譯隻綠蠵龜

In Sherry Simon’s first chapter of her Gender in Translation, she discusses how feminist translation arose and how its purposes affect the method of translation used in its production.  In the “cultural turn” of the 1980’s, translation studies acquired a new dimension.  Focus shifted from how to produce a “correct” and faithful translation to the purpose that these translated works would serve in its finished form.  In Simon’s words, the purpose turned to how translations as written documents “exist materially and move about, add to our store of knowledge, and contribute to ongoing changes in esthetics.  This kind of aim for social change seems to indicate that in the field of feminism, translated works are at the center of the polysystem.  This may help to explain the inclination towards "foreignization", rather than a production of a very fluent and domesticated translated text. (However, regarding "foreignization" in feminism, it appears to me that it is not so much a rigid adherence to the grammatical form of the source language, as it is a creation of a "feminist" language.)

In the context of feminism, translated works were not only meant to spread the message of feminism, but to bring attention to inherent gender associations of language itself indicated (such as the thought experiment reported by Deborah Cameron of pairs of words like knife/fork, vanilla/chocolate, etc. <p.18>), as well as to question why translation is considered a derivative of the “stronger” original, much like women are considered as the “weaker sex”.  To serve this end, feminist translators employ a number of methods, including clever formatting of the text.  For example, Godard’s clever wordplay (p.14) with the title of Brossard’s L’Amer, or De Lotbiniere-Harwood’s (p.21) bolding of the “e” in her translations (or spelling “author” as “auther”, etc.).