Mecanismos, responsabilidades y roles en la gobernanza

The context which has nurtured the approach that has come to be known as ‘feminist translation’ is one in which the Canadian scene in particular has seen a considerable volume of work by feminist writers who, in the majority of cases, have essentially sought to provide a critique of patriarchal language . Conventional vocabulary is etymo- logically dismantled and a new lexicon for the new experience of women developed. Language is fragmented at will and conventional syntactic

and semantic structures are not simply disregarded, but rather exam- ined more closely for concealed meanings. Put differently, language becomes a political weapon and conventional discourse targeted, since it is here that power is thought to reside.

4.3.1 The feminist paradigm: Tampering with usage

Within the feminist framework, translation is seen not as a neutral act of meaning transfer but, in the words of Barbara Johnson (1981, cited in Flotow, 1991: 81), as something much more ‘strong’ and ‘forceful’, a strategy that ‘values experimentation, [and] tampers with usage’. This radical view of translation has prompted the need to restore an element of translator ‘visibility’ in the target text, a notion about which decon- structionists in general have never been in doubt. The translator’s act of engaging with the text being translated is done deliberately and deci- sively, and it is now accepted that:

No translation theorist or practitioner can but position him or herself – aesthetically, politically, ideologically . . . Indeed, it is this very position- ing, be it overt or covert, conscious or unconscious, avowed, unavowed or disavowed, that enables us to go beyond dualist conceptions of transla- tion in order to bring to the fore the ethical stance which translation both entails and implies.

(Gillian Lane-Mercier, 1997: 63)

Feminist translation may thus be thought of as a practice in visibility, and the cardinal concepts are: production, subversion, manipulation, ‘transformance’. It is an ethical code through which the translator learns to claim full responsibility for choices made – aesthetic, ideological or political. Traditional dichotomies, such as ‘productive’ vs ‘reproductive’ (referring respectively to ‘original’ and ‘derivative’ text production), are called into question, and the translator’s ‘authorial’ role is widely promoted.

In this context, the role of the translator as an active text producer is asserted (Chamberlain, 1988) and the ‘feminine’ metaphors with which translation is described (e.g. translation is like a woman – beautiful, faithful, secondary) are questioned (Godard, 1990). This active form of poetics is also an active form of politics: the ‘visible’ feminist translator sees his or her work as an integral part of a commitment to a cause. The authorial role necessarily implicated in this confi guration of roles runs counter, on the one hand, to the ideal of smooth, fl uent readability in the target language and, on the other, to equivalence as a theoretical

ideal (Homel and Simon, 1989: 50). The process is much less orderly than might be implied by any of these notions. It is one in which:

The feminist translator, affi rming her critical difference, her delight in interminable re-reading and re-writing, fl aunts the signs of her manipula- tion of the text. Womanhandling the text in translation means replacing the modest, self-effacing translator. The translator becomes an active participant in the creation of meaning.

(Godard, 1990: 91)

4.3.2 Feminist practices

In practice, feminist translation theory meant a rethinking of gender identity and a setting aside of ‘natural’, preconceived notions. The feminist translator would be working with whatever perceptions the source text might present, and translating is seen as an exercise in inter- rogating the complex ways in which gender becomes bound up with language and, consequently, with translation (Massadier-Kenny, 1997: 55). Feminist translators have openly discussed their role as interven- tionists in the texts they translate, openly admitting that they intervene when they see a need, for example,

• to mitigate offensive forms of machismostic or misogynistic discourse; • to make explicit a subtle feminist rhetorical effect;

• to introduce an appropriate feminist angle on the source text. This desire for what the feminist critic Barbara Godard approvingly refers to as ‘shock effect’ may be illustrated from the work of a prominent member of the group – feminist translator Susanne Jill Levine.

In her translation practice, Levine (1991) asserts that her intention is to subvert the text. Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un infante difunto (a sexist novel bordering on pornography) provides Levine with an interesting forum from which to demonstrate her aggressive and creative approach to translation. According to Levine, Infante not only ‘mocks’ but ‘manipulates’ women and their words. The answer to this must be a tradutore traditore :

Because of what is lost and can be gained in crossing the language barrier, because of the inevitable rereading that occurs in transposing a text from one text to another, a translation must subvert the original.

