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Towards a Redefinition of
Feminist Translation Practice
a
Françoise Massardier-Kenney
a
Kent State University, USA
Published online: 21 Feb 2014.
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The Translator. Volume 3, Number 1 (1997),55-69
FRAN~OISE MASSARDIER-KENNEY
Kent State University, USA
In Maier and Massardier-Kenney (1996), Carol Maier and I pointed out the
destabilizing effect that translation can have on the idea of 'woman' as a se-
cure base, given that "gender definitions prove to be neither universal nor
absolute manifestations of inherent differences but relatively local, constantly
changing constructions" (ibid: 10). We called for an exploration of the ways in
which translation might lead one to rethink gender and gender identity, by
setting aside definitions that seemed 'natural' to the translator and by attempt-
ing to work with whatever definitions of gender the source text might present.
We also suggested that translators can use their practice as a vehicle for inter-
rogating the complexities of the bond that translation has with gender and chose
to use terms like 'woman-identified' and 'gender' rather than the term 'femi-
nist' , which we found problematic for anyone wanting to interrogate the very
category of gender. Our concern with feminism was that it imposed specific
definitions without recognizing that the source text might work from a differ-
ent set of definitions. 1 Thus the use of 'feminist' or 'woman' provides an unstable
point of departure for translation practice. Active translation does not depart
from predetermined gender definitions but must lead to an interrogation of
such gender definitions and roles.
However, this interrogation of gender in my activity both as a translation
practitioner and theorist has now led me to wonder if 'gender' might not have
its perils as well: the interrogation of gender has begun to reveal that what is
The question for me, however, is whether one can attempt to make the so-
called feminine subject visible in language without positing set definitions and
by working with texts which are not necessarily what a contemporary North
American or European would consider feminist, either because they were written
before feminism developed or because they come from a cultural context in
which feminism is not a viable strategy.4 Of course, the question itself of what
feminism is in the United States and elsewhere is controversial. As Schor (1992)
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Author-centred strategies seek to make the reader understand the source text.
Although strategies could be categorized in a number of different ways, for
example reader-centred, source literature-centred or target-literature centred,
the categories termed author-centred and translator-centred are particularly
useful within a feminist framework because they highlight the importance of
women as producers of texts (be it as authors or translators). The structuralist
dismissal of the notion of 'author' has primarily been possible because the
authors referred to were always gendered as males (and European and white,
we might add) and had enjoyed a long life before the critics declared them
dead. But the discourse about women as authors has just begun; of course, the
word author here is not understood as the old universal category of the man of
Fran(:oise Massardier-Kenney 59
genius but rather as "producer of text", a notion which allows for the interplay
of an individual agency (i.e. the gendered author) with the cultural forces that
shape that 'author'. Similarly, we need to speak of 'translator-centred strat-
egy', rather than simply 'reader-centred strategy' because, here again, the
specificity of the translator's activities and motivations needs to be examined
more thoroughly, especially in translation studies.
The first author-centred strategy, recovery, consists of the widening and
reshaping of canon. One possible way to define what feminist means in the
context of translation is to take "women's experience as a starting point", as
de Lotbiniere-Harwood has suggested (1991 :73), and to contribute through
translation to a rethinking of the canon from which women's experience has
been excluded. To take but one example, that of nineteenth-century French
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fusal of any efforts to define and create a 'feminine' identity", the translator
finds it inappropriate to focus a discussion of her work solely on "women is-
sues" (Maier 1994: 187). In this instance, the translator uses her afterword not
only to stress the importance of gender in Chacel' s work but also to problematize
words like "feminist" that may be "less international than some critics and
translators acknowledge" (ibid: 189). Although feminist Hispanists may not
consider these comments 'feminist' in the traditional sense, those comments
do focus on the importance of the feminine even as they point out the limits of
specific definitions. This type of metadiscourse reminds the reader that trans-
lating is an activity which creates authority for the writer translated, that the
translator is a critic responsible for introducing and marketing a specific 'im-
age' of that writer.
The presence of such metadiscourse makes it possible to counteract the
immediacy of the translated text and the feeling of familiarity which a transla-
tion necessarily induces to some degree; this immediacy and familiarity often
lead us to forget about the difference that the source text presented. Spivak
(1992) has pointed out the danger of a false sense of familiarity with a foreign
text or author, especially with the translations of Third World texts that obvi-
ously focus on women writing. In that case, the feminist 'bond' existing between
translator and author must not be used to erase the culture gap. When translat-
ing texts like 'Mirza' , an eighteenth-century negrophile story by French writer
Germaine de Stael, this metadiscourse is all the more important because the
styIe of the story is fluent; in other words the story does not call attention to
itself through obvious experimentation, and it is therefore difficult to avoid
producing a translation that is transparent.
