Gender and translation

Abstract

Three decades have passed since the publication of Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), in which Jacques Derrida compared woman with writing and, therefore, with translation, and over these years an ever-growing interest in translation studies and the role of gender has produced rich and varied research. While echoing the theories of the death of the author, of the new concept of canon and of the breaking up of hierarchies and binary oppositions expounded by contemporary intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and despite repeating the sexual language of the dominant discourses of former eras, Derridean translation theory defends the idea that original and translation are hierarchically equal, with no dependence or submission, and that the translator (normally a woman), like the author, writes, she does not rewrite. Derrida favours the woman translator and the translation in relation to the man and the original text, his aim being to put an end to textual and sexual subordination. He presents the era of the woman and translation as the ‘second age’. The first age was that of the man, of Plato, of the truth, of the source text. The second is that of the woman, non-truth, translation. In this article I take this Derridean ‘second age’ as the starting point, both in time and ideology, and carry out archaeological2 research into what has been done since the 1980s up till now, in the intersection of gender and translation studies. In keeping with the evolution of translation studies towards a new way of consideringthe hermeneutic act of translating, feminist translators in the 1980s began to pay close attention to the concept of identity and to the representation of woman in and through language. One of the first visible intersections between translation studies and feminist viewpoints was the Canadian School of feminist translation, which generated critiques for and against their translating strategies. Alongside this debate sporadic theoretical worksappeared such as those of Lori Chamberlain, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Carol Maier, who was motivated by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) in which she proposes that ‘gender’ should be understood as a construction rather than a static cultural label as had been the case up till then. This state of affairs marked the starting point for later studies on the interaction between gender studies and translation studies in the new millennium. In this chapter I will carry out an archaeological investigation in the field of this inter-section along three lines, which I have baptized with the following titles: (i) ‘theoretical origins: gender definitions, metaphors and myths in the feminine’, a section covering the main theoretical sources that have dealt with the intersection of gender and translation over recent years, either conceptually or metaphorically; (ii) ‘historiographic research: “recovery and commentary” of women translators and feminist authors’, an analysis of works that have rediscovered women translators and their writings, and have transferred classic feminist texts to other languages; and (iii) ‘translation practices: feminine affinities and paratextual approaches’, an approach to various experiences of translation practice based on the relationship between the woman translator and the author. Finally, the conclusions carry the title ‘future perspectives’. It must be said that the paleographic task carried out here is partial, biased and subjective. Despite an attempt to introduce traces of languages and cultures that are not English, it is, on the whole, a representative sample of the work done in the misnamed First World. We are therefore conscious of the fact that this archaeology should be extended to other languages and cultures which, for many reasons, are not easily accessible to us.