Mastodawn

阿华师姜母奶茶 Oct 7, 2023

Critiquing the modern concept of author, inventing multiple translatorship

The modern concept of the author as the sole and individual originator of their own work is comparatively new in the West, as research on the literary cultures of the medieval and early modern periods in Europe demonstrates.

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231006

Due to women’s historical exclusion from intellectual circles and institutions of learning, the way towards authorship and spiritual authority for women writers was neither straightforward nor, in some instances, without social consequences.

Writing as “a suspension rather than an assertion of selfhood” (Summit 2003, 96) and as textual demonstration of total submission to God’s will serve as examples of the ways in which women visionaries were engaged as authorial participants in medieval literary culture.

while intellectual submission and textual self-negation would initially seem to contradict or dissolve authorial possibility, the identification of a divine source for one’s writing, which exists not only beyond the self, but also supersedes individual consciousness, generates a space of creative agency and flexibility in which transmission and reception – rather than ownership – become the goals of cultural production and spiritual enlightenment.

By disclosing the multiplicity of agents involved, traces of negotiations challenge common conceptions of authorship.

(1/2) conventional conceptions of translation can be characterized as an ‘elastic’ model in that translation is measured against a discrete and autonomous original to which the translation always refers back and is inevitably found to be lacking and subservient. The equivalences of the exchanges fail and the translation is never commensurate with the original. By contrast, a ‘plastic’ paradigm views translation as a morphing process by which a text develops precisely through translations.

(2/2) To replace textual elasticity with plasticity is also to adopt a generative framework that aligns with feminist conceptions of relationality as opposed to a discrete subject/object divide.

[...]

neither is purely original or copied.

Expanding boundaries of authorship

the politics of speaking and storytelling in transnational contexts, particularly with regard to these questions of representation [...] Indeed, it is Ferrante’s determination to remain unknown that has allowed for a more expansive view of translation as collaboration and co-authorship
想起了 Günter Grass 和 Olga Tokarczuk

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231007

Ferrante’s novels themselves are particularly germane to the topic of feminist translation because they are in many respects about the power of translation and its vital role in expanding the boundaries of women’s social and political identities [...] It is only when she becomes a writer that the narrator is empowered, and not by the language in which she writes, but by the act of translating.

Fictionalizing translation and translators

They mistranslate and they do so on purpose, with a political agenda in mind. So what happens when a ‘bad’ translation becomes a good one? What happens when meanings are subverted deliberately?
屌砸误译《第二性》，《三体》得奖

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231007

these and other feminist fictional translators tamper with globalization’s running wheel, hinder its fluidity, slow down readers, forcing them to take a pause and reflect, or even suspect, mistrust the process. They make translation visible.

Translating in the digital revolution

practices of solidarity are undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the digital revolution.
更容易（实时）交流，也更容易暴露纷争，还有审查的问题

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231007

Collective intelligence, amassed and oriented via artificial intelligence, may crowdsource solutions and dissolve the lines upon which a male heroic narrative of solo authorship established itself.

While in the immediate it calls for an intersectional critique to identify the sexist, racist, and other biased foundations of algorithms, along with analysis of the effects of building translation from a corpora that draws on a male and Western canon, reinforcing patriarchy in automated reflexes, it also allows us to imagine machines outside a gendered body and to ask what happens to humans when they accommodate themselves to artificial intelligences.

how does feminist translation respond to the imperative to reduce the energy consumption implicated in translation technologies when human authority is overridden by the fact of climate change?

While there is a generalized belief in the superiority of human translation over machine translation, the condescending jokes about Google Translate mask both an underlying anxiety and the fact that we are developing an increasing tolerance for, indeed a habit of, interacting with both automated and mediated forms of intelligence. Sooner or later, depending on the languages, machine translation will be very effective.
very？对我来说只有行和不行

Towards solidarity in translation

It is precisely due to this power to defamiliarize our (half )truths by welcoming difference that translation appears as threatening to the self, when it is imagined and performed in opposition to the other. However, this supposed threat is the very celebratory aspect of translation. It is how translation is created and creates: it lures the self into a vulnerable state of hosting the other and becoming anew with them.

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231008

Translating feminism in China A historical perspective #郁仲莉

Informed by postcolonial and postmodern thinking, the third wave [...] is more oriented to diversity, multiplicity and even ambiguity in women’s lives. In Europe, this is referred to as new feminism, concerning itself with issues such as trafficking, violence against women, pornography, etc., while theoretically undermining the earlier notion that there can be universal womanhood.

