Translating harassment: cross cultural reconstruction of the feminist identity in translated fiction

Abstract

The issue of the sexual harassment of women is often discussed in academic literature, but how this issue is dealt with translated works has rarely been investigated. Targeting this lacuna, this study analyses the construction of the identity of the sexually harassed woman in two selected translations of a single novel. It also investigates how the translators’ perspectival positions are reflected in the translated versions of the source text. Mastoor’s Urdu novel, Aangan, and its two English translations by Rockwell and Hussain were chosen and used a parallel corpus. NLTK is used for the extraction of frequencies and concordances from this corpus. The data are analysed through critical discourse analysis (CDA), while drawing upon the theoretical assumptions of feminist translation. Both translators used discursive and translation strategies according to their perspectival positions. Rockwell has treated the issue of sexual harassment with sensitivity, whereas Hussain has shown tolerance of it and romanticized this issue. The image of the harassed woman appears maintained or magnified in Rockwell’s text, in which feminist translation strategies of supplementing, hijacking, adding commentary, substituting, deleting, adding and intensifying discursive choices were found to be employed. However, Hussain presented the same gender ideology as the one found in the source text, at times, the image of harassment was found to be de-emphasized in the translated version. She has mainly used the translation strategies of literal translation, omission, and explicitness. Moreover, the discursive processes of foregrounding, mitigated linguistic choices, and nominalisation were also employed. The findings imply that both translated texts depict the translators’ subjectivity, where the Rockwell’s translation seems to highlight the image of sexual harassment of women in Pakistani society.