegitimize 299 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf): 2, 33, 291,
queer transfeminism 319 – 332 293 – 296, 309; Hindi translations of 184 – 195
Quijano, Aníbal 339 Roper, Margaret More 117
Quran, Qur’an 481 – 491, 500, 505 – 506; Rose, Jacqueline 531
translations by women 393, 496; wife Rossatti, Alessandro 321
disciplining in 408 Rossetti, Christina 188
Quran and Woman (Wadud/Adnan) 484, 492 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 38
rowat 74
Raczyński, Edward 110 Rowe, Karen E. 529
Raczyński, Konstancja 110 Roy, Raina 340
Radzinski, Meytal 130 Rubin, Gayle 281
Radziwiłłowa, Barbara 108 Ruonakoski, Erika 231
Radziwiłłowa, Franciszka Urszula (duchess) Russell, Letty 473
108 – 109 Russell, Sandra Joy 5 – 14
Rahemtulla, Shadaab 484 Russia: pre-Soviet 277 – 278; post-Soviet 280 – 282
Rahimi, Norman 37 Russian language 3; borrowed terms in 270;
Raja, Anita 9 English, translated into 276 – 288; ‘gender’ in
Rajabzadeh, Ahmad 40 269; as lingua franca 277 – 278; male authors in
Rajewska, Ewa 107 – 116 translation 135, 145; Our Bodies, Ourselves in
Ramaswamy, Geeta 21 272; translations from 112;Volga’s fluency in
Ranganayakamma, Muppala 26 20, 24
Rani, Challapalli Swarupa 27 Ruterana, Pierre Canisius 532
Ranzato, Irene 413 – 428 Rutkowski, Sara 5 – 14
Rao, Katti Padma 26 Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez 256
Rao,Venkata Subba 20 Rwandan genocide 93
Raszewska, Anna 112 – 113 Ryan, Rachael 159 – 160, 166
Raumolin-Brunberg 364
Rawat, Ramnarayan 340 Sadiqi, Fatima 393
rawiyat 74 Sadkowski, Wacław 114
Reader on Feminism and Religious Studies (Al-niswiya Said, Edward 20, 48, 70, 352
wa al-dirāsāt al-dīniya) 488 Said, Sahar 208 – 209
Reda, Nevin 481 Saldívar-Hul, Sonia 244
Rée, Jonathan 224, 227 Saleh, Amani 481
Reed, Patricia 325 Saleh, Daniel [sic] 208
referents (linguistic) 363 – 364, 366, 376, 379 – 384; Salih, Salima 50, 74
and gender 321, 370, 446; queer, indeterminacy Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf 175, 177 – 178
of 352; in videogames 448 Sami, Hala G. 205 – 223
Reformation 6, 117, 473 Sánchez, Lola 149
568
Index
Sanger, Margaret 24 Sexton, Anne 530

