Gender and Genre in Translation: The Linguistic Construction of Femininity in the American and French Editions of Early 1920s VOGUE

Abstract

This paper aims to bridge the gap between gender, genre and translation studies by taking an interdisciplinary approach across these research areas and employing some of the tools of corpus linguistics to provide a contrastive analysis of the linguistic construction of femininity in the American and French editions of early-1920s Vogue. In particular, it takes as a sample twenty-four Vogue issues published in 1921 and focuses on its extensive fashion features, originally written in English and then translated or adapted so as to appear in the French edition. A contrastive analysis of two parallel corpora (one consisting of the fashion articles published in 1921 Vogue US and another comprising their translations/adaptations for Vogue France) as regards frequency, collocational patterning and co-textual environment of lexical items pertaining to the domains of fashion and femininity reveals both similarities and differences in the linguistic representation of gender identity across two different cultures, alongside the adoption of particular translation strategies.