Source — Literariness.org, "Translation and Gender"
- Title: Translation and Gender
- Author: Nasrullah Mambrol
- Publication: literariness.org
- URL: https://literariness.org/2018/01/13/translation-and-gender/
- Date: 2018-01-13
- Type: secondary — a literature/theory reference blog; neutral-to-expository stance, cites named primary sources with page-style citations (e.g. "Simon 1996: 1") rather than presenting unsourced synthesis.
- Accessed: 2026-08-30
Extract
- States feminist translation theory's core premise as an analogy: theorists identify a parallel between translation's subordinate status (relative to an "original" text) and women's subordinate status in society, and seek to "identify and critique the tangle of concepts which relegates both women and translation to the bottom of the social and literary ladder" (cited as Simon 1996: 1, i.e. Sherry Simon's Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, Routledge, 1996).
- Recasts the translator's relationship to the source text: rather than a translator serving either the author or the reader, feminist translation theory proposes a shared "translation project" in which "both writer and translator participate" (cited as Simon 1996: 2).
- Names Barbara Godard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as translator-theorists who practice deliberate textual intervention — Lotbinière-Harwood's own description of her aim is making "language speak for women."
- Describes concrete linguistic markers used by feminist translators to make gender visible in translation: bold emphasis on feminine letters/endings, capitalization for ideological visibility (e.g. "HuMan"), coined neologisms (e.g. auteure for a female author), and deliberate reassignment of gendered pronouns.
- Quotes Godard (cited as Godard 1990: 91) on the feminist translator's stance toward visibility: she "flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text."
- Also names Keith Harvey (translation of "camp talk" register across languages) and, as a historical antecedent rather than a theorist, Constance Garnett (translator of roughly sixty volumes of Russian classics into English) — both named but not elaborated on this page.
Gaps in this source (flagged, not filled here)
- This is a secondary summary; none of its Simon/Godard citations have been checked by this project against the cited primary texts themselves.
- Constance Garnett and Keith Harvey are named without enough context here to know why this page includes them under "translation and gender" — not pursued further this session.