Sang des autres, Le see Beauvoir Sezer, Melek 530
Sang, Tze-lan Deborah 348 – 352, 356 Shaaban, Bouthaina 496
Sanguszkow, Barbara Urszula 109 Shafik, Doria 402
Santaemilia, José 257 Shakespeare, William 109
Santorski, Jacek 299 Shamma, Tareq 76
Sapir, Edward 391 Shamsan, Muayad 394
Sapiro, Gisèle 71 Shamsie, Kamila 127, 131, 136
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 378 Shan Zai 善哉 349
Sappho 321 – 322 Shapiro, Esther 522, 525
Sartre, Jean-Paul: and Beauvoir 197, 199, 205, 215, Sha’rawi, Huda 402
220, 293, 297; on “sense” 226; Huis Clos 299 Sharia (Shariaa) see Islamic Sharia
Satō, Hiroko 201 Sharifi, Sima 32 – 47
Satyanarayan, K. 340 Sharma, Garima 184 – 195
Satyavathi, P. 20 Shatby (Imam) 496
Savarna movement (India) 20, 27, 342 Shavit, Zohar 531
Schäffner, Christina 434 Shaw, Sylvia 375
Schiebinger, Londa 461 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 179
Schmierbach, Mike 447 Shen Zemin 349
Schneider, Gertrude 93 Shih, Shu-mei 77
Schreibenycher, Anna 108 Shimon, Samuel 52
Schüngel-Straumann 474 – 476 Shread, Carolyn 5 – 14, 230
Scott, Joan W. 268, 281 Shree, Geetanjali 186
Scott, Walter (Sir) 110 Shriver, Lionel 127
Seager, Jane 122 Shrouded Woman,The see Amortajada, La
Sebbar, Leila 66 Shyamala, Gogu 27
Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 255; Epistemology Sideeg, Abdunasir 393
of the Closet 257 – 258, 261 – 262; “Queer Sidney, Mary 119
Performativity” 543 Sigismund II Vasa (King) 107
Second Sex,The (Beauvoir) 7, 21, 33, 36, 36, Simón, Carmen Valle 239
232 – 234; in Arabic 209 – 212, 219; in China Simon, Sherry 45, 148
309, 314 – 315, 509; in English 226, 231 – 233; Simons, Margaret 231
in Japan/Japanese 196 – 203; in Poland/Polish Single Numberless Death, A see Sola muerte numerosa,
298 – 299, 302 – 303; in Spain 151 – 153; see also Una (Strejilevich)
Parshley, Howard Madison Skevington Wood, Arthur 473
Sellers, Susan 228 Skibniewska, Maria 112
Senhouse, Roger 230 Skwara, Ewa 114
Serjeantson, Deirdre 122 Slavova, Kornelia 266 – 275, 366, 521
Sethna, Christabelle 523 Smedley, Agnes 18, 25; Daughter of Earth (Bhumi
sexism 40, 384; and AVT 417; grammatical 375; Putrika [Telugu]) 25
and political correctness 413 – 414; and the Smith, Ali 368
social sciences 277; struggle against 44, 419; Smith, Barbara 28
women’s experiences of 415; see also linguistic Smith, Deborah 144
sexism Smith, Helen 121
sexual activity 416; and sin 87 Smith, Julia 475
sexual and reproductive health 514, 518 – 525; see Smith, Rosalind 123
also birth control; childbirth; pregnancy Smith, Stacy L. 445
sexuality 7, 10, 17, 22, 24, 193 – 194; in Anzaldua’s Sobti, Krishna 193
work 239; in Beauvoir’s work 230, 298 – 299, Sola muerte numerosa, Una (Strejilevich) (A Single
313 – 314; in Catholic theology 474, 478; Numberless Death) 95, 97 – 99
contested 356; deviant 71; discourses on 255, Solanas,Valerie 327
472; fetishized 72; and gender 269, 272, 301, Solberg, Ida Hove 5 – 14
410; non-normative 353 – 354, 358; queer Solnit, Rebecca 148 – 149
256 – 257, 355; taboos 273; and translation 100; Sommy, Soheil 41, 44
and women’s bodies 402, 519; and women’s Sora no ito (The Thread of the Sky) (Yada Eriko)
health 509 – 514, 518, 521 – 522; see also 550 – 552
censorship; heterosexuality; homosexuality Sørsdal, Kristin 9
569
Index
source text (ST) 32 Szapocznikow, Alina 298

