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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Anne-Lise Feral
Panel 2: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
British Chicks? On the French Translations of Bestselling Modern Romance
Fictions
University of Edinburgh, UK
This paper explores the construction of gender identity in the French
translations of three British best-selling modern romance, or ‘chick lit’,
novels: Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, Jane Green’s Mr. Maybe, and India
Knight’s My Life on a Plate. A comparative analysis of the source texts and
their translations highlights the difference in ideology between French and
British cultures as regards gender roles, stereotypes and relations.
Chick lit is a popular genre written by, for and about British women. The
translations studied here were produced by French women for a French female
readership. The change in producers and receivers results in a professional,
economic and sexual disempowerment of chick lit characters, revealing that
French women still lag significantly behind their British counterparts in their
gains from the 20th century women’s movement. The extent to which British
chick’s realities, lives, aspirations and culture-specific behaviour were
manipulated in the translations reflects the resistance to new gender identities
in the receiving corpus whose predominant ideology rejects identity groups and
politics.
It is clear that different patriarchal languages produce different gender
identities, but feminist translation scholars and translators have specialised
in the construction of gender identities in feminist works and in women’s
literature canonised by the women’s movement – as if these constituted the
entire feminine discourse. Yet, women’s fiction produced and translated for mass
consumption reaches a broader female readership than any other type of
literature and plays an important part in women’s socialisation. Moreover, the
Western/non-Western dichotomy has dominated translation and intercultural
studies, creating the illusion of ideological uniformity in the West. Yet the
conflicting approaches on gender issues between two neighbouring Western
countries present a more complex and fragmented picture of the Western world and
reveal the limitations of the feminist movement’s international dimensions.
© IATIS 2003