The Feminist Translation Network (FTN) asks a clear and straightforward question: What is feminist translation, in practice, in the twenty-first century? The investigators are aware that there is no straightforward answer. Hilary Brown’s historical work has debunked the myth of a feminist translation genealogy. Olga Castro often reminds us that there are as many types of feminist translation as there are feminists, and our roles as academics is not to prescribe or find a definitive and narrow answer. Therefore, a wide range of possible answers was to be expected. However, having followed the network events closely, I found that range wider than I had expected. In this post, I reflect on some of the examples of feminist translation discussed and some of the different perspectives they represent.
During the first FTN event, a symposium on ‘What Makes a Translation Feminist?’ held at The Exchange in Birmingham, doctoral candidate Laura Woolley-Núñez was asked to name an explicitly feminist strategy in her translation of María Teresa de León’s autobiography, Memoria de la Melancolía. Woolley-Núñez’s example was translating the Spanish ‘niños’, which is gender-marked in the supposedly ‘generic’ masculine, with the gender-neutral ‘children’, in English. I asked whether that was not the obvious strategy, since any other choice, such as the alternative mentioned by Woolley-Núñez, ‘boys’, would be sexist. I believe that feminism needs to go beyond gender neutrality. Anti-racism activists often remind us that not being racist is not enough; we need to be anti-racist. Likewise, feminism should be about more than being non-sexist; it should be about being actively anti-sexist.
In the third FTN event, a ‘Pedagogies of Feminist Translation’ symposium held in Oxford, Rosalind Harvey hit the nail on the head when she commented that some examples of feminist translation practice seemed to her to be just ‘good translation’. Being aware of unequal power relations in terms of gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, religion, etc. is simply good practice, in any domain. However, as Marilyn Booth had noted during the earlier symposium in Birmingham, even such innocent strategies as using non-sexist language are sometimes unjustified: using gender-neutral pronouns in the translation of an Arabic text written in 1960s would have made the translation sound anachronistic, and that would not be ‘good translation’.
Other, more provocative examples discussed at the Oxford event suggest that feminist strategies often go beyond good, gender-aware translation. This event included a slam between Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci and Lawrence Schimel, based on Ledicia Costas’ Verne y la vida secreta de las mujeres planta, Costas’ self-translation from the Galician source text. I particularly enjoyed Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci’s translation. Her addition of ‘Amazon’ in the description of a warrior woman’s legs (in Spanish, ‘las piernas de una guerrera’) was a subtle move, but one that nevertheless pushed, without breaking, the limits of ‘good translation’.
If we consider feminism as a movement against sexism. Lawrence Schimel’s version of Costas’ text did not make any overtly ‘feminist’ gestures. However, he included Galician words in his Spanish translation where Costas herself, in the Spanish version, had not used Galician. When asked whether he considered giving visibility to minoritized languages a feminist strategy, Schimel was confident in his positive response: our society can be represented as a pyramid with cis-hetero white middle-class men at the top and everyone else below, he explained; challenging any aspect of the power dynamics that maintain the pyramid is a feminist act. I tend to agree with Schimel that feminism should include, but also go beyond, gender-focused activism.
Schimel’s strategy falls under what scholar and translator Lawrence Venuti calls ‘resistant translation’ (also known as foreignizing or minoritizing translation). The use of source culture words in the target text is one of the most commonly cited examples of this type of translation. Venuti mentions feminism only in passing in his publications, although generally as examples of resistant translation. Resistant translation is placed in opposition to what Venuti calls ‘instrumental’ or ‘domesticating’ translations. While well-intentioned, Venuti and Schimel’s vigorous defiance of tradition reflects a position that translators occupying less secure roles in the field cannot take for granted. What is more, the power of translation as a tool for resistance is not always diminished by fluent translations. Fluency can also be a strategic tool.
I object to the term ‘domestication’ to describe translations on the basis that it denigrates the domestic as a familiar, comfortable and safe space. Domesticity is historically associated with women and families, a space to protect rather a seat of power. However, reclaiming the domestic can be a powerful feminist gesture, as some of the examples discussed during the Translator Scratch Night organised by the Emma Press in collaboration with the FTN demonstrate. One of the drafts discussed was Ruth Donnelly’s translation of a young adult novel, El retrato de Verónica Gby Argentinean author Andrea Ferrari. Donnelly contrasted this project with a previous one, in which Donnelly’s feminist strategies had involved mainly linguistic choices intended to undermine the sexist nature of the Spanish language. In Ferrari’s novel, since the subject matter itself was feminist, Donnelly argued, a smooth and fully idiomatic translation would be more strategic as a feminist strategy, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the story, experiencing the dilemmas that the main character goes through.
The translations discussed during the scratch night will be published by the Emma Press in an anthology to be formally launched at the Birmingham Literature Festival in October 2025. Judging by the drafts discussed during the scratch night, readers and festival goers are in for a treat. This event was made possible thanks to extra AHRC funding obtained by the FTN to accelerate the impact of their activities. The FTN has only just begun its work. Judging by the momentum gathered so far, there is still much more work to do. The examples discussed here only scratch the surface of a shaky ground that translators, academics and publishers all over the world will need to continue digging into for a while.
Gabriela Saldanha
University of Oslo