|
|
Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Luise von Flotow
Some of the most voluble and theoretically savvy translation studies researchers
and writers to connect translation and gendered identity construction have been
Canadian – Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (1992), Sherry Simon (1996), Barbara
Godard (translators’ prefaces and articles 1988, 1990, 1995) and others, and all
of them have worked at the interface of contemporary French and English. They
have been engaged as much in producing translations as in the power-brokering of
language critique and language reform. Why is this? What were the philosophical,
sociological, and cultural underpinnings of this development that we are now
discussing in its many different international guises in Seoul.
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Tracing the Gendering of Identity and Translation: Canada
School of Translation and Interpretation,
University of Ottawa, Canada
My presentation will present a historic overview of the contact between French
and English feminisms in Canada leading up to the 1990s, the role played by
translation (and translators and translation theorists) during this period to
bring at least two streams of the women’s movement into contact. It will also
analyze the perhaps avantgardist theorizations that came out of it.
The focus will be on the (French/Québécois?) notion of difference – as revealed
in the ‘écriture féminine’ that both produces and reflects it, and that was
sanctioned at the time by numerous post-structuralist approaches to texts. In
the paper I will consider the relative absence of more universalist, egalitarian
feminist approaches which might have deprived the imbrication of ‘gender’ with
translation of its politicized identity-forming, constructionist bases.
My purpose is to localize the contact between these two concepts – in Canada, at
a certain moment, for certain reasons, in a certain coterie - and to ask to what
extent it must remain a local, historical, cultural/political manifestation.
© IATIS 2003