Soviet Union 93, 266, 270, 278 Szwebs, Weronika 291 – 307
Spain see censorship; Francoism Szymborska, Wisława 113
Spanish language 3; Anzaldúa in 2, 239 – 247;
dubbing into 419, 423, 431 – 432; English into Tabakowska, Elżbieta 113
323; as gendered language 363, 375 – 387; as Tacitus 109
hegemonic language 11, 328; Iranian works Taffin, Jean 120
translated in 33; Iraqi works translated into 56; Tafsir 497 – 499, 501
into Italian 323 – 324; literary works in 85 – 91; Tagame, Gengoroh (Tagame Gengoroh) 544,
and machine learning 464, 522; in the Maghreb 546 – 548
65; Our Bodies, Ourselves in 522, 525; into Polish Taïa, Abdellah 256
108; testimonios in 97 – 102; translations into 143, Taiwan 143; Anzaldúa’s work in 240; normative
151; in Turkish 533; translations from 132 – 133, sexualities and queer identity in 345, 347 – 357;
135, 144 – 145, 152 – 153, 178, 187; in videogames Our Bodies, Ourselves in 510 – 511
445 – 448, 451 – 454; women depicted in literary Takai, Kuniko 200
works in 10; see also Amortajada, La Talbot, Mary 45
Spanish Royal Academy 376 Talib, Aliya 50, 52
Spencer, Herbert 312 Taliban 93
Spender, Dale 473 – 474 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 177 – 178
Spicer, Jack 256 Tan, Chong Kee 352
Spivak, Gayatri 17, 77, 186, 188 Tang, Wenpei 510
Spoturno, María Laura 239 – 252 Tavits, Margit 391
Spurlin, William J. 256 – 257, 331 Tawq, Marie 208, 212 – 214, 219
Srikakulam Naxalbari movement 20 – 21 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) 189
Środa, Magdalena 299
Tarabishi, Georges 212 – 213, 219
Staël, Germaine de (Madame de Staël) 180
Tarnowska, Krystyna 112
Stalin, Joseph 295
Taronna, Annarita 153, 321
Stanislaus I 110
Telangana Armed Struggle 21
Stanton, Domna 259
television shows 427 – 418; Crown,The 418; Life on
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 24, 475
Mars 413 – 416; Mad Men 415 – 416
Starkey, Paul 51
Telugu 3, 17, 18, 20 – 29; see also Volga
Stavrovyetski, Kirill 108
Tejaswini, Niranjana 17
Steinem, Gloria 545
Stein, Gertrude 544 – 545 Teso, Elena 375 – 376
Stephens, John 529 Tharakeshwar,V. B. 17
Stevenson, Jane 123 Tharu, Susie 27, 186
Stillinger, Jack 7 Thatcher, Margaret (Maggie) 421
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 112; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 34 theocracy: Iran 37 – 38, 40 – 41, 44
Stree Shakti Sangatana (SSS) (Women Power Thott, Birgitte 123
Organization) 20 – 21 Tidd, Ursula 230
Strejilevich, Nora 93, 95, 97 – 99 Tito, Josip 266
Student Federation of India (SFI) 20 Tobler, Stefan 127 – 128
Subadra, Joopaka 27 Tokarczuk, Olga 300
subtitling 3, 256, 356, 430 – 433, 436; in the Arab Tolstoy, Leo 297
world 401 – 425 Tolstoy, Sophia 297
Suddenly, Last Summer (film) 423 – 424 Toury, Gideon 17
Summit, Jennifer 6 Trabelsi, Baha 66
Sunnah 497 – 499, 501, 504 TRACE group (University of Léon) 15
Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem 417, 524 – 525 transfeminism 2, 320 – 322; collectives 322 – 327; see
Sweden 9, 143 also queer transfeminism
Swedish International Development Cooperation transgender 270, 320 – 322; in India 336 – 342; in
Agency 491 Japan 549; in Taiwan 354
Świrszczyńska, Anna (Anna Swir) 298 translated feminist children’s literature (TFCL)
Switzerland 145 533 – 534
Syria 146, 205; Feminine Mystique in 216; translation sociology 354
publishers in 486 – 487; see also Said, Sahar; translators (male) 118 – 119, 122, 185 – 187, 196; see
Tarabishi, Georges also Holmes, James S.; Parshley, Howard
570
Index
translators (women) and translation 9 – 10, Velasco, Julián de 178

