Gendered and sexual identities are unstable constructions which reveal a great deal about the ideologies and power relatinships affecting individuals and societies. The interaction between gender/sex studies and translation studies points to a fascinating arena of discursive conflict in which our intimate desires and identities are established or rejected, (re)negotiated or censored, sanctioned or tabooed.

This volume explores diverse and heterogeneous aspects of the manipulation of gendered and sexual identities. Contributors examine translation as a feminist practice and/or theory; the importance of gender-related context in translation; the creation of a female image of secondariness through dubbing and state censoriship; attempts to suppress the blantantly patriarchal and sexist references in the German dubbed versions of James Bond films; the construction of national heroism and national identity as male preserve; the enactment of Chamberlain's 'gender metaphorics' in Scliar and Calvino; the transformation of Japanese romance fiction through Harlequin translations; the translations of the erotic as site for testing the complex rewriting(s) of identity in sociohistorical term; and the emergence of NRTs (New Reproductive Technologies), which is causing fundamental changes in the perception of 'creativity' or 'procreation' as male domains.

Santaemilia, Jose

Gender, Sex and Translation: Contents

Introduction

Frontera Spaces: Translating as/like a Woman, Pilar Godayol, pp 9-14

The theory and practice of translating as/like a woman, being a political and social discourse that criticizes and subverts the patriarchal practices which render women invisible, assumes a feminine subjectivity. That is, it makes plain that the common basis of its activity is a subject who lives in a feminine body. However, despite sharing a common politics of identity, the different feminisms, among them those in the field of translation, interpret feminine subjectivity in different ways. Similarly, they also differ in their definitions of their universal categories, such as 'women', 'identity', 'gender', 'sex', 'experience' and 'history'. As a result, some translators cast doubt on the possibility of building a feminist theory of translation given the contingency and mobility of its universal categories. This raises an urgent question: how can a politics of identity survive if it does not take into account the idea that its universal categories must be permanently open and questioning in order to lay the ground for the inclusions or exclusions of its future demands? This paper attempts to move closer to the unresolved question of the feminine subject in the practice of translation as/like a woman, as well as in all fields of general feminist study.

The Creation of A "Room of One's Own": Feminist Translators as Mediators Between Cultures and Genders, Michaela Wolf, pp 15-25

In the course of the 18th century, an increasing number of women tried to create their own space both through the formation of a specific literary discourse and the formation of a new professional group, the female writer. This paper discusses the way in which female translators - in a historical as well as contemporary context - can 'gender' their social and intellectual environment, thus contributing to the formation of female individuality through translation. Within the broader context of women's constitution of a 'female image' in the period of the Enlightenment, and drawing on the biographies of two German translators, Luise Gottsched and Therese Huber, the paper illustrates the ways in which these two translators subverted contemporary men-made translation practices and translation theories. In the second part of the paper it is shown that to a certain extent, even though under obviously different conditions, women are still struggling for a "room of one's own" in the translational domain. This is highlighted by the presentation of the results of a research project which was carried out in Austria and which focused on a comprehensive record of the state of the art of feminist translation in the various fields of research, teaching and practice in German-speaking countries. The emphasis of the project was on a theoretical survey of the fields of feminist translation and feminist translation studies, detailed surveys conducted in publishing houses concerning their 'policies' in relation to feminist translation, enquiries into guidelines for non-sexist language use in national and international institutions dealing with translation as well as in translation agencies, and interviews with feminist translators focusing on their working conditions.

Gender(ing) Theory: Rethinking the Targets of Translation Studies in Parallel with Recent Developments in Feminism, M. Rosario Martín, pp 25-37

This paper grew out of the conviction that drawing parallels between the evolution of gender studies and translation studies may be enlightening in order to foster new developments in our discipline. Firstly, comparing the evolution in the definition of the objects which are at the very basis of these two movements, i.e., the concepts of 'woman' and 'translation', allows us to posit that translation studies could enlarge its horizon by revising and de-essentializing (emulating the move in gender studies in relation to the concept of 'woman') both the ideal definition of translation that has traditionally been in force and the social yet biased definition of translation which descriptive translation studies claims as the (only) point of departure. In the second place, the comparison seems to be helpful not only in discovering the flaws of descriptivist approaches but also in questioning and problematizing the core assumptions of mainstream feminist translation theories. Gender studies, in short, proves to be instructive not only for redefining the general targets of the discipline but also for inspiring new feminist translation agendas which aim to circumvent the risk of essentialism.

Tracing the Context of Translation: The Example of Gender, Luise Von Flotow, pp 39-51

Starting from the premise that the contexts in which translations and translation studies are produced are of paramount importance (Lefevere 1992), this article looks at a number of instances where gender has played an important role - in the process of translation and/or in the studies of a translated text. It begins with the work of Julia Evelina Smith, Bible translator in the 1850s and suffragette in the 1870s, moves on to the challenges encountered when translating the eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse of French intellectual women for twentieth-century America, turns to gay writing and its translation in the 1990s, and returns to the Bible at the turn of the new century - the Vatican's Liturgiam authenticam instructions on Bible translation and the new French Bible 2001.

On the Women's Service?: Gender-conscious Language in Dubbed James Bond Movies, Nicole Baumgarten, pp 53-69

This paper deals with the construction of social gender through spoken language in film. The investigation of language in film and film translation has been a hitherto largely ignored field of enquiry. Before proceeding to present a concrete example of the type of cross-linguistic analysis undertaken on the basis of a large corpus of multimodal texts, the paper gives an outline of a model for the analysis of language in film and translated film dialogue ('the dubbed text'), which is based on a broadly systemic functional theoretical framework. Drawing on current research into the notion of cultural specificity in original and translated texts, the paper aims at describing the forms and functions of language specific textualization of 'extralinguistic concepts'.

Translation, Nationalism and Gender Bias, Carm…