Living in translation: Voicing and inscribing women’s lives and practices

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European Journal of Women’s Studies
18(4) 331
–337
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1350506811415190
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EJWS
Living in translation:
Voicing and inscribing
women’s lives and practices
Kornelia Slavova
University of Sofia, Bulgaria
Ann Phoenix
Institute of Education, UK
Our whole life a translation. (Adrienne Rich)
In today’s world of global connections Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Our Whole Life a
Translation’ can be seen not simply as a beautiful metaphor for the untranslatability of
human experience but very much as a reality for many women who live mobilities. If
‘our whole life is a translation’, we cannot help wondering: what then is the original? Is
it another text, another experience or another reality? Many years ago Walter Benjamin
defined translation as ‘a mode’, i.e. simultaneously a condition and a form of movement
between texts and cultures, reminding his readers that ‘a translation issues from the origi-
nal’ and ‘it comes later than the original’ (1999: 72). Therefore translation is not simply
a linguistic movement of words and texts from one language into another but a move-
ment of selves in/through language to other places, cultures, selves and positions – a
signal of dynamic processes of continuation, change and transformation.
By employing the whole gamut of ambiguity in the concept of ‘translation’, this spe-
cial issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies explores the complex connections
between words and worlds, between self and Other(s), between the translating subject
and the object/context of translation from a gendered point of view. At the same time, the
lens of translation offers alternative modes and scenarios for interpreting women’s lives
and identities – from the quotidian aspects of living, education and work to the more
exceptional aspects of female creativity, subjectivity and expression in another language.
The articles that follow raise multiple important and provocative questions: What does it
mean to live in translation? How is femininity constructed, deconstructed, and recon-
structed when transmitted from one language/culture to another? Is stereotypical
understanding of femininity/masculinity reinforced or obliterated in the movement from
one historical and social context to another? How do gender binaries and hierarchies
Editorial
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332 European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(4)
travel in translation and what effects do they have on the translation process? And vice
versa – how is gender reconfigured in the movement from one linguistic and cultural
environment to another? What strategies can make women more visible in/through
translation?
Of course, many similar questions have been raised previously by scholars in wom-
en’s studies, translation studies as well as in other disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences. In the last three decades translation studies as an ‘interdiscipline’ (Snell-
Hornby, 2006: 72) has moved away from the linguistic aspects of translation as text-
based towards translation as culture and politics, exploring the role of various social
categories in translation such as gender, ethnicity, class, ideology, history and tradition.
It has drawn insights from sociology, anthropology, literary and postcolonial theory, cul-
tural studies, philosophy, psychology and many other areas. For example, postcolonial
scholars have shown how translation practices are always embedded in structures of
power and knowledge, often imposing particular values and norms or masking inequali-
ties (Bhabha, 1994; Rodriguez, 2008; Spivak, 1992). Along similar lines Lawrence
Venuti equates these processes with doing violence:
The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstruction of the
foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist in the target
language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining
the production, circulation, and reception of texts. (Venuti, 1996: 196).
Commenting on her own struggle to unlearn internalized principles and norms when
translating late 18th-century Bengali poetry, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also suggests
that translation is not an innocent act: ‘I must overcome what I was taught in school: the
highest mark for the most accurate collection of synonyms, strung together in the most
proximate syntax. I must resist both the solemnity of chaste Victorian prose and forced
simplicity of “plain English” that have imposed themselves as the norm’ (1992: 178).
Yet, in the very next sentence Spivak dissipates the violence of neo-colonialist construc-
tion with love, claiming that translation is ‘the most intimate act of reading: I surrender
to the text when I translate’ (1992: 178). Thus translation can be many different things:
violence, imposition and appropriation, but also intimacy, loyalty and empathy.
While translation studies has shifted from an exclusively linguistic focus to attending
to the social, the social sciences and humanities have come to recognize that translation
is a central feature of everyday practices in globalized and mobile lives. Thus, language
brokering, including children’s language brokering, is increasingly the object of empiri-
cal study for its effects on family relationships, identities and acts of citizenship (e.g.
Orellana, 2009). Translation as metaphor is also used to help illuminate intersectional
social-historical relations. This is evocatively exemplified by Susan Bordo (2008), who
links gender and racialization in a discussion of her daughter Cassie’s hair:
Ayana Bird and Lori Thorps [sic], authors of Hair Story, emphasize that the quest for straight
hair [by black women] has never just been about ‘conforming to the prevailing fashions’, but a
recognition that ‘straight hair translated to economic opportunity and social advantage’, both
within slavery and after.