118 – 119; Arabic 209 – 216; and censorship 41; Velde, Theodoor Hendrik de 298
as cultural mediators 135, 240; and cultural Venuti, Lawrence 76, 206, 225
representation 85 – 90; in the digital age 11 – 12; Vergès, Françoise 323
‘documentary’ 486; feminist 17 – 29, 58, 119, Verstegan, Richard 122
193, 208, 224, 235, 259 – 260, 267, 524 – 525; Vicente, Angeles 393
and gender pairings with writers 136, 187; video games 444 – 468
influence of 235; Iranian 34, 44; Iraqi 48 – 56; Vidya (Living Smile) 338
in modern Europe 117 – 126; Maghrebi 74; Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollestonecraft)
Malayam 186; “naïve” 280 – 282, 287 – 288; noble 24, 235, 309; in China 315; Godwin’s memoirs
(rank) 108 – 109; in non-Western culture 45; of of 177, 179; in Iran 38; misattributions and
philosophy 226 – 230; Polish 107 – 116; queer mistranslations of 180; translations of 173, 302,
256, 258, 262 – 263, 270; Russian 278; sexist 315
413 – 428; South American 84; as subversion 5, Vindya 27
9 – 10, 458; as texts 74 – 76 Vinson, Pauline Homsi 69
Tratnik, Suzana 270 Viplava Rachayitala Sangam (Revolutionary
trauma: colonial 66; testimonies of 93 Writers’ Association) (India) 20
Travers, Pamela Lyndon 112 Virgil 121
Trentacosti, Giulia 128 Visscher, Anna Roemers 119
Trill, Suzanne 119 Vitiello, Giovanni 347 – 348
Tripathi, Laxmi Narayan 339, 342 Vittorini, Elio 368
Tristan, Flora 179 Volga 17 – 31; “Feminism Ante” (Feminism Means)
Trites, Roberta Seelinger 531 23; feminist texts by 18 – 19; Mudu Taralu
Trzeszczkowska, Zofia (née Mańkowska) 110 (Three Generations) 22, 25 – 26; Puttani Biddaku
Tso, Wing 533 Talli Uttaram (Letter to a Child Never Born) 22;
Tunisia 64 – 66, 208 Swechcha (Liberty) 22; Tholi Velugulu–Sthrivadha
Turkey 146; feminism in 533; translated feminist Siddhantha Vikasam (First Illumination–Evolution
children’s literature in 534; Wollstonecraft in of Feminist Theory) 23
180 Volpp, Sophie 347
Turra, Elisabetta Caminer 179 Voorhees, Gerald A. 445
Tuwim, Irena 112 Voynich, Ethel: Gadfly 36, 37
Tuwim, Julian 112
Tyler, Margaret 117 – 118 Walser, Robert 113
Tymoczko, Maria 45, 96 Walsh, Catherine 341
Wang, Hsiu-yun 510
Ukraine 8, 277 Wasamgi, Siddiqa 485
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 349 Wadud, Amina 481, 484, 488, 492, 497
Ulysse, Gina Athena 8 Wang, Hsiu-yun 510 – 511
Umutesi, Marie Béatrice 93 Wang,Yin 354
Union Feministe Libre (UFL)(Morocco) 407 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 129 – 130
United Arab Emirates (UAE) 2, 436 Waugh, Thomas 262
Untranslatable, the 226 – 227 Weaver, Helen 229
untranslatable 320, 341, 496 Wegener, Anna 7
Upadhyay, Nishant 336 – 344 Wei Sheng 薇生 349
Urdu 363 Weiss, Max 146
Usha, M. 17 Weiss, Reska 93
Utopia group (France) 327 – 328 Weissenborn, Georg Friedrich Christian 175,
177 – 179
Vagina Monologues,The see Ensler, Eve 311, 524 Wells, H. G. 111
Van Gogh,Vincent 187 Wentz’l, Maria 111
Vanita, Ruth 338 Wenzel, Hélène Vivienne 229
Varma, Mahadevi 193 Whipps, Judy 37
Vanmassenhove, Eva 463 White, Micheline 119
Vassallo, Helen 127 – 146 Who provides? Who cares? Changing Dynamics in
Vatican 205, 471 Muslim Families 491
Vatican Council 152 Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake
Vazquez, Pilar 153 Chronicle (Ulysse) 8
571
Index
Wilkie-Stubbs, Christine 534 Xiaomingxiong 小明雄 346

Williams, Tennessee 423 Xie Se 謝瑟 349
Willis, Sharon 228
Wilson, Emily 11 Yacowar, Maurice 415
Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in Yada, Eriko (Yada Eriko) 544, 550, 552 – 553
North America 485 Yalom, Marilyn 315
Winterson, Jeanette 368 Yalta Conference 292
Wirtemberska, Maria 109 Yañez, Gabriela Luisa 93 – 106
Wisłocka, Michalina 298 Yang Youtian 楊憂天 349
WITMonth campaign 130 Yan Shi 晏始 349
Wittig, Monique 216, 224, 227 – 229, 258, 260 – 261 Year of Publishing Women (YPW) 127 – 139
Wojciechowska, Martyna 296 Yiddish 365
Wolf, Michaela 45 Yolen, Jane 530
Wollstonecraft, Mary 2, 24, 151, 173 – 183; Young, Iris Marion 225
Maria, or Wrongs of Women 173 – 181; Yuan, Mingming 533
Vindication of the Rights of Women 38, Yúdice, George 321
173 – 181; see also meme Yugoslavia 93, 154, 266, 521
Women and Memory Forum (WMF) (Egypt) Yu, Zhongli 308 – 318, 319, 524
403, 488
women in translation (WIT) 133 – 134 Zagórska, Aniela 118
Women’s International Day 127 Zangana, Haifa 50 – 51, 55, 57
Women’s Stories,Women’s Lives 491 Zapatistas 11
Woods, Michelle 45 Zawistowska, Kazimiera 112
Woolf,Virginia 114, 216, 268, 281, 301 – 302; Zawiszanka-Łaniewska, Maria Beata 108
Mrs Dalloway 36, 294 – 295, 316; Orlando 38, Zawisza,Voivodeship Krzysztof 108
294, 321; To the Lighthouse 294 – 295, 316; Waves, Zeig, Sande 228
The 34, 35, 36, 36, 37; see also Room of One’s Żeleńska, Zofia 112
Own Zerilli, Linda Marie-Gelsomina 229
World War II 93, 103, 197, 202; and Beauvoir Zetkin, Clara 24
293, 296; Kristeva on 286; post-war 212, 266, Zhang Jingsheng 張競生 348, 350
295; revolutionary movements of 279; and Zhang Lu 162 – 166
Western feminism, impact on 292; and Woolf Zhang Zhujun 张竹君 312
294 – 295 Zhao, Jieyu 463
Woydyłło, Ewa 296 Zheng, Binghan 161
Wright, Chantal 129 Zilfi, Madeline 498
Wright, Francis 24 Zipes, Jack 529 – 531
Wright, Gillian 122 Zoberman, Pierre 375
Wu Cuncun 346 Zou, James 462
Wu, Michelle Ming-chih 356 Zwischenberger, Cornelia 159
572

