Is there a Feminist Way of Studying Translation?

Gender, Translation, Language and Identity Politics

ALKA VISHWAKARMA

Translation is often considered a cultural transformation from

one language to another. It is indeed a creative work, a
recreation or a ‘reproduction’. The disciplines like Translation
Studies, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies are
interdisciplinary and researches have been conducted under
these approaches. These approaches deal with the notions of
gender and culture at large. Gender and culture are socially-
constructed phenomena which determine the social identity of an
individual. Translations intend to transfer these notions from one
culture to another without losing the essence of the previous.
Translators are often men who translate as history has shown us.
In translation therefore, male translators are of great eminence
which arises certain questions: is there any woman translator and
their history, have gender-issues historically been neglected or
recognized, did different cultural contexts affect gender-
conscious awareness in translation, how does gender-conscious
translation affect the target texts and the reception of a translated
texts and how the identities of the translator and author is
politicized? The present paper intends to problematize them. It
will simultaneously show how identity is constructed through the
politics of language which itself politicises the identities. These
aspects would be explored in the light of the views of Sherry
Simon, Luise von Flotow and Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak
specifically. In other sense, the present paper is more of a
critique of Sherry Simon’s ideas supported by von Flotow and
Spivak, enlightening the readers of the possibilities of feminist
perspective to translation.
Keywords: identity politics, gender, language and translation.
Introduction
Translation Studies and Gender Studies have recently found their platform in
the past thirty or forty years. Since 1980s there have been certain
developments that have led to the rise of ‘the cultural turn’; this addition of
culture has rendered a significant dimension to translation (Bassnett &
Lefevere 1990). It has shifted the emphasis from how and what to be
translated to what do translations do, how do translations affect the literary
world and its reception in society. Simon cites Nicole Vard Jouve who has
asserted that translation occupies a “(culturally speaking) female position”
 Is there a Feminist Way of Studying Translation?

(Simon 1996: 01). The conventional view of translation refers to the ‘active
original’ and ‘passive translation’; thus the creation is through passive
transformation. Men and women occupy the similar active and passive roles
in society as well as their sexualities. The notions of beauty and fidelity are
associated with females and so with the translation which is not to be
beautiful only but must be faithful to the original.
Writing and translation are however interdependent, each adheres to the
other. Therefore, the original cannot be considered the real one but a
translation of whatever is present in a society that is culture. As the arrival of
deconstruction and post-structuralism has aroused the plurality of meaning;
and therefore there is no ‘single speaking subject’. Translation therefore
becomes quite difficult giving rise to the politics of identity, i.e. identity of
the writer, the translator and the characters. Gender is constructed through
language which intends to monopolise the weaker; women are supposed to be
the weaker because of their attributes of submissiveness and humility
determined through language. Language therefore has played a vital role in
the subjugation of women from the religious scriptures to the conduct books.
So what if a translator is a woman translating the text which is framed under
the ‘patriarchal’ language. Here comes into being the politics of language
which looks for the feminine way of writing and reading. Before getting into
this idea, let us see whether there is any history of female translators or
feminist theory of translation. Feminist translators came to the surface
concealing their intentions to analyze their oppression through language.
They not only castigated the ‘phallogocentric’ language but advocated for the
emergence of a language which will serve as an antonym to
‘phallogocentrism’ and which could be called ‘gynocentric’ redefining and
modifying existing vocabulary along with the peculiarities of parenthesis,
gaps, silences, denoting their own condition through language.
Translatress: The ‘lost’ Women on the Surface
Renaissance refers to the birth of literature, a revival of learning. During this
period, we see the exchange of various cultural transformations through
Greek and Latin manuscripts; for such transformation translation came into
existence, introducing it to the English speaking world. Sherry Simon has
used the term ‘translatress’ suggesting the presence of female translators
during renaissance. Sixteenth century has witnessed many women translators;
Margaret Hannay’s edited Silent but For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons,
Translators and Writers of Religious Works (1985) is a collection of essays
which inserted personal and political topics subverting texts through
translations. These female translators were ‘lost’ as they were neglected or
overlooked. Researchers now have worked on discovering those ‘lost’
women’s knowledge. The anthology, Translating Slavery: Gender and Race
in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823 (Kadish et al. 1994) discusses the
works of eighteenth and early nineteenth century French women. Olympe de
Gouges, Germaine de Stael and Claire de Duras have been translated and
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located in their historical and cultural contexts. It deals with the issues of
gender and race questioning the place of writers and translators. There have
been abolitionist writings which helped to pave path for the anti-slavery
movement. Women Writing in India (two volumes) has been edited by Tharu
and Lalita (1993); it attempts to rediscover the forgotten texts. Its second
volume pays attention to language restoring the forgotten voices from the
Indian vernacular languages. There have been a number of translatress who
have been translating from sixteenth century to nineteenth century; among
them, Margaret Fuller, Aphra Behn, Margaret More Roper, Mary Sydney and
Margaret Tyler are the eminent ones. Aphra Behn is considered the prominent
translator; her novel Oroonoko itself has been translated in many languages.
Susanna Dobson, Mary Arundell, Lucy Hutchinson and Elizabeth Carter have
also translated immensely. Women began translating the Bible as they were
allowed to translate religious works written by men. Elizabeth Cay Staton’s
The Woman’s Bible (1972) is the best example of it. Bible translation led to
the emergence of the ‘inclusive language’ which ignore the sexist language.
However it could not check feminist’s contention of subjugation that was led
by the patriarchal or phallocentric language. There have been many research
works conducted on these ‘lost’ women and it is hard to bring all of them into
these pages. Therefore, now I will progress to discuss how language, body
and gender came to dominate female translators.
Language Politics in Translation
Language is a site of ‘contested meanings’, an arena where subjects test and
prove themselves (Simon 1996: 07). Despite being a means of
communication, language is referred as a ‘manipulative tool’. This aspect can
be understood through the language-centered feminist writers like Helene
Cixous, Claudine Hermann, Mariana Yaguello in France, Nicole Brossard,
Louky Bersianik, Madeleine Gagnon and France Theoret in Quebec; and
Mary Daly, Kate Millett, Andriene Rich in USA. These radical writers
viewed language as an instrument in women’s oppression; they explore how
the consciousness of men and women are created and how gender differences
are created through language. They equally delineate how language issues
work in power struggle and how power is enhanced through language. In
terms of gender and translation they began to rewrite and translate the
existing dictionaries and other referential materials. Mary Daly analyses the
obsolete words for women’s activities and coins the neologies. She analyses
the negative connotations of the words like ‘hag’, ‘crone’ and ‘spinster’. She
invents the splitting words like therapists as ‘the/rapists’ and so on.
Feminism could widely spread throughout the world just due to translation
which transferred the movement from one country to the other. French
feminism began it and from here it reached USA and then England. The
women’s movement led women to think of the liberation from the patriarchal
language and “La liberation des femmes passé par le langage”. It is of the
view that at first women must be liberated from phallocentric language.
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Bersianik returns to phallocentrism of the language from two aspects: naming

