|
|
Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Elisabeth Gibbels
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a staple text of
feminist discourse. It has been translated into German four times and always at
historical moments when women’s social roles were being negotiated: over the
course of the Enlightenment’s focus on educational reform and human rights; the
emergence of a strong women’s movement in the 19th century; the collapse of the
socialist GDR; the post-feminist era after German reunification.
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Wollstonecraft in Four German Versions: Discursive Unease vs Norm Compliance
English Department, Humboldt Universität, Berlin
As a representative of an emergent discourse Wollstonecraft’s text had to use
text markers that questioned established discourse positions and language use.
Wollstonecraft stakes out a claim for female participation in discourse areas
that were forbidden – male – territory, and negotiates a speaking position for
herself as the “exceptional” woman who does not “speak for her sex” but is
“disinterested” and speaks with the “firm tone of humanity”, not so much for
women but to everybody: the members of dominant groups and middle-class women.
The resultant heterogeneous rhetoric and textual strategies are as instrumental
for the text’s emancipatory agenda as the political demands it contains.
Heterogeneity and stylistic shifts, however, are challenging for any
translation. Because of their habitus and their desire to produce “acceptable”
translations, the translators have tended to eliminate the traces of discursive
struggle. The texts the translators have produced are more norm-compliant and
stylistically correct than Wollstonecraft’s and they reflect the discourse
positions women were allotted in the translators’ concrete historical
situations.
The paper shows how the German texts construct female identities that are
different from and often more opportunistic than those in the English text. The
analysis concentrates on gaps, frictions and mistranslations as indicators of
discursive uneasiness. Patterns on the structural, syntactic and lexical text
levels are shown to position both readers and author in a way that is often
contrary to or less avant-garde than Wollstonecraft. It also tries to explain
why this happened in spite of the sympathy each of the translators had expressed
for Wollstonecraft and women’s causes.
© IATIS 2003