Preface. Translating women [Pages 8 17] [2023 03 21]
Luise von Flotow2011, Translating Women
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Abstract
I t is time to write about "women and translation" again, time to return to and perhaps expand on the "first paradigm" 1 of gender studies as applied to translation, revisiting a series of agents-translators, writers, fictional characters-that "call themselves or are called 'women,'" 2 a category that for a few years was set aside as "essentialist," or "monolithic," or unjustifiably homogeneous. Inevitably, in returning here, feminist social and cultural activism is brought back into play. Almost twenty years have passed since the first work focusing on women translators and women authors in translation started to appear in North America, work that was usually couched in terms of gender and translation and was inspired by the many forms of feminism that had developed over the 1970s and 1980s. It came on slowly at first, with occasional brief articles by women translators, who were encouraged and mobilized by feminist assertiveness and agency in the late 1980s and wondered how they might subvert certain aspects of texts they found unpleasant, or belittling, or simply silly in the face of newly-won feminist confidence, and who discussed the creative efforts required to translate innovative feminist writing (often from French). Meanwhile, of course, Bible translators and scholars had already been at work for a decade-in many parts of the West-adapting, rewriting, and re-translating biblical materials as well as liturgical texts for the new social environments created by the different feminist movements and to reflect new readings of the old texts. Religion could, after all,
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