Feminist Approaches: A Constructive ‘Dis-Unity’

Luise Von Flotow brings in her paper ‘Dis-Unity and Diversity.Feminist Approaches to Translation' a short but succinct update on the diversification of feminist discourse in Translation Studies. She accounts this increasing phenomenon of the last fifteen years on the focus on the notion of difference that cross-cultural work has created. The main factors which seem to boost the proliferation of feminist approaches are dis-unity, diversity and complexity.

When it comes to diversity, the author believes that one must maintain a survival strategy which should cluster around two poles: ‘response-ability’ and ‘desire-ability’ (1998:3). Given the fact that feminist discourse criticism is rarely neutral – a thing which is utterly undesirable, for a general consensus wouldn’t then encourage development within the field - Von Flotow believes it achieved the required strategic complexity. Nonetheless, she feels the necessity to pinpoint the main factors which bring disunity in feminist approaches and which may not be as constructive as wished to be.

One of the factors Von Flotow chooses to examine more closely is maintaining a ‘mainstream “translatese” of third world material’, which not only perpetuates stereotypes and misrepresentations in the Anglophone world, but also ‘deprives the texts of their original style’(1998;5). To illustrate this issue Gayatri Spivak argues that, by writing in an ‘available English’, Western feminists end up erasing the cultural particularities of the original, making ‘the literature of a woman in Palestine (…) resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.).

The Canadian scholar also brings into question the issue of elitist translation. By deliberately translating from a feminist perspective, the resulting texts, full of complex wordplay, become very difficult to comprehend by the general public, except for a small academic, bilingual elite. One good example would be Barbara Godard’s translation of L’Amer (These Our Mothers). Thus, by supplementing the wordplay from the title, the original L’Amer (a reference to mere –mother, mer –sea, and amer – bitter) becomes These Our Mothers (The Sea Our Mother + Sea (S)mothers + (S)our Mothers) (1991;75).

Another issue that Von Flotow raises in this paper is the hypocrisy of some feminist translators, who criticize the use of ‘male violence’ in translation (1998:7) but who approach the same type of aggressive methods in their own work, like ‘hijacking’, a term defined as a deliberate act of feminizing, appropriating the target text(1991;75). To use as an example the same translator, it seems that Godard’s translations involve as ‘dis-unifying’ strategies both the use of elitist and the theoretically non-coherent – that is, hypocrite – translation approaches(1998;5); in other words, she makes use of sophisticated and inaccessible word games along with the violent appropriation of the source text (a perfect example is the famous translation of "Ce soir j'entre dans l'histoire sans relever ma jupe” with “ Tonight I shall step into history without opening my legs”(1991;69)).

Further on Von Flotow presents three factors which she believes to play a role in feminist dis-unity(1998;10). The first one, 'identity politics', refers to that certain consciously identifiable cultural/political characteristics that will determine one’s opinions and prejudices. She mentions Gayatri Spivak as an example, her multicultural heritage and how this might have influenced her political views and consequently the way she translates.

The second factor, 'positionality', accounts for the way personal values are reinterpreted and constructed in time and space according to different economic, political and cultural backgrounds. A good example for this case would be the feminist approach of Suzanne Levine’s translations.

Lastly, the ‘historical dimension’ of scholarly discourse refers to the way gendered subjectivity changes with the time and with the political and institutional contexts. As such, where Theo Hermans saw in Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse a sense of affinity between the author and the translator, Lori Chamberlain sees with her feminist approach a ‘form of struggle for the right of paternity’ (1998;11).


Taking a broad picture of the field of feminist translation as it has developed so far, I would argue that the proliferation of various ‘dis-unifying’ approaches is constructive, for it increasingly incorporates traditions and perspectives of women from very different social backgrounds, which is helpful for a better understanding of their needs and expectations; moreover, it may have positive repercussions not only in the world of translation studies, but in their social and economic environments as well.


References:

Von Flotow, Luise (1998) “Dis-Unity and Diversity. Feminist Approaches to Translation', Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing
------------------(1997) Translation and Gender. Translating in the Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing (http://www.litere.usv.ro/pagini/Volume_manifestari_studentesti/CONSENSUS%20lucrari/11.pdf)
------------------(1991). “Feminist translation: Context, Practices and Theories”. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, vol.4, no.2, (p.69-84) (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/1991/v4/n2/037094ar.pdf)