strategies and grammatical gender-marking. Now what if a male translator
translates a female text; Bersianik takes the translation of her French novel
Eugelionne by Howard Scott. He says that his only duty as a translator is
merely to provide an equivalent rather than introducing sexism in French
language. He emphasizes the female identity of the guilty when he translates
the lines: “Le ou la coupable doit etre punie” as “The guilty must be
punished… whether she’s a man or a woman!” This is what to be called the
politics of language in the formation of identity and gender.
Le deuxieme written by Simone de Beauvoirr is considered the ‘feminist
bible’; it advanced gender-conscious translation criticism. It was first
published in French in 1949 and was translated by the American professor
Howard Parshley in English in 1952 as The Second Sex. It was critically
accepted by the readers and scholars. Criticism was based on the unmarked
deletion of more than ten percent of the book. The section containing names
and achievements of historical women has been deleted in the English
version. Margaret Simons (1983) says that names of seventy eight women
have been along with the ascription of such cultural taboos as lesbian
relationships (Flotow 1997: 50). As a male translator, he puts his own identity
first and he comes to the writer later, eliminating most of significant part of
the text.
The feminist translators challenge the notion of grammatical gender-
consciousness. In the opinion of Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist, the
term gender is attributed to Protagoras and it refers to the division of the
Greek nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter. It implies that under
grammatical gender the nouns are placed according to their form; and this
form determines how the word will behave in agreement to adjectives, articles
and pronouns which will generate the gender-conscious identity. It is argued
that gender cannot be an element of language for translation as grammatical
categories belong to structural language. But Roman Jacobson is of the view
that grammatical gender can be invested with meaning when it is to analyze
poetry and mythology. He emphasizes the mythological origins and gendered
identities of the terms for the days of the week, day and night or sin and
death. Therefore feminist translators followed Jacobson in reinvesting gender
markers with meaning (Simon 1996: 17). Howard Scott and Susanna de
Lotbiniere-Harwood focus on grammatical gender. Simon says that de
Lotbiniere-Harwood’s translation of Nicole Brossard’s Le Desert mauve
unravels the expressions of gender-marking. She responds to Brossard’s
gender-markings with the invention of her own. Simon cites her words:
My translation spells “author”, ‘auther’ as a way of rendering the
feminized auteure pioneered and widely used by Quebec feminists;
and “renders the beautiful amante, lesbian lover, by “shelove”. To
further eroticize the foreign tongue, “dawn”, a feminine noun in
French is referred as “she” in the sentence: . . . , these feminization
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strategies make it possible for target-language readers to identify the