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231008

Some people regard the third wave as just another way of talking about the contemporary moment, while some others prefer to call it post-feminism. Post-feminism literally means “after feminism” or what is “left when feminism is over.” Open to many different, conflicting, and problematic interpretations on the one hand, post-feminism seems to connote that feminism is in a mess, in decline, and has failed

Feminism of the fourth wave goes beyond the struggles of women. It sounds clarion calls for gender equity and a broader awareness of oppression along with racism, ageism, classism, ableism, and sexual orientation

As China started to shift from “state-socialism” to “market-socialism,” Chinese women became more vulnerable, more frequently turned into sex objects, and exploited and discriminated against in employment contexts. The differences between men and women were re-emphasized to “justify inequalities” that came with economic reform

[...]

In the 1990s, the new translation of feminism as “女性主义 nüxing zhuyi” [womanism/women’s gender-ism/feminine-ism] replaced the old one in the academy in China,

In his Chinese translation of Herbert Spencer’s 1851 treatise Social Statics: Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, Ma Junwu (马君武) translated the expression “rights of women” into “女权 nüquan.”

the May Fourth Movement advocated that Chinese women should be the same as men, and not become ‘the other’ of men.

After the Party turned to Marxism, members steered the debates on women’s rights towards a socialist program [...] adopting an exclusionary strategy copied from European socialists to differentiate the “proletarian women’s liberation movement” (focusing on the Party’s goal) from the “bourgeois feminist movement” (focusing on gender equality).

The Mao era from 1949 until the late 1970s

the boundaries separating the sexes were overridden by the movement of women into men’s work and political activism

a women’s liberation idea that maintained the male-universal as the norm was problematic, because such equality between men and women actually deprived women of their difference, and androgenized women somehow created the illusion that Chinese women were liberated and enjoyed equal status as men

the depression and reformation of translation publishing from 1990 to 1999

(1/2)

The 1980s

about 20 feminist works were imported. They were concerned with the female body, female sexuality, married women, working women, and gender sociology. Among them, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (TSS) (1986, 1988×2, 1998, 2004, 2009×2, 2011), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1988×3, 1992) were the most popular

Another three works that had retranslations are Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside her (1988, 2007), Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much (1989, 2011), Our Bodies, Ourselves of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1989, 1998).

Beauvoir’s naming of women as the second sex reflected the experience of Chinese women as an invisible gender in society. Chinese urban women in the 1980s were in theory equal to men at the political, economic, and legal levels created by the socialist system. However, under this seemingly absolute equality, women faced the heavy burden of a male standard of work in society and the concealed expectations of being “贤妻良母” [good wife and virtuous mother] at home.

The 1990s

The increased number owed much to the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 [...] introduced. Moreover, the Conference led to the growth of women’s NGOs in China, and increased the number of gender-related international development projects [...] Since the early 1990s, Chinese feminists are said to have enthusiastically embraced the global feminist concept of gender

In this period, the translated works concerned not only women’s secondary position, women’s lives, the female body, female sexuality, and gender, but also women’s rights, needs, and self-esteem, feminist theology, and feminist literary criticism. The most influential book was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [...] The Hite reports were very popular too.

The 21st century

subject, moving beyond issues of women and men to address homosexuality, bisexuality, intersex, queer, desire, identity, history, ethics, science, semiotics, media, and public administration.

trafficking, prostitution, prejudice against female university students in the job market, prejudice against gender minorities, and violence against women, including sexual harassment and rape,

阿华师姜母奶茶 Oct 16, 2023

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in Polish

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231015

Western feminism may encounter criticisms or rejection in non-Western countries, but it is still a basic point of reference all over the globe.

Solidarność, I stubbornly maintained, has to first win independence and democracy for the entire society and only later we shall tackle the issue of women in common.
天朝民运？

The translator’s task can therefore be seen as one that replicates the orality, so clearly stressed in the text, and to find equivalents for the ironic intonation.

“Beauvoir’s style in Le Deuxième Sexe is defined by its “long and dense paragraphs” which are “essential, integral to the development of her arguments” [...] choice of strategy between domestication or foreignization
《第二性》注定难读，简化/归化真能提高销量、阅读量达到推广的效果吗

“On ne naît pas femme: on le deviant” [...] the Polish translation changes the singular into plural
但 on 在语意上不一定是单数

Up until the 1970s, she [Woolf] was seen mostly as an apolitical author of avant-garde psychological prose, a representative of high-brow modernism [...] It was with second-wave feminism that A Room of One’s Own was rediscovered

after 1989 these countries received a broad and intensive influx of texts – and not only those from the 20th century – representing the entire Western canon of feminist and gender-related thought [...] (the first translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 2011),

Translating feminist texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health

#翻译 #女权主义 #女性研究 #翻译研究 #女权主义翻译理论 231017

Most texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health have traditionally been written by medical doctors, usually male, and have underscored women’s roles as mothers and wives

From the 17th to the 19th century, medical professions led by male doctors in Western Europe and North America, in their efforts to gain recognition and establish their authority, constructed a view of the female body as inherently flawed, and vehemently disparaged any knowledge on health and the body produced by healers and midwives

It is only in the 20th century that a feminist critique of medical discourses acquired a prominent place in discussions of sexual and reproductive health. This critique was rooted in practices that questioned the very production of knowledge in the area of health. In the 1960s and 1970s, women reappropriated their bodies and their sexual health by openly sharing their experiences in consciousness-raising groups [...] to develop collective knowledges based on lived experiences

producing one of the most recognizable slogans of the 1960’s American political era: “The personal is political.” In this way, the practice of sharing experiences and knowledge served as the foundation for critical analysis of social structures and medical institutions. [...] women’s health groups developed a more pragmatic stand.

