DeMarco, Toto - Gender Approaches in The Translation Classroom
DeMarco, Toto - Gender Approaches in The Translation Classroom
APPROACHES
IN THE
TRANSLATION
CLASSROOM
Training the Doers
Edited By
Marcella De Marco
and Piero Toto
Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom
Marcella De Marco · Piero Toto
Editors
Gender Approaches
in the Translation
Classroom
Training the Doers
Editors
Marcella De Marco Piero Toto
London Metropolitan University London Metropolitan University
London, UK London, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi
Contents
Index 195
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii
Notes on Contributors
of interest are critical pedagogy and second language teaching. She has
published extensively in collective works and peer-reviewed journals; she
is the author of Metáforas de su tierra: Breve historia de las mujeres irland-
esas (2004), El trabajo de las mujeres pobres (2010) and A Practical Guide
to Address Gender Bias in Academia and Research (2016).
Marcella De Marco is a Senior Lecturer in Translation at London
Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of Audiovisual
Translation Through a Gender Lens (2012).
Pauline Henry-Tierney is a lecturer in French and Translation Studies
at Newcastle University, UK. She teaches modules at undergraduate and
postgraduate levels on literary translation, interpreting and subtitling.
Her research interests revolve around questions of gender, sexuality and
translation, particularly in relation to contemporary women’s writing in
French and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical texts. Recent publica-
tions include a book chapter on translating sexual alterity and another
on matrophobia in autofictional women’s writing, while forthcoming
publications include a monograph entitled Translating Transgressive
Texts, an article on women’s erotic writing and a book chapter on
“Translation and Queer Theory”.
Robert Martínez-Carrasco is a lecturer in the Department of
Translation and Communication at Jaume I University (Spain), where
he lectures in Inverse Translation and Advanced English for Translation.
He received his Ph.D. in Applied Languages and Translation from that
university in 2017, with a dissertation that explored the epistemological
bases of legal translation education in contemporary higher education
settings. Prior to that, he received his M.A. in Legal Translation from
City, University of London (UK) in 2011. Primarily an educator and a
practising translator, his research focuses on translation training, peda-
gogy, and queer representation.
Antonia Montés is Senior Lecturer in Translation, in the German
section, at the University of Alicante, Spain, where she teaches liter-
ary translation and translation from Spanish to German, focusing on
advertising translation. Her main research area is translation and gen-
der, on the one hand, especially in advertising translation, where she has
Notes on Contributors
ix
M. De Marco (*) · P. Toto
London Metropolitan University, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Toto
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 1
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_1
2
M. De Marco and P. Toto
as pointed out by the World Economic Forum (2015), which states that
“education provides the skills people need to thrive in the new sustain-
able economy, working in areas such as renewable energy, smart agri-
culture, forest rehabilitation, the design of resource-efficient cities, and
sound management of healthy ecosystems. Perhaps most important,
education can bring about a fundamental shift in how we think [and] act ”
(our emphasis). As a matter of fact, Higher Education (HE) institutions
have recently started integrating gender-inclusive agendas in their strate-
gic plans as part of their equality and diversity policies.
Translation practices in academia have also been reconceived as a
trigger for social change (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002); for example,
as a means by which the gender bias inherent in the texts—and that
translators (sub)consciously risk transmitting in their work—may be
questioned and possibly reversed. At the same time, gender-inclusive
language practices have started to spread more widely across countries
(Farid 2016) as a result of the feminist campaigns aimed at implement-
ing the use of non-sexist language in political and institutional contexts
in the 1990s (Miller and Swift 1995; Sabatini 1987). However, the
application of feminist translation strategies has usually been perceived
as a form of manipulation, which is irreconcilable with real-life assign-
ments, and there does not seem to be a unanimous consensus about the
feasibility of such implementation. Similarly, gender-sensitivity is not
perceived as being a pressing need by all agents involved in the transla-
tion process. This is because gender tends to be regarded as something
intimate, not as an integral dimension of someone’s professional duties.
