Language as a social structure

- The social process can be seen as the interplay between three levels of social reality: social structures, practices, and events. (Fairclough 1999).

- Social practices ‘mediate’ the relationship between general and abstract social structures and particular and concrete social events;

- Languages are viewed as social structures, correspondingly, orders of discourse are social practices an texts – social events (Fairclough 2003:24)

Changer les mots, c’est changer les regards

In 1980, the bilingual edition of ‘Neons in the Night’, selected poems of the Quebec poet Lucien Francoeur was published, translated for the first time into English by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood.

Francouer was the first and last male poet I translated. During the three years I spent on his poetry, I realized with much distress that my translating voice was being distorted into speaking in the masculine. Forced by the poem’s stance, by language, by my profession, to play the role of male voyeur. As if the only speaking place available, and the only audience possible were male-bodied. I became very depressed around meaning.’ (de Lotbiniere-Harwood, 1995:64)

Susan Bassnett (1992) “Writing in No Man’s Land: Questions of Gender and Translation”.
Translation is a complex, multifaceted activity that demands time and care, commitment and scholarship, and TS is attempting to look systematically at some of the issues involved. The work that has begun which considers translation in relation to issues of gender is as important for men as it is for women, because it seeks to explore in greater depth the linguistic, cultural and philosophical dimensions of the translation process.

Gender

With the rise of the feminist movement, the notion of gender evolved, extending upon the simple definition limited to biological sexual difference.
1970s: the feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.

John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955.

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between and from masculinity and femininity.

Gender identity refers to a personal identification with a particular gender and gender role in society.

4 LINES OF INQUIRY IN FEMININE TS
I. Uncovering female translators and their role in history. Women by and large were not meant to participate in in public discourse but sometimes they could translate, as a form of secondary speaking. Some women even felt more comfortable translating then writing their own name.

II. The historical and ideological construction of translation and its remarkable correlation with traditional gender constructions.

III. The translation of gendered language. At first the issues centered on the translator’s responsibility when confronted with gender bias in texts, subsequently attention shifted from ethical to technical questions, as translators struggled to cope with the explosion of experimental writing by feminist authors seeking to forge a language of their own.

IV. The practice of feminist translation and criticism.
• Translation as demonstrative rewriting.

 

Virginia Wolf

Novel “A Room of One’s Own” (1919)

1) Declares men have and continue to treat women as inferiors;

2) The male defines what means to be female and controls the political, economic, social and literary structures.

“A feminist is any woman that tells the truth about her life”.

Toril Moi “Feminist, Female, Feminine”

She distinguishes between

• Feminism as a political position
• Femaleness as a matter of biology
• Femininity as a set of culturally defined characteristics.

“Femininity” is a cultural construct: one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it.

Framework

Gender questions apply to research on translation in different ways:

• By focusing on gender as a sociopolitical category in macro-analyses of translation – phenomena, such as the production, criticism, exchange, and fame of works, authors and translators;
• By examining gender issues as the site of political or literary/aesthetic engagement – through micro-analyses of translated texts.

Gender in macro-analyses of translation

• A focus on gender leads to largely revisionist work, starting from the finding that women have essentially been excluded from or presented negatively in the linguistic and literary histories of the world’s cultures.
• The perspective of gender allow researchers to re-evaluatehistorical texts, their translations, authors, translators, socio-political contexts and influences or effects.
• Neglected woman translators:

Of science texts in the 1700s

2) The great classics of Russian literature were initially made available in English in translations produced mainly by one woman, Constance Garnett. Her sixty volumes of translation include almost the entire work of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov and Gogol.

 

 

Gender in micro-analysis of translation

Gender used as a lens for the micro-analysis of individual translations focuses on the minute details of language that may reflect or conceal gendered aspects of language use.

Translations can be extremely challenged by such d iscursive manifestations of gender, and micro-analytic studies provide clues about the literary climate of the translating culture.

In 1976, the Ukrainian “masculine” translation of Francoise Sagan’s novel “Un Profil Perdu” was published in the journal Vsesvit.

Examples: parler – белькотіти, торохтіти, верзти, патякати, щебетати

“Gender and metaphorics of translation” 1988

· Lori Chamberlain (1988/2000)applies feminist theories to traditional metaphors of translation, the way in which authorship and originality are expressed in terms of the masculine and paternity, while translation, along with other artistic forms of expression such as the performing arts, is considered to be feminine and derivative.

· Typical of this is the centuries-old (first coined in the 17^th c) metaphor of ‘les belles infideles’ that viewed translation as being beautiful and unfaithful.

· The word traduction is feminine in French, lending itself to be used in the metaphor which stressed the feminine and potentially untrustworthy nature of translation (the woman) compared to the masculine originality and trustworthiness of the source.

Sherry Simon (Routledge, 1996)

· Because they are necessarily “ defective ” all translations are “reputed females”. In this neat equation, John Florio (1603) summarizes a heritage of double inferiority.

· Translators and women have historically been the weaker figures in their respective hierarchies, translators are handmaidens to authors, women inferior to men.

· This forced partnership finds contemporary resonance in Nicole Ward Jouve’s statement that the translator occupies a (culturally speaking) female position

· And Susenne de Lotbiniere-Harwood’s echoing self-defenition: “I am a translation because I am a woman”

L. Chamberlain’s example

Suzanne Jill Levine, the translator of a novel by the Cuban exile Cabrera Infante which is ideologically offemsive to women, “mocks” and “manipulates” “women and their words”.

“Where does this leave a woman as translator of such a book? Is she not a double betrayal, to repeat the archetype once again?” asks Levine

The answer she offers us is the conviction that her only alternative is to become a traduttora traditora, “because of what is lost and can be gained in crossing the language barrier, because all the inevitable rereading that occurs in transposing a text from one context to another, a translation must subvert the original”

Chamberlain shows how, instead of rejecting the translation commission, Levine chooses instead to subvert the text, to play infidelity. And to follow out the text’s parodic logic. She does this first my choosing to translate the text and second by challenging the reader linguistically with new puns, forcing the reader to question the status of the original. As Levine herself describes it:

Translation should be a critical act, however, creating doubt, posing questions to its reader, recontextualizing the ideology of the original text. Since a good translation, as with all rhetoric, aims to (re)produce an effect, to persuade a reader, it is, in the broadest terms, a political act.

Rather than regret translation’s shortcomings, Levine stresses how translation is itself a creative act, unearthing a version lying dormant beneath an original text, and animating it, like some mad scientist, in order to create a text illuminated and motivated by the original.