Translation From The Perspective Of Feminism

The feminist movement, originating from Humanism and the Industrial Revolution, mainly took place in Europe and the United States with its primary goal to claim equal rights for women in society. In history, the movement experienced three climaxes: one from the late 19th century to the early 20th , another from the 1960s to the 1970s and the third from the 1970s to the present. With its development, China also began its introduction of feminism.When feminist movement came to the second stage, its focus transformed to the academic study. Feminists began to take language as their weapon against patriarchal language. Since translation has long been regarded as the secondary status like that of women in history, feminist translators took translation as their academic tool to fight for the so-long supressed voice of women.Meanwhile, with the introduction of'gender', feminist translation starts to prosper as a unique theory and practice to get women's voice heard. In theory, feminist translators have been combatting traditional translation ideologies, which in their eyes subvert the status of translators by emphysizing fidelity to the source text without taking the subjectivity of translators into consideration. On the other hand, feminist translation draws inspirition from the Cultural Turn and Deconstuction theory, forming a completely new systematic translation theory.In practice, when feminism encountered with translation, feminist translators seek to overturn the long-established patriarchal language by way of intervention or manipulation of language, so as to improve women's secondary status in translation. The strategies they take can be roughly divided into supplementing, prafacing and footnoting. The author takes Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma to explore the feminist ideology in different versions of translation by various translators, expecting to see the strategies they use when confronting patriarchal language and representing their consciousness of gender difference in translations when dealing with the same problem.