Gender Discourse Power In The Translation Context

Ever since the 1990's, translation studies have gone beyond the linguistic perspective and shifted to the culture. The combination of gender and translation makes the feminism translation a new hot study.Feminism campaign in West is remarkable and has gained much from it. There are three climaxes in feminist development history. The first began in the middle of the 19 century, the second was from 1960s to 1980s, and the third originates from1990s. Each period has its own features. In the third period, feminism turns attention to the knowledge and language. Some radical feminist hold that it is the language that puts women in the position of second sex, for the traditional language under patriarchy is phallocentrism. In translation study there has long existed a sex metaphor that the translation text is an unfaithful beauty, implicating the translator and the translation text must be faithful absolutely to the writer and the source text. After exploring the inner relation between the translation and politics, together with the discourse/power theory developed by Foucault, the writer draw an important conclusion that the whole history of feminism is actually a history of fighting for the gender discourse power, thus discourse power is put into a unprecedentedly crucial status. The term Gender Discourse Power, however, has not been given the attention it deserves in china.Additionally, the writer takes a deep look back on the origin of the discourse power theory, arguing that the " sex difference" given by Woolf and the "gender" theory by Beauvoir, together with the " gender discourse power", are actually closely related in chronological order and all are developed with further advance of feminism campaign.Compared with the western counties, feminism translation is much less remarkable. However, there are some notable women translators with "feminism awareness". Taking Zhuhong and Bingxin as examples, this paper formulates domestic feminism translation activities.