In the last few years, there have been lacklustre attempts at using
the translation classroom as a way to enhance gender awareness, in the
hope of instilling the habit of thinking of gender as all-encompassing
and affecting all spheres of life, including work responsibilities (Corrius
et al. 2016; De Marco 2011).
In this volume, such practices are explored from a variety of perspec-
tives and by contributors whose academic, professional and personal
experience informs their pedagogy. The range of fields included in this
volume include the translation of literature, legal translation, pedagogy/
curriculum design, interpreting, the translation of advertising, and
audiovisual translation.
4
M. De Marco and P. Toto
References
Corrius, M., M. De Marco, and E. Espasa. 2016. Situated Learning and
Situated Knowledge: Gender and Translating Audiovisual Adverts. The
Interpreter and Translator Trainer 10 (1): 59–75.
De Marco, M. 2011. Bringing Gender into the Subtitling Classroom. In
Audiovisual Translation: Subtitles and Subtitling—Theory and Foreign
Language Practice, ed. L. Incalcaterra McLoughlin, M. Biscio, and M.Á.
Ní Mhainnín, 139–155. New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am
Main, Oxford, and Wien: Peter Lang.
Doherty, S. 2016. The Impact of Translation Technologies on the Process and
Product of Translation. International Journal of Communication 10 (2016):
947–969.
Farid, G. 2016. Integration or Discrimination of French Feminine Grades
and Titles? In Language for International Communication: Linking
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. I. Karapetjana and D. Liepiņa, 41–48.
Latvia: University of Latvia.
Gile, D. 2009. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training,
Rev. ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Holmes, J. 1972. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation
Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
International Labour Office. 1998. Gender Mainstreaming in Local Economic
Development Strategies: A Guide. Geneva: ILO.
Kiraly, D. 2000. A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education.
Empowerment from Theory to Practice. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Marshman, E., and L. Bowker. 2012. Translation Technologies as Seen
Through the Eyes of Educators and Students: Harmonizing Views with the
Help of a Centralized Teaching and Learning Resource. In Global Trends in
1 Introduction: The Potential of Gender Training …
7
F. Vigo (*)
Humanities Department (DISUM), University of Catania, Catania, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 9
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
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F. Vigo
whose interaction (or dialogue) occurs through social events and social
practices—that is to say, through texts and discourse.
Despite different existing opinions, CL is not so dissimilar from
CDA. Both support the claim that the linguistic level is the surface of
deeper (hidden) meanings; both agree on considering lexical choices
as social actions (Stockwell 1999, p. 3; Fairclough 1995, p. 131); both
ascribe great importance to pre-existing personal knowledge (Fairclough
1989, p. 24); and both consider language use a subjective event. The
difference between the two is the perspective from which they look at
language. While CDA focusses on how language is used to shape soci-
ety, CL concentrates on the conceptualization of events. As early as
1999, Peter Stockwell highlighted the links between CDA and CL,
using Fairclough’s and Lakoff’s works on the war in the 1990s as exam-
ples.5 He managed to demonstrate how the scholars’ analyses were con-
siderably comparable. He argued that, at the concrete level, CL and
CDA can be thought of as akin when they investigate discourse that is
“foregrounded for its ideological and political status” (Stockwell 1999,
p. 11). If the two approaches are not so diverse, then they can be inte-
grated to develop an alternative model of analysis for which CL pro-
vides tools to devise categories and spot conceptualization or figurative
language and CDA supplies frameworks and strategies to reflect upon
the link between language use and the social level. This proposal is also
corroborated by Hart who maintains that CL and CDA dovetail, since
CL places a strong interest on the relation between language use, mental
representations and attitudes toward society. In his opinion, cognitive
linguists and CDA scholars are converging to look for new method-
ologies (Hart 2015, pp. 323–324). The combination of CDA and CL
tools might prove fruitful for translator training because it simply forces
trainees to reflect differently (and more broadly) on the texts they have
to translate. The new combined framework of analysis will enable stu-
dents to move beyond the text and the translation context, towards
more general reflections, which may refer more easily to the ethical level.
