Translation and Gender

Translating in the 'Era of Feminism'

Luise Von Flotow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134960002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The last thirty years of intellectual and artistic creativity in the 20th century have been marked by gender issues. Translation practice, translation theory and translation criticism have also been powerfully affected by the focus on gender. As a result of feminist praxis and criticism and the simultaneous emphasis on culture in translation studies, translation has become an important site for the exploration of the cultural impact of gender and the gender-specific influence of cuture. With the dismantling of 'universal' meaning and the struggle for women's visibility in feminist work, and with the interest in translation as a visible factor in cultural exchange, the linking of gender and translation has created fertile ground for explorations of influence in writing, rewriting and reading.

Translation and Gender places recent work in translation against the background of the women's movement and its critique of 'patriarchal' language. It explains translation practices derived from experimental feminist writing, the development of openly interventionist translation strategies, the initiative to retranslate fundamental texts such as the Bible, translating as a way of recuperating writings 'lost' in patriarchy, and translation history as a means of focusing on women translators of the past.

1. Historical Background

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 "on ne naît pas femme, on le devient" and when E.M. Parshley translated this in 1953 as "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman", both Beauvoir and Parshley were talking about gender. Though the term did not actually come into use at the time of these texts, it was undergoing rapid development twenty years later, and its users and adapters often referred back to Simone de Beauvoir's work on women's socialization.

The Women's Movement and the Idea of Gender

In the mid to late 1960s, as post-war feminism began to develop a certain momentum along with many of the other protest movements of the time in Western Europe and North America, the notion of gender evolved to complement and extend that of biological sexual difference. Since biological sexual difference hardly seemed adequate to explain the differences in men's and women's societal roles and opportunities, grassroots women's movements and scholars developed and employed other tools and analytical categories in order to understand these discrepancies. Anglo-American feminist writers and theorists began to refer back to Beauvoir and explore the questions raised by her aphorism. Beauvoir suggests that a baby born with female reproductive organs does not simply grow up to be a woman. She has to turn herself into a woman, or more correctly, she is turned into a woman by the society she grows up in and in response to the expectations that society has of women. The final product 'woman' is a result of education and conditioning, and differs according to the dominant influences she is subject to in the culture, subculture, ethnic group, religious sect, in which she grows up. Early feminist use of the term gender referred to the result of the social process that turns young females into girls, and later into women. This process instills into girls and women the physical, psychological and sociocultural attributes that are typical of a particular time and culture and which, as a rule, differ substantially from the attributes of the men of the same period.

It needs to be stressed here that gender refers to the sociocultural construction of both sexes. Feminist thinkers of the late 1960s and early 1970s developed the term in the interests of examining and understanding women's socialized difference from men, and their concomitant cultural and political powerlessness. More recently, though, gender studies have been examining the construction of male attributes and attitudes that are typical of certain societies and cultures at specific historical moments. Results of such studies have appeared in a number of essay collections (Kaufman 1987; Brod 1987). Other contemporary approaches criticize gender duality, the idea that there are only two types of encultured gender which correspond to the two biological sexes (Butler 1990); theorists and writers working in the area of gay and lesbian studies focus on the gender complexities raised by homosexual contexts and practices such as cross-dressing or transvestism. For the purposes of this book, however, the main focus will be on ideas of gender applied in the women's movement and in women's studies in order to understand and then undermine, or strategically exploit, the effects of gender identity in women.

The women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on two aspects of women's difference. First, it tried to show how women's difference from men was in many ways due to the artificial behavioural stereotypes that come with gender conditioning. Since these stereotypes were artificial, they could be minimized. Second, the movement de-emphasized differences between women, stressing instead women's shared experiences, their commonality, their solidarity. In other words, it viewed gender as a form of deliberate cultural conditioning that needed to be criticized and rejected, but that also transcended individual cultures and could bond women into a political force (Eisenstein 1983). This led to the "ideological and political conviction that women were more unified by the fact of being female in a patriarchal society than [...] divided by specificities of race and class" (Eisenstein 1983:xvii). The idea of gender as a largely negative aspect of women's conditioning could thus be strategically and politically exploited to bring women together.

Gender was understood to be the basis of women's subordination in public and private life, and was viewed as an phenomenon affecting all women—in the household as well as in the workplace, everywhere from the pink-collar ghettos of the corporations, via images of women in the media, to government or educational agencies establishing policies affecting women. It was a part of everywoman's life. Activities criticizing the gendered aspects of everyday life kept the issue in the public eye; interest and support were galvanized by media events such as the disruption of the Miss America Pageant in 1968, where the trappings of stereotypical femininity — dishcloths, steno pads, girdles and bras — were thrown into a 'Freedom Trash Can' (Morgan 1968:62-67).