Lawrence Venuti (1992, 1995) advocates what he calls resistancy in trans-
lation, i.e. making the labour of translation visible through linguistic means
that have a defamiliarizing effect and that work against easy fluency. This
notion can mostly be applied to modernist or post-modernist source texts that
already challenge the literary/linguistic conventions of their source languages;
but, as we shall see, it can also be fruitfully adapted to serve the objectives of
'feminist' translation, however defined. Indeed, resistancy works well with
Fran~oise Massardier-Kenney 61
experimental feminist writers like Monique Wittig, whose texts challenge the
(patriarchal) linguistic conventions of French through a reworking of French
grammatical gender (le genre) as expressed, for instance, in subject pronouns
and male/female endings of substantives. Wittig's texts do indeed resist the
structure of her native French, and Venuti's concept of resistancy encourages
the feminist translator to find ways to similarly challenge the norms of stand-
ard English. Likewise, the notion of resistancy can be applied to the works of
Quebec feminist writers who, as von Flotow has explained, produced "work
that was highly experimental, and constituted efforts to attack, deconstruct, or
simply bypass the conventional language they perceived as inherently misogy-
nist" (1991 :72). 7
However, the notion of resistancy needs to be adapted to deal with texts
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that do not use stylistic innovations to explore gender (this includes most pre-
contemporary texts). When texts do not invite stylistic tactics of estrangement,
the matter surrounding the translation can become an integral part of the text
and contribute to its resistancy, pushing against its automatic insertion in the
target culture. The notion of thick translation, proposed by cultural critic
Kwame Anthony Appiah, can also be fruitfully explored in the context offemi-
nist translation. Appiah (1993) uses the term 'thick translation' 8 to refer to a
translation "that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to
locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context" in an effort to attend to
"how various other people really are or were" (1993:817). He directly links
this understanding of "the reasons characteristic of other cultures" to a peda-
gogical project that aims at creating in students a new appreciation of and
respect for people of other times and cultures. Thus the notion of thick transla-
tion could be very useful in our current context in that it would allow the
translator to point out the importance of what is women-identified in terms of
literary production. Appiah rightly points out that this type of translation is
'academic' in the sense that it is associated with literary teaching; it is associ-
ated with the general objective of seeking to understand why people have spoken
or written the way they have. This academic mode of translation does not treat
the text as a thing made only to be bought and devoured but as a gendered,
linguistic, historical, commercial and political event. Appiah is speaking spe-
cifically in this instance about translating African proverbs, but his notion
of thick translation can obviously apply equally well to texts from other cul-
tural contexts.
Understanding the motivations of other times and other people is one of
the basic tasks of the translator, and that task can be achieved not only through
annotation but also through the kind of meta-translation discourse which I
mentioned earlier. For instance, Maureen Ahern's translation and editing of
Rosario Castellanos's works is a superb example of thick translation (Ahern
1988). In her introduction, Ahern focuses on the specificity of Castellanos as
a Mexican woman writer. She manages to describe Castellanos's feminist
62 A Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice
strategies and her use of intertextual references to other women writers while
showing how her own selection of translation strategies is guided by
Castellanos's feminist ideology and by the importance of "the exploration of
the other, whether that other be woman, indigenous culture, language, silence,
or writing itself' (1988:8). Specific examples of Ahern's thick translation
include her discussion of the ways in which Castellanos reworks the myth of
La Malinche, a figure usually represented as a traitor to Mexico and as a mon-
ster; there is also her analysis of Castellanos's mastery and parody of Mexican
bureaucratic formats, of Castellanos's critique of racial and cultural oppression
of the indigenous people in Chiapas. This rich context illuminates both the
source text and the translations. One also thinks of how fruitful thick transla-
tion would be with Caribbean writers like Maryse Conde, whose works
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The strategies discussed so far aim to make the source text accessible; they are
thus author-centred strategies, even if they include a reconstruction by the
Franroise Massardier-Kenney 63
translator of the cultural context of the author. To these must be added strategies
that are translator-centred. The first strategy, commentary, is essentially the
same as that discussed under author-centred strategies, but it serves a different
purpose here. If the metadiscourse that is part of the thick translation strategy
aims to bring the text closer to us while preserving its difference, it should also
describe the factors that affect the performance of the translator as well as the
stakes that the translator has in making the translation. In other words, the
feminist translator must describe her motives and the way they affect the
translated text in order to avoid reproducing a textual power structure which
genders the translator as the male confessor of the text. In her seminal essay,
'Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation' , Chamberlain (1988) shows how
the metaphorics of translation are deeply marked by gender differences.
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use of parallel texts, by which I mean texts in the target language which have
been produced in a situation similar to that in which the source text was pro-
duced. The term 'parallel texts' is not used consistently in the literature and
can mean different things to different people: from source texts and their trans-
lations to original texts of the same genre in the source language, to texts of the
same genre in the target language; however, it will be useful here to restrict the
definition of 'parallel texts' to texts in the target language that were produced
in a similar situation or that belong to the same genre as that of the source text.