The model devised for this research project includes the construction
of cognitive maps in relation to problematic lexical items. The construc-
tion of a cognitive map forces the students to put the tricky items in
2 Turning Translation Training into Life Training
17
relation to other similar items and other contexts. In doing so, a wider
picture is displayed to help the students to better define the meaning
they are looking for and, at the same time, to place the reflection out of
the text, thus achieving a more social dimension. Understanding is not
accomplished syntagmatically but, rather, paradigmatically, in Saussure’s
terms. Visualizing how lexical elements link to other lexical items to
enter a number of different semantic domains makes the students aware
of how socially influential their linguistic choices can be for society.
In addition, the combined framework of analysis foresees the use of
TAP for the construction of the cognitive map. Once the map is con-
structed, the lexical items that make it up will be examined by means
of CDA tools, in order to unveil what is hidden from a more ideologi-
cal point of view. The analysis is broader and entails a deeper reflection,
which can be ethically meaningful.
From the analysis following TAP, it was clear that nearly all the students
had employed some questions to identify the type of problems they had
encountered.
The questions were approximately:
and
All the questions referred broadly to linguistic issues. What the stu-
dents seemed to find reassuring in the problem-solving process was cate-
gorizing the problem in linguistic terms. What they seemed to maintain
was that if the problem was of a linguistic nature, it could be solved
by means of the tools they had and the strategies they knew. Moreover,
some students went back to the corpus to better understand the use of a
term or a sentence.
Since TAP is an individual activity, I decided to complete it
through observation. I chose four ‘observers’ among the students.
They did not participate to the training but were in charge of observ-
ing their fellow students’ behaviours. I carried out my own obser-
vation as well. The student/observers were asked to take notes of
interactions, topics, spontaneous creation of groups, monothematic or
multi-thematic discussion groups and possible conflicts on the check-
list provided.
The aftermaths of the observation confirmed and completed the out-
comes of TAP. Students drew on their linguistic and metalinguistic com-
petence in order to solve the problems; they looked for help on behalf of
their partner students with reference to issues that they had previously
2 Turning Translation Training into Life Training
21
relevant for the article she did not want to be responsible for hiding a
possible meaning and, therefore, hiding some information. Again, her
ethical quality came into play.
To solve these problems, the new combined framework was used.
Students were encouraged to create mind maps starting from the term
that caused them problems. Initially, they started looking for synonyms,
as expected, but soon moved on to terms that were conceptually similar
to their problematic one but could not be used in the text. The text was
no longer their starting and reference point; they had gone beyond it to
look at a wider scope. They went on paradigmatically searching for con-
notations, figurative language, periphrasis and the like. They formulated
new questions, which were no longer related to the text and its linguis-
tic level but to the problematic issue related to real life.
TAP revealed how the students shifted from questions concerning
the text and what was possible for the text to questions related more
generally to language use in social reality or to what kind of influence
their lexical choices could have had. They never mentioned ethics nor
accountability with reference to them, but their behaviours and their
reasoning were of a purely ethical nature.
Once the mind map was created, the choice of the term to be used
was made using CDA tools. Students, in fact, applied some CDA ana-
lytical categories like those related to processes, overlexicalization,
contrasting pairs and actors to the words they had found. Later, they
double-checked them against their text and investigated the corpus.
In most cases, the creation of the mind map reassured the students,
who ultimately managed to find a possible solution.
TAP revealed how there was a change in the degree of the students’
awareness with reference to those topics and, more importantly, in their
attitudes towards them, which affected the way they behaved in society.
The observation showed how they started thinking about their role into
society when they had to choose between one term/phrase and another.