The establishment of women's studies' initiatives developed from this sense of women's commonality as well as from the realization that women were excluded from large parts of public and academic life. It marked a new development toward the implantation of feminist ideas in the academy and found its justification in two factors. First, traditional claims about the 'universality' of knowledge and scholarship were untenable; second, it was precisely the gendered difference of women's lives that needed to be examined and understood. This led to women-centred perspectives which debunked claims of scholarly or political objectivity and rewrote history, literary history, sociology and psychology from women's points of view. A good example of such feminist revisionism is the critique of the student protest movements of the 1960s in France and Germany, in the USA and in Quebec's mid-1960s cultural revolution. Rather than viewing these movements as being as egalitarian as their rhetoric, feminist researchers have shown that they were to a large extent carried out on the backs of their female participants. The feminist journal from Quebec, Québécoises deboutte!, which was published in the early 1970s and anthologized in 1982, clearly documents the unabashed male bias of the 'Quiet Revolutionaries' (O'Leary and Toupin 1982).

While many research initiatives in women's studies have focused on the critical rewriting of received knowledge, some work has also led to positive views of women's engendered behaviour, associating women with qualities of nurturing, cooperation, ecological sensitivity as well as considerable psychological and physical strength. These views have, however, received severe criticism from within the women's movement for being essentialist and positing some kind of universal psychological essence for all women. Indeed, by the early to mid-1980s intense processes of differentiation between women developed, as scholars uncovered and investigated the historical and cross-cultural differences in women's lives (Rosaldo 1980; Mohanty 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983).

The realization that these differences between women were important caused some disturbance of the common ground on which ideas about gender had been founded. Nonetheless, gender as an analytical category continues to motivate researchers in diverse areas. In psychology, for example, feminist thinkers have developed the area of child psychology, taking into account the gendered differences between girls and boys and the effect they have on their development (Gilligan 1982). In literary studies, the work of hitherto neglected women writers has been unearthed, examined, translated and made available. Similarly, women's histories are being written, and account is being taken of women's contributions in the arts, in music, in philosophy, in medicine, and so on. It has become unacceptable to exclude simply on the basis of gender (or race or other factors). Research and writing that does so can no longer presume to be accurate, let alone make claims for universal applicability.

In Anglo-American contexts, gender issues have made sizeable inroads into the academic and political domains, affecting numerous social and institutional structures. Gender has come to be recognized as an important analytical category as well as a factor that has an impact on business decisions, educational institutions and governmental policies. It is recognized as a basic substructure of society that must be examined, understood and analyzed in its many forms and functions.

Women and Language

Though the social sciences were the first to be affected by issues of gender, the term soon entered the realms of language and literature. Attention was drawn to the fact that language is not only a tool for communication but also a manipulative tool. This idea was developed by authors such as Helene Cixous, Claudine Herrmann, Marina Yaguello, Annie Leclerc in France, Mary Daly, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich in the United States, and Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, France Théoret in Canada. The subsequent focus on the effects of 'patriarchal' language — the language forged and used by the institutions in society largely ruled by men —led to outpourings of scholarly analyses and literary texts. Some of the many questions that scholars posed and sought to answer centred around language use: How do women use language? Is their use different from men's? Do women carry out different communicative roles from those of men? Other questions focused on how gender was reflected in language: How are women and men represented in conventional language? How is women's and men's consciousness moulded through language? How is gender difference constructed and reinforced in language? Yet another cluster of questions was concerned with the ramifications of language issues in power struggles: How is power enhanced or undermined through language? How are individuals or groups manipulated by language? Does gender difference in language also mean different kinds of access to public life and influence?

There were two different approaches to questions about women and language; they could be broadly viewed as reformist and radical. The reformist approach was to view conventional language as a symptom of the society that spawned it, accepting it as conceivably reformable, if good intentions prevailed. The radical approach was to view conventional language as an important cause of women's oppression, the medium through which women were taught and came to know their subordinate place in the world (Cameron 1985). The reformist approach led to the creation of handbooks of 'non-sexist' language, language education workshops and training courses, and language planning by agencies such as the Office de la langue française in Quebec which has been developing gender-free job designations. The idea was to clearly represent women in language, rather than subsume them under the category 'Man'. In the radical approach, women located themselves in the role of the individual that is excluded, insulted or trivialized by conventional patriarchal language. From this perspective all of conventional language becomes a danger to women's confidence, self-esteem, psychological development and creativity, precisely because it is controlled and manipulated by 'malestream' institutions. Deborah Cameron's highly readable discussion of these issues summarizes this radical viewpoint as follows:

The radical feminist view, then, is of women who live and speak within the confines of a man-made symbolic universe. They must cope with the disjunction between the linguistically validated male world view and their own experience, which cannot be expressed in male language. Indeed, since language determines reality, women may be alienated not only from language but also from the female experience it fails to encode. (1985:93)

This view held that language was not only a man-made artifact, but it was made to reflect men's lives, their realities, their ideas. It determined and named men's realities, leaving women's realities indescribable. The only remedy could be a full-scale revamping of language so that women's specificity might be accounted for and women's development be made possible.