lesbian in the text (de Lotbiniere-Harwood’s words in Sherry
Simon).
Language of the source text can be modified and re-invented by the
feminist translators according to their own emphasis on gender denoting
meaning. Translation is thus not a simple transfer but the continuation of a
process of meaning creation, the circulation of meaning within a contingent
network of texts and social discourses. The writings of Cixous, Irigaray and to
a certain extent Kristeva are “language-centered”. Irigaray uses philosophical
concepts like enigmatic, parodic, visionar, prophetic, academic, in order to
adapt to different projects. She introduces neologism such as “sexuation” and
renders new meaning to the existing words by replacing certain letters. She
changes Levinas’s term (during translation) l’aimee to her l’amante, restoring
woman as a desiring subject (Simon 1996: 100). This Sex Which Is Not One is
her chief text and here she talks about the politicized language under the
control of power structure already suggested by Cixous. Kristeva is a
psychoanalyst but a close reading of her essay, Desire in Language: A
Semiotic Approach to Literature an Art, reveals her concerns for language too
in order to give voice to female sexuality. The translation of the term
jouissance has been discussed in detail. She relates female ‘sensual, sexual
pleasure’ to plisir while refers to ‘joy or ecstasy’; and it can go beyond its
meaning through the working of signifier.
Helene Cixous advocates for ecriture feminine, a language specifically for
females. She is considered, according to Nicole Ward Jouve, the highly
misinterpreted French feminist. “Le rire de la Medusa” published in
translation as “The Laugh of Medusa” in Signs (1976) is a seminal article
where she enunciates her views on the possibility gender based language for
females. Her views are a bit complex as she refers to the multiplicity of
language in which she was born and which led her to conclude that there is no
definite language; therefore meaning of one language to another language.
She urges us to master language and embrace the plurality of language and its
differences. Her Vivre l’orange (1979) is a bilingual text. Her translation is
‘consistent and coherent’; in English she renders a very deep echo of the
French text. In every language there is a ‘plurality of codes’; by asserting this
she attempts to bring out the ‘tensions among identities’. Therefore the
speaker’s identity is postponed as of writer, translator and even of language
itself. Here the politics of language comes to fore. Such feminist thinkers
created a community of readers for their literary and linguistic experiments. It
is Nicole Brossard from Quebec who employed this approach in her writing.
Her works not only dismantle the power invested in patriarchal language but
also creates women’s utopia (Flotow 1997: 11).

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Identity Politics, Spivak and Translation

Women’s representation ‘in language, through language and across language’
has problematized the very identity of their being. Gender instability therefore
has added a new dimension in the discussions taking place under the
disciplines of Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. The globalization of
culture has led to the multiplicity of identities as well as cultural differences.
The translational communication and frequent migrations have problematized
the contemporary world. The hybridization of diasporic culture has led to the
emergence of mobility of identities; Cultural Studies brings this into
considerations along with gender identities. In the words of Sherry Simon:
Women “translate themselves” into the language of patriarchy,
migrants strive to “translate” their past into present. Translation as a
tangible representation of a secondary or mediated relationship or
reality, has come to stand for the difficulty of access to language, of
a sense of exclusion from the codes of the powerful (Sherry Simon
1996: 127).
When culture is referred in terms of gender and translation, the
postcolonial critics, Homi Bhabha and Spivak are of greater significance.
While translation, the identities of the translator, writer (of migrants too) and
characters come into play which leads to tensions and confusions. These
altered identities of translation have destabilized the cultural identities.
Culture and cultural studies have deeply influenced the works and theories of
the writers including Bhabha and Spivak. Cultural Studies probes the
complexities of gender and cultural identities in translation. Translators are
expected to understand the culture of the source text which is itself a
translation of the existing ideas and cultural exchanges. As it closely
associated with its own cultural conventions it is quite difficult to convert one
culture into the culture of other language. Hereby cultural meaning cannot be
brought out in another language as it is. Language of one text carries its own
cultural implications; it is difficult to transfer one language into another along
with its cultural meaning because each language carries its own cultural
identity. Therefore a translator should be concerned with the reconstruction of
the value of one text rather than finding its equivalents. ‘Cultural contention’
helps translation generate meanings which are itself unstable due to its
constant shifting and changing scenario.
Feminist translators and translations equally help us understand the
cultural meanings behind the construction of their identities. They foreground
the cultural significance of women by emphasizing role of gender in language
and the role of subjectivity in reclamation of meaning. Cultural identity has
itself gone through three phases: (1) an essentialist phase, claiming existence
of women’s reality opposing patriarchy; (2) a constructionist model,
differences due to historical positioning; (3) differences are produced
dialogically based on Derridean “difference” and Foucauldian knowledge as a
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performative category; plurality of differences prioritizes the concept of

