Translation Studies In Feminist Perspective

As two important parts of cultural category, feminism and translation studies have something related. From the perspective of feminism, we could reconsider several unreasonable factors in traditional translation theory, thus explore a new ground for translation studies. This thesis aims to make a comprehensive study on the development of feminist translation theory, and tries to provide a systematic discussion on the characteristics of feminist translation theory by analyzing two versions of a famous feminist work Jane Eyre.This thesis consists of six chapters besides an introduction and a conclusion.The first chapter is a brief introduction on the research background, scope, purpose, and methodology of this thesis.The second chapter is a review of the origin and development of feminist translation theory, which gives a respective discussion on the origin and development of feminism, and how feminism and translation studies combine with each other. At the end of this chapter, three famous feminist translation theorists and their works are referred: Luise Von Flotow, Sherry Simon and Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood. From the review of their works, we can get a brief idea on the development of feminist translation theory.The third chapter presents some characteristics of feminist translation theory. This chapter begins with the viewpoint that feminist translators consider translation as a tool to take power, in which two issues are getting focused: the relationship between power and language, and the relationship between power and translation. In feminist translation theory, the description of women's body is emphasized. Women translators make great efforts to deconstruct the male language of patriarchy and describe women's body and physical experience that has been vanished and disdained in man's culture by using new spelling, new grammatical structure, new image and metaphor. At last, this chapter provides another characteristic of feminist translation theory ---feminist translators try to assert their value and identity into their translation, in order to make women translators visible in translation. In the end, feminists created the concept of "androgyny", and applied this concept to translation studies, thus promoted translation studies to a higher level.Chapter four refers to the practice of feminist translators from three aspects: the selection of source text, feminists'reading theory and feminist translation strategies. In addition, a case study is provided in this chapter. A comparison between two versions by man and woman translators of Jane Eyre is carried out, from which we can find out that there are great differences of man and woman translation when they are translating the same text. Thus the three characteristics mentioned in chapter three are getting proved.Chapter five refers to some limitations of feminist translation theory and some suggestions on its further research. The appearance of feminist translation theory is inevitable, and its limitations are unavoidable. Feminist translation theory will go a long way to finish its self-perfection and self-correction, while in this process, it is important to deal with the"degree"issue.Chapter five is the conclusion part. This chapter summarizes the great contributions and inspirations of feminist translation theory made on translation studies, and makes a further viewpoint that translation studies will benefit a lot from the combination of feminism and translation studies.