The remedies that were applied to patriarchal language took radical forms, triggering the earliest discussions of gender and translation. Writers took issue with standard language and criticized, rewrote or ignored dictionaries and other established reference materials. They viewed standard syntax and the established literary genres as reflecting and perpetuating patriarchal power structures. They tried to find a new language and new literary forms for women that would reflect and respond to women's realities; they began to criticize and radically change existing language so that it might be rendered useful, rather than inherently dangerous for women. As the French theorist Luce Irigaray puts it:

Si nous continuons à nous parler le méme langage, nous allons reproduire la même histoire. Recommencer les mêmes histoires. (Irigaray 1977:205)

(If we continue to speak the same language, we will reproduce the same (his)story. Repeat the same (his)stories. (my translation)

Women writers who subscribed to this position tried to get beyond the 'same language' that had been identified as detrimental to women's wellbeing. Throughout the 1970s women writers created experimental works in which patriarchal language became one of the main themes. In Quebec, Louky Bersianik easily demonstrated the male bias of standard French: her character l'Euguelionne, a creature who arrives on earth from outer space and describes what she finds, is amazed at the definition of virile. The Petit Robert states firstly that virile designates qualities typical of, even exclusive to men ("propre à l'homme"), and then goes on to list such qualities as "actif, énergique, courageux, etc." (active, energetic, courageous). L'Euguelionne is perplexed that these characteristics should be designated as exclusively male and she wonders whether women do not have such qualities. The questions raised by this kind of dictionary entry point to the underlying ideology of conventional language. Even twenty years later, the Petit Robert dictionary, under the entry for femme (woman) continues to carry the following citation from Malraux: "Une femme est AUSSI un être humain" (A woman is ALSO a human being). An interesting comment on contemporary lexicography.

While women undertook work like Bersianik's in many different languages, others focused on etymological research to reclaim words. They unearthed old or obsolete words for women's activities, or rehabilitated terms they found degraded in patriarchal usage. Mary Daly, writing in the United States in the mid-1970s, took issue with the contemporary meanings of ancient words which, in her view, are indicators of a once powerful women's culture: words such as 'hag' and 'crone' and 'spinster' have exclusively negative connotations today, yet they once referred to women who were powerful and autonomous. Daly asserts that since men are the ones who want to be powerful and autonomous, and women therefore have to be helpless and subject to men, it is in men's interest to denigrate such words. For Daly, a definition of hag as a "frightening or evil spirit" reveals more about those who write and publish the definition than it does about the term they purport to define. While Daly's work has been criticized for many different reasons, its tone and style of argumentation are not untypical of the period.

The idea that conventional language and its use in both public and private situations is detrimental to women had far-reaching consequences. It was explored by linguists who analyzed many Western languages in order to describe, document and combat oppressive aspects of semantics, grammar systems, proverbs, myths and metaphors. Sociolinguists studied women's silence in public situations as well as the linguistic work they do in their partnerships (Spender 1980; Tröml-Plötz 1982). Psychoanalysts and therapists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva explored the connections between language use and women's psychological disorders and psychoses. Development workers in both developing and first world countries investigated the disproportionate cases of illiteracy or semi-literacy among women (Kaplan 1976). Others examined women's restricted access to writing, publishing, and public influence in the industrial countries (Showalter 1986). Throughout these discussions and in the ensuing publications, the issue of gender was a dominant aspect of the straitjacket of patriarchal language. Gender was a product of patriarchal institutions and conventional language was one of these institutions. It was employed to prescribe women's options and women's condition, and to restrict and mould women to functions in the service of 'mankind' (Thorne et al. 1983).

Creative work further stretched the bounds of language. Writers began to refer back to hundreds of precursors — famous, little-known or unknown women authors; they developed dictionaries for women (Wittig and Zeig 1981; Daly and Caputi 1987) which would supplement, if not supplant, the standard works and help create women-identified language; and they proved a powerful source of new ideas, new language and new uses for 'old' language. Their work was seldom restricted only to creative writing, however; it encompassed teaching, publishing, public lectures, playwriting and other public activities, thereby making their radical approaches to language more palatable to those who found them frustratingly esoteric and difficult. Such authors helped create a community of readers for their literary/linguistic experiments. Nicole Brossard (Quebec) is an example of an experimental author who took such an integrated approach. Her creative writing confuses the genres of poetry, prose and theory and is fairly difficult to read. Yet through her activities as a journalist, a teacher, a public speaker, an editor and anthologist, she was able to develop an international community of readers for her material. Over the course of her career, she has produced a series of books of experimental writing that provide readers and researchers with new feminist concepts, new language and new literary forms to decipher, understand and use. Her work not only seeks to dismantle the power invested in patriarchal language but also describe and develop ideas about women's Utopias somewhere beyond the pernicious influence of patriarchal structures and language institutions.

It is not easy, however, to read new utopias created and described in new language with new syntactic structures. How do you read a language that tries to be innovative in its own structures and forms, and at...