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The Routledge Handbook

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PHILOSOPHY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND PRAGMATICS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND EDUCATION

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND ACTIVISM

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, FEMINISM

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND COGNITION

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Hand

Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal

List of illustrations xii

1 Women (re)writing authority: a roundtable discussion

2 Volga as an international agent of feminist translation 17

3 Translation of women-centred literature in Iran: macro and micro analysis 32

4 Pathways of solidarity in transit: Iraqi women writers’ story-making

5 Maghrebi women’s literature in translation 64

6 Translation and gender in South America: the representation of

7 Translating metonymies that construct gender: testimonial

8 Polish women translators: a herstory 107

9 Women translators in early modern Europe 117

10 Women writers in translation in the UK: the “Year of Publishing

11 Censorship and women writers in translation: focus on Spain

12 Gender and interpreting: an overview and case study of a woman

13 The Wollstonecraft meme: translations, appropriations,

14 An Indian woman’s room of one’s own: a reflection on Hindi

15 A tale of two translations: (re)interpreting Beauvoir in Japan,

16 Bridging the cultural gap: the translation of Simone de Beauvoir

17 Translating French feminist philosophers into English: the case

18 On Borderlands and translation: the Spanish versions of Gloria

19 At the confluence of queer and translation: subversions,

20 Feminism in the post-communist world in/as translation 266

21 The uneasy transfer of feminist ideas and gender theory:

22 Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s

23 Translating feminism in China: a historical perspective 308

24 Queer transfeminism and its militant translation: collective,

25 Translating queer: reading caste, decolonizing praxis 336

26 Sinicizing non-normative sexualities: through translation’s

27 Grammatical gender and translation: a cross-linguistic overview 363

28 Le président est une femme: the challenges of translating gender

29 Identifying and countering sexist labels in Arabic translation:

30 Egypt: Arab women’s feminist activism in volunteer subtitled

31 The sexist translator and the feminist heroine: politically incorrect

32 Women in audiovisual translation: the Arabic context 429

33 Gender in war video games: the linguacultural representation

34 Gender issues in machine translation: an unsolved problem? 457

35 Translating the Bible into English: how translations transformed

36 Negotiation of meaning in translating ‘Islamic feminist’ texts

37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an 496

38 Translation and women’s health in post-reform China: a case study

39 Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health 518

40 Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation, and translation 528

41 Recognition, risk, and relationships: feminism and translation

Mónica Ahumada is a part-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Rosa Basaure is an assistant professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Sanaa Benmessaoud is Assistant Professor in Translation and Comparative Studies at the

Marlène Bichet teaches English at the Université de Franche-Comté (France). Her

Andrea Campaña is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Marcela Contreras is a full-time professor in the Linguistics and Literature Department at

Beverley Curran is a lecturer of linguistic, cultural, and media translation at International

Sama Dawood is Associate Professor of Translation and Interpreting in the Department of

Handegül Demirhan is a lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Studies department

Laura Fontanella is a postgraduate in European and extra-European languages and literature at

Pauline Henry-Tierney is a lecturer in French and translation studies at Newcastle University,

List of illustrations xii

2 Volga as an international agent of feminist translation 17

3 Translation of women-centred literature in Iran: macro and micro analysis 32

5 Maghrebi women’s literature in translation 64

8 Polish women translators: a herstory 107

9 Women translators in early modern Europe 117

20 Feminism in the post-communist world in/as translation 266

23 Translating feminism in China: a historical perspective 308

25 Translating queer: reading caste, decolonizing praxis 336

27 Grammatical gender and translation: a cross-linguistic overview 363

32 Women in audiovisual translation: the Arabic context 429

34 Gender issues in machine translation: an unsolved problem? 457

37 Feminist strategies in women’s translations of the Qur’an 496

39 Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health 518

40 Children’s literature, feminism, adaptation, and translation 528

Table 3.2 Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s

Figure 5.1 Languages of translation