Both self-help groups and the women’s movement opened a path for the emergence of a feminist epistemology (Kuhlman and Babitsch 2002; Davis 2007). This epistemology is rooted in the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988) and brings forth the idea that knowledge is never neutral because it always reflects a particular context and the particular perspectives of the subject producing it.

Today, feminist critiques of medical models of knowledge continue to highlight the problems created by relying solely on supposedly “objective” knowledge production that views individuals as objects of study.

While oral contraception has allowed many women to take back control of their fertility, it is regularly presented by the health industry as a safe option that has no consequences (so-called objective knowledge). It has taken a great deal of reporting and sharing by women on their personal and serious secondary effects of the pill (subjective/experiential knowledge) in order to push pharmaceutical companies to develop safer options such as the minipill (progestin only).

Kathy Davis’s book The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders, which appeared in 2007, marks the first major study of the OBOS translations and their significance around the world [...] Collective, Davis’s work is a rare examination of a non-literary text and its translations.

global translation projects had the effect of “decentring” OBOS as a Western feminist project [...] OBOS translations have provided a platform for activists involved in the translation to demonstrate their “creative agency” by choosing what information to include and what to omit, contingent upon the “local political and cultural climates” (Davis 2007, 78). This editorial freedom accorded to the local translation groups by the Boston Collective set OBOS apart from most other translation projects

(1/2) As OBOS started to lose its influence domestically, it increasingly took on a new role as the “facilitator of its life outside the United States” (Davis 2007, 79; our emphasis)

(2/2) While most translations of OBOS are adaptations sensitive to local and cultural contexts, the one constant that has travelled to all global projects – or was always translatable – was the idea “of a small group of laywomen talking about their embodied experiences and critically assembling useful information about their health needs”

the Serbian translation spotlights the politics of translation and raises questions about the possibility of an equal exchange and knowledge production between feminists who are differently positioned on the geopolitical map.

[China's] transition from a planned economy to a “socialist market economy,” [...] influx of feminist literature from the West together with collaborations between Chinese women’s groups and intellectuals as well as foreign feminists.

The use of interviews as a research method has been gaining in popularity among translation studies scholars, perhaps nudged by considerable work on the importance of the translator’s agency, as it offers an opportunity to validate the experiences and insights of the translators.

which feminist translations of texts on women’s sexual and reproductive health demand a collaborative effort setting them apart from other feminist translations such as literary works.

The study of the collaborative translation process in Quebec highlights grammatical and terminological challenges brought on by the renewal of the notion of gender.

the use of the expression “we women” risks erasing oppressions experienced by the most marginalized women (racialized women, Aboriginal women, LBTQ women, etc.).
也不能反映女权日益“分裂”的现实

Sethna’s historical study focuses on the political context that gave rise to McGill students’ contestation of repressive reproductive policies and general lack of knowledge about the body, sex, and contraception.

The idea that a translation needs to remain faithful to the source text is a largely Western approach to translation,
林纾、“归化”派字幕组

translation practices that deal with sexual and reproductive health texts tend to encourage translation scholars to expand their definitions.

Yu studies the strategies of Ai, one of the translators of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in China. Ai presents the texts in her classes and integrates stories told by her students about their first menstruation experiences. She then replaces the stories in the source text written by Ensler on the experiences of American women with local women’s testimonials.

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva with her case study on Turkish Mommy blogs about pregnancy and childbirth shows how these bloggers employ a translation strategy similar to that used in the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting the history of terceme, Susam-Saraeva suggests that this term may be more useful for understanding blog translations due to their “emphasis on retelling, rewriting, saying again, reinterpreting and repeating for a new audience” as well as on intertextuality and unclear boundaries

women’s health is often highly politicized, a situation which encourages translation scholars to integrate activist dimensions in their work and research. Translations of women’s health texts are often completed by non-professional translators who are involved as activists in a cause they deem important. These lay translators engage in social activism as part of their translation and adaptation process.

that women’s health texts are increasingly made available solely online in a digital format.

the very nature of the web (chaotic, uncharted, and diachronic) provides a challenging environment for scholars to identify a significant and relevant corpus. Translation studies scholars thus face the challenge of developing new and creative tools to process the data stemming from blogs and online communities.