( p. 92 )

Levine (1991: 83) gives an interesting example of how she is able to question the male narrator’s narcissistic posturing: his ‘jaded’ claim in

the Spanish no one man can rape a woman (implying that women are will- ing rape victims) becomes no wee man can rape a woman (which focuses on the amusing alliterative aspects of the Spanish ‘one’ and ‘wee’).

To cite another case, it was in translating Nicole Brossard’s play La nef des sorciers that feminist intervention achieved oft-cited notoriety. To take one particular line as an example, two versions might be envisaged – a conservative and a radical one. Operating within fairly traditional views of equivalence and fi delity, one might expect a literal rendering such as:

This evening I’m entering history without pulling up my skirt.

Feminist translator Linda Gaboriau, however, chose to explicate the source text drastically:

This evening I’m entering history without opening my legs . (Gaboriau, 1979: 35)

This liberty has raised a few eyebrows, but not from Godard who, as pointed out earlier, had praised such shock effects: commendable is ‘the repossession of the word by women, and the meaning of the life of the body as experienced by women’ (1984: 14).

In places, this unabashed embracing of manipulation takes the form of retaliation against traditional, patriarchal notions of translation: men do it, so why shouldn’t we? Chamberlain looks at the politics of gender and the representation of translation in gendered terms. Turning to the politics of colonialism, she cites an English translation of Horace that was written in the sixteenth century. During that period, disregard for the original’s language and culture was considered a public duty.

Quote 4.4

In his preface, the translator, Thomas Drant, has this to say:

First I have now done as the people of God were commanded to do with their captive women that were handsome and beautiful: I have shaved off his hair and pared off his nails, that is I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter. . . . I have Englished things not according to the vein of Latin propriety, but of his own vulgar tongue. . . . I have pieced his reason, eked and mended his similitudes, mollified his hardness, prolonged his cortall kind of speeches, changed and much altered his words, but not his sentence, or at least (I dare say) not his purpose.

4.3.3 The feminist paradigm assessed

A striking example of the kind of concerted attacks on certain feminist translation practices might be drawn from Arrojo (1994) who took issue with what she variously labelled ‘anxious’, ‘theoretically incoherent’ and ‘hypocritical’ proposals. She criticised the feminist translators’ tendency to intervene, sometimes wantonly, in the texts they are translating. The hypocrisy is seen most glaringly when it is these translators who usu- ally claim some form of allegiance to a translation ethics whereby the author’s meaning should be protected at all costs. This ‘infamous double standard’, Arrojo ( p. 149 ) observes, is no different from the ‘masculine’ theoretical stance adopted by the traditional translation theorist.

Arrojo sees this ‘ambivalent, rather opportunistic brand of “faithfulness” ’ ( p. 152 ) to be closely linked with another form of double standard, this time relating to ‘appropriation’ which feminist translators have only too readily associated with colonialism and rape (see above quote). What is the difference between this usurpation and Levine’s ‘womanhandling’ of Infante’s text, which is an equally serious act of ‘castration’? Is it not all a ‘struggle for authority, a struggle for the right to possess and determine meaning?’ ( p. 154 ).

Flotow (1997: 7) replies to some of these criticisms by suggesting that, unlike what happens in patriarchal language and contrary to the impression given by Arrojo and others, the incidence of feminist inter- ventions is in fact ‘limited and highly focused’. Conceding that the political rhetoric of feminist practices does sometimes become over- powering, Flotow nevertheless asserts that the political investment and bias are done openly and are actually fl aunted as ‘the signature of a positionality’ ( p. 7 ).

Further reading

• On translator invisibility and general background to domesticating vs foreignising within the cultural model of translation, see Berman (1985/2000), Schleiermacher (1813/1992), Niranjana (1992), Gentzler (1993), Spivak (1993/2000), Pym (1996), Venuti (1998).

• On the theory and practice of the feminist translation trend, see Simon (1996), Kinloch (2007), Chamberlain (1988/2004), (1998/2001), Delisle (2002), Bauer (2003), Santaemilia (2005).