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Slavova and Phoenix 333
The texts which follow approach ‘living in translation’ from diverse angles: as a
process of positioning in relation to exile, as appropriation or transculturation, which
allows both resistance and accommodation between hegemonic and marginal cultures
and languages; as a social practice that is historically located, has political consequences
and is imbued with power relations; as a process of reinventing the self and as a process
of reflection and self-reflection.
This special issue pays attention to feminist translation theory and scholarship,
which has contributed enormously to breaking down the barriers between hegemonic
positions/languages and those of the marginalized and the oppressed, and to construct-
ing a more integrated approach to translation studies (Chamberlain, 1992; Maier and
Massardier-Kenny, 1996; Massardier-Kenny, 1997; Simon, 1996; Von Flotow, 1997).
In keeping with the interdisciplinarity of EJWS, however, the special issue represents
a range of academic disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, Quranic studies, sociology and systemic psychotherapy.
This cross-cultural interdisciplinarity allows it to consider the ways in which transla-
tion in the social sciences and in pedagogic practice reveals how the language and
experience of the marginal or the Other often lead to deeper insights and understanding
about realities – for example, in cases of racial prejudice, ethnocentrism or forced
migration as well as greater sensitivity to cultural and linguistic difference. It also
illustrates how a focus on the process of translation itself can illuminate social power
relations of gender, social class, ethnicity and nationality.
The articles provide a kaleidoscopic picture of ‘living in translation’ by bringing
translation and women’s practices into view in various configurations and patterns across
space and time. The experiences discussed in the articles below – in/of translation –
speak of different languages (including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German,
Hebrew, Polish, Shona, Spanish and Urdu) and diverse locations (Argentina, Australia,
Europe, the Middle East and North America). The material analysed moves between dif-
ferent media and genres: from oral interviews and memoirs through film, TV and popular
cultural products to fiction and philosophical treatises. They are also methodologically
diverse, blending case studies from translation practice with reflections on pedagogic
processes, empirical research and feminist theory.
It is fitting that the discussion on voicing and inscribing women’s lives and practices
in translation opens with a conversation with the writer Eva Hoffman, since the special
issue was partly inspired by her memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
(1989) and it is a touchstone for some of the articles that follow. For Eva Hoffman,
translation is the overall metaphor of the first four decades of her life, expressed in the
language of family and childhood, of education and friendship, of love, gender and a
changing, globalized world. Looking back at her experience in-between languages and
continents, she comments on the different ‘psychological trajectory of immigration’ in
today’s intermingled world, where the force of cultural difference has been recognized
and ‘cross-national movement has become the norm’. As a translingual author she still
cherishes distance as a necessary vantage point in writing, but also the desire to write
‘within unitary subjectivity’ – within that part of oneself which ‘has absorbed and
processed experience, and has become receptive’. In a similar manner, she cautions
against romanticizing or over-emphasizing cultural difference and reconsiders the
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334 European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(4)
established meanings of exile, nomadism and cultural relativism. She suggests a
new kind of cosmopolitanism that does not come from a few centres of importance but
‘proceeds from everywhere’, and is ‘out of exile’ rather than exilic.
The article that follows establishes a direct connection with Eva Hoffman’s writing by
taking her memoir as a starting point. Helma Lutz discusses the relevance of Hoffman’s
focus on language as an identity issue for migration researchers who need to consider the
practical implications of language as an instrument for data collection in interviews with
transnational migrants. Lutz argues that researchers need to recognize that the everyday
lives of transnational research participants involve ‘dis-appropriation’ and the denial of
recognition and belonging in social hierarchies that are highly politicized. This recogni-
tion requires the analysis of hybridity and of the interaction between hegemonic dis-
courses and their integration into, or exclusion from, biographical narratives. In analysing
these biographical narratives sociologically, the article makes it clear that it is important
not to be seduced by participants’ narratives into treating gender as binary. It is equally
important not to detach the narratives from the power relations inherent in the relations
between different languages and hence, their speakers. Lutz advocates an intersectional
approach to addressing multiplicity.