Parallel texts are usually associated with training in specialized translation,
but every literary text is also specialized in that it belongs to a specific genre,
period or style and has specific features that are reproducible in the source as
well as in the target language.
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Several literary translators have discussed their use of parallel texts and
these discussions suggest that gender can often be a decisive factor. In his
preface to Crossing the Mangrove, Richard Philcox (1995) explains that he
turned to writers like Faulkner, Naipaul and Garcia Marquez to find a parallel
voice in English, but, not unexpectedly within the framework of a feminist
approach, he found Virginia Woolf to be the most compatible parallel to Maryse
Conde. ll The translator admits he was surprised by this compatibility, given
that these two writers seem too far apart, but of course the importance of gender
in their work brings them closer than one would expect. Similarly, in her
afterword to the Memoirs ofLeticia Valle, Carol Maier discusses the texts she
turned to in order to find the voice of a young woman, and the names of AnaYs
Nin and Anne Frank turn up. Maier's attentiveness to the importance of gender,
if not feminism, in Rosa Chacel's text makes her unravel the strands of a
tradition of women writing. To find a model for the tone of 'Mirza' that would
match the historical distance between the text and the contemporary readers, I
looked for Romantic texts with descriptive passages and dialogues, as well as
texts written by other women, in order to capture any possible intertextuality
that links instances of women writing but without assuming a specific ecriture
feminine. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein provided a glossary of Romantic
terms used by a woman writer who also wrote about an outsider (in the sense
of a creature who does not belong to the realm of the 'normal'). If, as de
Lotbiniere-Hardwood has convincingly argued, "feminist intertextual
knowledge is indispensable for translating feminist writers and for rewriting
texts in the feminine" (1991: 126), the reverse is also true: translating women
writers who may not be overtly feminist also requires a knowledge of women
writers in the target language even if their work has not yet been conceptualized
as a tradition. Since gender, like class and race, is an unavoidable factor in the
cultural production of human beings, selecting parallel texts on the basis of the
factor of gender is one of the ways in which a feminist translation can be effected.
The last strategy that can be used by the translator to achieve a feminist
translation is collaboration; this involves working with one or more transla-
Franroise Massardier-Kenney 65
tors and/or with the author on a given text. This practice can reinforce the idea
of translation as cooperation with the text, the author and other translators,
rather than a lonely struggle to 'master' the text. Diaz-Diocaretz (1985) and
Levine (1991) provide particularly good examples of the kind of 'cooperation'
the translator and the author can share. Examples of collaboration among trans-
lators can be found in Kadish and Massardier-Kenney (1994). Suzanne Jill
Levine's and Carol Maier's collaborative translation of Severo Sarduy's El
Cristo de la rue Jacob provides a further example (Sarduy 1987/1995).
Collaboration in the context of feminist translation means that while the
translator claims her agency in the metadiscourse surrounding the translation
and the awareness of creating a tradition, she can also avoid the traditional
dichotomy between two subjectivities (author/translator) which seek control
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3. Conclusion
FRAN<;OISE MASSARDIER-KENNEY
Modern and Classical Language Studies, Kent State University, POBox
5190, Kent, Ohio 44242-0001, USA. FKENNEY@KENTVM.KENT.EDU
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Notes
I would like to thank my colleagues Carol Maier and Doris Kadish for the sug-
gestions they have given me during the writing of this paper.
1. Of course, this is not to say that specific text meanings are 'deposited' in a
text, but rather that the text is the place where definitions are worked out
within the interactions between source text and reader, where certain defi-
nitions are encouraged. Although readers are time- and place-specific, the
definitions activated in the interaction between text and implied reader are
shaped by the cultural paradigms and the ideologies of the implied author
and the implied reader.
2. This is the position of feminists like Luce Irigaray who accept the psycho-
analytic explanation of the formation of the subject.
3. The inseparability of race, class and gender when considering women and
translation is what Doris Kadish and I argued in our Translating Slavery:
Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823 (Kadish &
Massardier-Kenney 1994). Although I acknowledged the "conscious val-
orization of gender" (ibid:25) in our translations, it seems now that what
was valorized was not so much gender as the devalued difference of the
'feminine' .
4. de Lotbiniere-Harwood alludes to this question when she notes that "in
mainstream translation, a feminist translator will seek to manifestly in-
clude women in the readership via nonsexist (aka inclusive) rewriting
strategies" (1991: 154).
5. See Vinay and Darbelnet's classic definition of compensation as a strategy
that attempts to keep the tone of the whole target text by using a stylistic
figure in another part of the text to replace the figure that could not be
translated where it was used in the source text. (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/
1977: 189).
6. These anthologies include Angelsey's work on Central American Wom-
en's poetry (Angelsey 1987), Ahem's (1988) book on Rosario Castellanos,
the short story anthologies of women writers from Costa Rica and Panama
Fran~oise Massardier-Kenney 67
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