Gender In Canadian Feminist Translation Studies

Feminist translation studies,a conjuncture of gender studies and translation studies since the late 1980s, is renowned for its assertive and aggressive challenges to many conventional translational notions such as"translator","objectivity"and"faithfulness". The intense debates between the conventional and the unconventional have set the once stagnant translation studies in motion again and cultivated the new school of study rich and profound. In order to promote a more detailed and systematic understanding of the school, this dissertation, anchored in Canadian feminist literary translation, makes a comparative study on the translation theories of Susanne de Lotbienière-Harwood and Luise von Flotow, two of the leading feminist scholars in the school in the 1990s.Both translation theorists are found to believe that"faithfulness"is impossible and intervention is unavoidable. For them, personal factors of a translator such as political ideology and education will drive him/her into self-conscious and -unconscious intervention to the source text. All translations, in this sense, are partial translations, or in a stricter sense, mistranslations, and what is more, a source text can reasonably have several versions, each marking the specific background of its translator. With a positive attitude towards the translator's subjectivity and creativity, both feminists strongly advocate that feminist translators, censors and critics to the source texts in the meantime, should actively subvert and correct patriarchal language for the good of women in the world of letters.Yet, the theoretical gap between the two feminist translation theorists is strikingly wide and deep. De Lotbienière-Harwood, positioning all men as the collective enemy to all women, asserts that men can understand neither women nor female experiences in a real sense and insists that men be excluded from feminist translation. As to women, she holds that the translator in feminist translation should not only be female, but also be a feminist with feminist awareness in language use. It is on this basis that she calls for the construction of a common woman language against patriarchal language and encourages communications between women of different languages and cultures by means of translation. Generally speaking, her study of feminist translation, stressing the guiding role of theory over practice, focuses on how a feminist translator produces a feminist translation by either bringing into the target language the subversion of patriarchal language in the source text or directly intervening in the patriarchal language of the source text. It is a study on translation process for suitable translation methods, an aspect of translation studies that has been traditionally done.In sharp contrast, von Flotow, breaking the linkage between gender and gender awareness, argues that what really counts in feminist translation is gender awareness and that a male translator with gender awareness may do a better translation of a feminist text than a female translator without. She believes that the existing language can be improved with patriarchal language corrected and women identified. More noticeably, she, merely viewing gender as one of the many entangled cultural elements that exert a joint impact on the translator's decision-making, affirms that differences inside one gender are sometimes greater than differences between genders and it is meaningful to study the differences and the communications of gender as a specific political ideology between different languages, cultures and historical periods. Based on gender difference, her research on feminist translation is, to be specific, cultural studies.Finally, with a summary of the comparison between de Lotbienière-Harwood's and von Flotow's translation theories, this dissertation ends with a conclusion that theirs are of different types, each deep-rooted in its complicated theoretical background, and with an expectation that new avenues of thought would be opened in feminist translation studies, especially on the study of its internal differences, for the soundness of the school.