The tensions in multilingual living are echoed in Charlotte Burck’s article on trans-
lation as a tool in shaping gendered subjectivity and forms of relationships. Like Lutz,
she discusses immigrants’ narratives in different linguistic contexts but this time from
a psychological and systemic psychotherapy perspective, complemented by narrative
theory and feminist critical theory. Drawing upon a corpus of interviews with migrants
into the most multilingual city in the world (London), she discusses the challenges and
opportunities that living life in more than one language raises for individuals and fami-
lies. She documents their different experience of self in their old/new, first/second and
other languages. Burck raises serious questions about cultural and linguistic frontiers,
about learning the dominant language as a process of reinventing oneself (again refer-
ring to Hoffman) or how language intersects with the asymmetrical relations of colo-
nialism or international relations. Her argument that the concept of ‘mother language’
may have some positive impact on women’s sense of entitlement to mother in their
first language, but has deleterious effects on fathers’ predilection to speak to their chil-
dren in their first language, is thought provoking and suggests that it is a term that
would best be avoided.
In her article Sanja Milutinović Bojanić uses translation as a tool to discuss changing
interpretations of the desire for knowledge (and power) in philosophical thought over
the centuries. Here the concept of translation is understood in broader metaphorical
terms – not simply as a movement from one language to another, but as a transformation
which carries a change in the forms of life – i.e. as creative power or what Derrida calls
‘transgression’ or ‘carrying over’ (as in: ‘only in the carrying over from one to the other
translation and metaphor take place’ [Derrida, 1983: 214]). Along these terms the trans-
formation of the passion for knowledge (libido sciendi, known also as Faust’s quest)
‘carried over’ into the passion for life (libido amorandi) is analysed as a translation
process, which occurred at the end of the 20th century in writings inspired by feminist
theory of ‘sexual difference/différence’. The author pays particular attention to women
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Slavova and Phoenix 335
writers and philosophers (especially Hélène Cixous) and their attempts to transform/
translate destructive energies into life-respecting creativity.
The next two articles in the special issue address gender and women’s issues from a
translation studies point of view. Anne-Lise Feral explores the French audiovisual texts
of the popular American series Sex and the City in terms of cultural adaptation and
(self-)censorship. She analyses specific examples from the original related to issues of
feminism in the USA and how they are rendered in French. Her analysis reveals how
subtitles and dubbing carry social class connotations in their linguistic translations. She
finds that the subtitles retain most US references and appear to be aimed at a middle-
class audience. In contrast, the dubbing texts reveal a marked tendency to delete, weaken
and tone down references to American feminist culture, female achievements in the
public sphere and feminist ideology as well as to the rhetoric of gender equality. The
author demonstrates how feminine voices are often adapted or ‘naturalized’ in audio-
visual translation in order to meet the gendered expectations of the French audience as
well as the sociocultural and ideological constructions of ‘femininity’. The changes in
the dubbed versions (targeted at a more general audience) raise questions about the
intersection of gender and social class as well as the role of cultural adaptation and
censorship in the social practice of translation.
Translation and feminist location politics surface again in Mercedes Bengoechea’s
article, which compares and contrasts two Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s
essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (written in 1929 and clearly directed at women). More
precisely, the author traces how the gender neutral pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ are rendered
into Spanish (a language that, unlike English, has formal marking of gender). The anal-
ysis makes clear that translation is not simply a linguistic choice but a political and
cultural issue since the translator’s choice can subvert or enhance the meaning of the
original. The author adopts a feminist stance in line with contemporary ideas of feminist
translation theory. She discusses Jorge Luis Borges’ translation solutions as part of the
social, linguistic and political context of Argentina in 1936. However, she criticizes his
choice to subsume the feminine into the generic masculine, resulting in the devaluation
and exclusion of the feminine. In contrast, the contemporary Spanish translation by
Rivera Garretas (2003) uses feminist translation strategies and reinforces sexual/gender
difference in the source text, thus recovering and recuperating the original message and
legacy. This case study powerfully shows how the translator’s position can be instru-
mental in neutralizing or muting women’s voices.
