Translators vs translatresses’ strategies: ethical and ideological challenges

Abstract

In the last few years there has been an increasing interest in the issue of gender in translation practice especially thanks to the work of feminist critics and translators who see the act of translating as an activity which involves making use not of speciously neutral, so-called objective strategies, but rather dynamic procedures and tactics which negotiate and are negotiable, open and contingent, and which never assume feminine subjectivity to be an absolute and stable category. Drawing on such premises, this work will focus on the interrelation between identity, textuality and translation in an attempt to explore the idea that gender representation in translation practice may be shaped by the translator’s identity and this can be partly detected through their strategies. Specifically, we will show the role these factors play through the analysis of two case-studies, that is 1) the feminist (unpublished) translation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by María Reimóndez and its final (published) translation into Galician with additional comparisons in Spanish and Italian, and 2) the two Italian translations of Woolf’s Orlando (1928), carried out respectively by a woman and then by a man. In both cases, translation strategies will be discussed in an attempt to unveil the ideological reading of translation and to raise translators’ awareness of gender constructs in textuality.