|
|
Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Annarita Taronna
University of Bari, Italy
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Translating Androgyny: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, a Case Study
Department of English Studies,
This paper has developed out of my interest in feminist explorations of gender
as a cultural construct and in translation as cultural transfer. The aim of the
paper is threefold.
First, it will provide a theoretical overview of gender awareness in translation
practice which will raise urgent questions about the politics of identity that
reflect on the status of women in writing and translating (essentialist and
constructionist postures, gender metaphorics concerning the patriarchal paradigm
of father/author(ity), the relegation of the female/translation to a variety of
secondary roles, and the subversion of these paradigms). I will also discuss the
interdependence of identity and textuality which makes translation a negotiable
practice onto which we can (re)conduct our own reading. And I will examine the
theory and practice of translating as/like a woman, that is an activity which
involves making use not of speciously neutral, so-called objective strategies
and the immobilized subjectivity of patriarchal discourses, but rather dynamic
processes and tactics which negotiate and are negotiable, open and contingent,
yet which never assume the absolute totality of a feminine subjectivity in
translation.
Second, in the light of these premises, I propose to examine the (en)gendering
of translation (practice) through a comparative-contrastive analysis of Orlando
by Virginia Woolf and two of its Italian translations, by a male and a female
translator, respectively. In particular, this case study seeks to investigate
those differences, semantic deviations and equivalences emerging from the
translation of specific keywords (he-man-male; she-woman-female;
sex-change-fashion) which reveal the leitmotiv of Woolf’s literary work:
metamorphosis.
Third, my study also includes a pedagogical agenda as my research poses
questions for a direction in scholarship that may be interested in learning and
teaching (the intersections of) gender and translations.
© IATIS 2003