The three essays in the Open Forum place the discussion of women’s lives and prac-
tices in translation into an enlarged world context, including Australia, North America
and Europe. The title of the first text – ‘Subjects through translation’ – plays with the
distinction between, and the blurring of, ‘subjects’ as disciplines and ‘subjects’ as indi-
viduals, thus signalling from the start the huge impact translation has on the apprehen-
sion of meaning. Drawing on her experience of teaching feminist philosophy at an
Australian university, Lucy Tatman asks provocative questions straight from the class-
room: ‘What is it like to read text after text in translation? How do familiar words become
so strange? How to express the dizziness, the blurring, the sharp and sometimes painful
dislocations of meaning, sense?’ In her highly poetic piece Tatman provides a ‘lesson’ in
using translation as a pedagogical tool to unravel meaning, to confront the pleasures and
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336 European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(4)
frustrations of linguistic and cultural crossings and to discuss philosophical and social
processes of inclusion and exclusion. She illustrates how translation produces intertextu-
ality in practice – in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Adriana Cavarero, Hélène Cixous,
Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and other European women theorists and coincidentally, the
poetics of Adrienne Rich introduced at the beginning of this editorial. The text draws
attention to language as the medium for class work in higher education – a subject that is
not often considered. We hear the voices of students and see pedagogic processes in
action so that translation becomes an instrument to reimagine content and ideas, to
interrogate meaning in ways made possible through translation and, most importantly, to
change ‘subjects’ in the process.
Laleh Bakhtiar’s text illuminates yet another significant aspect of translation – not
simply as a linguistic, cultural and social practice but as a political act. As translator of
the first critical translation of the Quran into English by a woman in the United States,
she studies in microscopic detail Chapter 4 Verse 34 of the Quran, which has had serious
consequences for the lives of Muslim women. Through her close readings of the Quran,
Bakhtiar argues that for fourteen centuries many Muslim men have misinterpreted this
verse of the Quran (4:34) in ways that allow them to beat their wives. The Sublime
Quran corrects this error and the contradiction, not inherent in the Quran itself, that it
has created. She studies the existing translations of the Quran; compares specific words,
imperative forms in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and analyses the intervention of
commentators and jurists from a woman’s point of view. As a result her translation
constitutes an empowering and liberating act in practice – one that would seem to fit
well with current demands for changed power relations that characterize the ‘Arab
spring’. Bakhtiar’s article demonstrates that translation is far from innocent, but has
political consequences and can perpetuate or challenge historical taboos, misconcep-
tions, misinterpretations and injustice.
The last piece in the Open Forum considers translation as adaptation, combining
diverse forms of intertextuality, intervisuality and intermediality. More precisely, it anal-
yses the adaptation of Francoise Davoine’s book Mère folle into the documentary film A
Long History of Madness (Cinema Suitcase, 2011) by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams
Gamaker. The authors of the essay (the filmmakers themselves) consider the film a trope
for multicultural Europe as it is spoken in twelve languages, ranges across six centuries,
and was shot in five countries. The major idea behind the film is to provide a theoretical
translation of madness – ‘the most radical form of discrimination’ – by presenting mad-
ness ‘from strangeness and foreignness into a visual language that people can understand
and share’. Bal and Gamaker create a multilingual world where actors from different
countries enact stories in their own languages (English, French, Hungarian, German,
etc.) – yet, they seem to understand each other. Thus the Babel world of language disper-
sal becomes a utopian space which creates the ‘possibility to communicate against all
odds’: across the boundaries that separate the sane from the mad, the past from the pre-
sent, one cultural and linguistic community from another. The filmmakers employ a rich
arsenal of movements between different media: from text to image, from written to oral,
from stage to screen, from written figures to performing actors, relying on a variety of
non-verbal languages such as costume, space and the body. The engagement with all
these ‘other’ languages allows a multi-discursive ‘translation’ – not a literal translation
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Slavova and Phoenix 337
(‘the hallmark of bad translation’ in Walter Benjamin’s words [1999: 70]) but a
performed and visualized translation of madness. The essay ends with a provocative
rhetorical question: ‘Babel may well be the best place to be?’ Indeed, the many stories
Bal and Gamaker incorporate from the Renaissance to contemporary times suggest a
reconceptualized Babel as a space of diversity. The film and the article suggest that the
multiplicity of languages and cultures are indicative of the new opportunities and pitfalls
for women living in translation in the 21st century.
The articles that follow in this special issue bring together multiple disciplinary and
cultural perspectives in a mutually productive dialogue. On the one hand, they demon-
strate that women can be ‘rediscovered’ in/through translation in diverse ways: by digging
out and transcribing women’s written and oral stories, reinterpreting women’s experi-
ences, providing greater visibility for women writers and translators and commenting on
various practices and theories of translating women’s words. On the other hand, they
reveal that women’s experience and feminist theory are centrally involved in the debates
and developments of translation theory and practice, and can expand critical horizons and
knowledge production.
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