localization. Sexual differences and representational cultural practices are
central to the production of the subjects generating identities.
In order to understand the duality of gender and cultural identity in terms
of translation, the theorist Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak can be taken into
consideration at first. Her seminal essay “The Politics of Translation” deals
with the intersection of gender and culture in translation. At first, she counsels
translators to take language as a ‘clue’ in the formation of gendered identity;
it leads to the ‘analysis of the ‘rhetoricity of language.’ In the beginning, the
translators must ‘surrender’ to the text which leads them towards the issues of
subjective investment and loss in knowledge (Spivak 1993). She is of the
view that there must be an engagement between translator (as an agent of
language) and textuality, emphasizing the conditions of meaning along with
the ideas created in the text. She explores the relationship between self and
other enacted through translation. She talks of two aspects in translation: the
erotic and the ethical. The ‘ethical’ implies that it has to be ‘self’, it should be
similar to the source text; while in translation we find ‘irreducibility of the
otherness’ which leads to erotic side. This erotic side can be understood in the
light of George Steiner’s ‘hermeneutic motion’. Using the male imagery, he
describes the act of penetration of text through which the ‘translator invades,
extracts, and brings home.’ His stages of imagery begin with a passive
movement but end up with a gesture of control (Simon 1996: 136).
Spivak describes her act of translation in this way: at first the translator
must surrender themselves to the source text, and then they must move
towards language showing its limits as its very rhetorical aspect will expose
the silences within language. It would show the hidden confusions and
tensions prevailing in the text. She recognizes the need for translation
completely grounded in feminist solidarity; as cultural inequalities have been
created by the First World feminists which must be paid attention. For
instance, Goethe wishes his readers understand his ideal of a world literature
as the ‘prefiguration of a harmonious universe of exchange’ or a ‘form of
cultural dissensus and alterity’ (Bhabha 1994). Spivak echoes him in her
suggestion of the translation of the Third World literature into English. In the
words of Sherry Simon, “Translation can attain the democratic ideal only if
the rhetoricity and textuality of the work of the Third World women is equally
rendered.” Spivak emphasizes on the learning of the work of other language,
she says that if a person intends to learn other culture why can’t (s)he learn
the intended language too. By this suggestion, she enters the reach of
postcolonial inequalities and how they are reproduced in academic feminism
and cultural studies. She thus draws attention to the power of language of
translation in terms of its poor linguistic and aesthetic assimilation; and how it
affects the constructed identities.

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Illustration through Spivak’s Translation of Bengali Texts

Spivak says that translator must be aware of the resistant and conformist
writings by women. She establishes her opinions with the help of her own
translation of Bengali texts. In first of her Mahashweta Devis’s short story,
she neglects Bengali proverb which would have been “The Wet Nurse” and
uses “The Breast Giver” to emphasizes its Marxian and Freaudian
associations. The preface of the volume, Imaginary Maps, describes the
conversation between her and the writer along with her own intention of the
contextualization of all the voices in her translation: the voices of the tribals
of India, of Devi and of Spivak herself. In her translation, all these three
identities are given equal importance. She addresses her double audience. She
gives “chic”, “bad news”, “what a dish”, “blow him away”, in terms of
familiar vernacular language. Like Spivak’s, they make swift leaps between
different vocabulary registers. The English terms appeared in the original
Bengali text are italicized in English in order to retain the ‘legacy of colonial
English in Bengali vernacular’ (Simon 1996: 140). She reads her story,
“Doulati”, from three different perspectives, i.e. Marxism, deconstruction,
feminism. Through her translation, she attempts to sensitize the readers of two
things: internal differences of postcolonial nation; and appreciation of the
singular nature of the cultural forms produced by Third World. Spivak
thereby proves to be one of the prominent theorists who consider language a
significant ‘condition’ for understanding singular cultural forms. Spivak along
with Homi K. Bhabha defines translation as ‘a difficult and a never-ending
transaction between the uncertain poles of cultural difference’ (Simon 1996:
156).
Conclusion
Translation thus can be seen as closely associated with the terms gender and
cultural differences. It also implies that the politics of language leads to the
construction of gendered-conscious identities. Cultural identity and gender
identity have equal affects on translation of the source text. Feminist
translators at first took the notion of language politics and language mobility
in order to show how they help creating gender-conscious awareness. It also
shows how translations provided a platform for women to enter the writing
world, however translating the religious texts written by male writers. All
these opinions are discussed in the light of the opinions of Simon and von
Flotow. Spivak’s theories regarding the politics of translation are discussed
and how she encourages feminist translators to render multiplicity of
identities in their translations. There are feminist translators who made the
feminist translations possible. They provided a feminist element in the
translation with the help of language and identity politics. But the question
arises whether there will be a separate place for female translators and is it
fruitful to highlight the gender-conscious awareness in the translation.

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