Feminist translation: contexts, practices and theories

2010

The focus of my reflection will be the circulation and reception of canonical texts of twentieth-century feminist thought in translations. Making use of the concept of a travelling theory put forth by Edward Said (1982: 226-247) and its extension in feminist and translatological studies (Sebnem 2006), I would like to analyse the history of translations of three works which are unquestionable components of the canon of contemporary feminist and gender studies. These are as follows: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Her Own of 1929, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe of 1949 and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble of 1989. I am largely inspired by the works of Susan Gal, who dedicated much time and attention to tracing back the routes of feminist ideas, notions, concepts, and practices, especially in Central and Eastern Europe; how they circulate, become recontextualised and what local impact they have (Gal 2003; Gal Klingman 2000). I am not going to embark on an in-depth comparative study rel...

مجلة سوهاج لشباب الباحثين, 2023

This research paper aims to present the feminist side of translation. It aims to reconsider and reshape translation from the feminist point of view. It does so by introducing the feminist theory to translation and applying it to some excerpts. These excerpts are taken from the great English novelist Virginia Woolf's (1977) A Room of one's own. The theory in this study is the feminist theory in translation by the famous theorist Louise von Flotow (1991). This theory contains three strategies. The first is supplementing. It means adding elements to the translation to compensate for what the language lacks, such as gender agreement in English. This strategy fills the gap between conventional linguistic norms and feminist purposes. The second strategy is Footnotes and prefaces which present explanations for translational choices and linguistic references at the beginning of the text or throughout it to make women's voices visible. The third strategy is Hijacking which is an appropriation of the text, including the changes applied to it to suit feminist translators' aims.

Palimpsestes, 2009

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, 2018

Since the 1990s, we have witnessed a gradual increase in the production of research and scholarship on women, gender, feminism and translation. This growth has led to the topic being incorporated into the curricula of many (largely western) universities, as part of courses on translation theories and methodologies or as independent courses devoted to analysing the interactions between women, gender, feminism and translation. Such increased integration into academic settings has brought upon an unprecedented institutional recognition to the field of Feminist Translation Studies. Yet, it should be noted that there is no consensus in regard to the name of this field, which investigates translation theories and practices developed and carried out from feminist perspectives that are themselves multiple: we prefer the title Feminist Translation Studies for its open-endedness and political emphasis on plurality and power. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the dynamism of the existing field with its emphasis on translation as a central aspect of feminist politics. We also aim to reconfigure feminist translation as a substantial force and form of social justice activism against intersecting regimes of domination, both locally and transnationally. The chapter does not, therefore, pursue a narrow, fixed understanding of feminism as a form of gender-only politics that belongs exclusively to the west. Rather, we problematise this monolinguistic, oppositional, essentialist and binary approach to feminism, seeking to expand our understanding of feminist action not

TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 2000

2019

Breaking the Surface: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, University of California Press, forthcoming in 2015.