At the end of the course, in addition to traditionally assessing the stu-
dents, I required them to answer some questions with reference to the
course. My aim was to check whether they felt at ease with the method-
ology used, whether they found it effective and useful and whether they
2 Turning Translation Training into Life Training
23
would plan to use it again. I also asked them to list strengths and weak-
nesses in relation to the method.
Even though some students complained about the amount of work
they were asked to deal with and to undertake, most of them found the
method rewarding and useful beyond class requirements. They felt they
had done something for their professional life that was not merely ‘a
course.’
The framework combining CDA and CL proved productive, even
though its exploitation needs to be better organized with reference to
time and group activity especially.
4 Conclusion
My initial claim was that training translators may become a wider kind
of training with reference to gender and sexuality, and that a more com-
plex framework of analysis, which forces trainees to go beyond the lexis
and access a deeper cognitive level, may also prove to be a perfect tool
for expanding their awareness and comprehension in relation to some
matters, such as gender and sexuality. This kind of training might be
able to modify the trainee’s stance towards gender and sexuality, thus
developing a more positive attitude towards these issues that could, ulti-
mately, transcend the training itself.
As far as trainees’/translators’ accountability is concerned, the after-
math of my investigation shows how references to the ethical layer arise
when students leave the purely linguistic level to approach the broader
social level. This corroborates my assumption that training translators
has a significant ethical force and link to accountability.
The outcomes of my small-scale research project confirm my claim
and grant translation an active role in raising awareness as far as gender-
related issues are concerned. Including gender-related issues within the
curriculum leads also to an increasing demand on behalf of the students
to investigate those issues, which, in turn, will make their presence
unmarked and institutionally more accepted. As a consequence, possible
institutional hostility towards them will decrease.
24
F. Vigo
Notes
1. According to Langacker (1986, p. 4) a domain “can be any sort of con-
ceptualization: a perceptual experience, a concept, a conceptual complex,
an elaborate knowledge system, and so forth”.
2. For CL, every communication act implies universal Idealized Cognitive
Models (ICMs) and schema, which help our understanding and the cre-
ation of new concepts.
3. Risku maintains: “What makes cognitive translation research cognitive is the
fact that it tries to look ‘behind’ the observable processes and, when doing
so, refers to certain cognitive scientific concepts or approaches as a frame-
work (which can thus be confirmed or disproved). Consequently, cognitive
approaches focus clearly on the people and processes involved in transla-
tion and employ a primarily descriptive—as opposed to a normative—
mode of research, applying various empirical and experimental research
designs” (2013, p. 1).
4. A shift occurs in the cognitive approach to translation, the attention is
no longer placed on learners or occasional translators, but on profession-
als, whose actions are being categorized in an operational manner. As
already mentioned, for a satisfactory picture of the cognitive approaches
to translation, refer to Risku (2013).
5. In the 1980s, Paul Chilton drew from mathematics the notion of mor-
phism to explain his combined use of CL and CDA in his analysis of
political discourse. What he proposed is a perfect example of how the
two approaches can be combined for analytical reasons.
6. Teoria gender (gender theory) is not a philosophical issue but rather how
Italian newspapers have started calling whatever is related to gender. It is
mostly used in education by parents and associations who are scared of
what may happen to their kids if the ‘traditional’ values are destroyed. As
a phrase, it was coined at the end of the 1990s to criticize all the studies
and articles that focused on gender matters, which started to bloom in
those years in Italy. Those studies are depicted as dangerous since they
are alleged to have a secret plan of destruction of the traditional family
2 Turning Translation Training into Life Training
25
References
Baker, Mona. 1998. Translation Studies. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies, ed. Mona Baker, 227–280. London and New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier. 2011. Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training
Critical Perspectives. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5 (1): 1–14.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2009. The Name and Nature of Translator Studies.
Hermes 42: 13–22.
Corsellis, Ann. 2005. Training Interpreters to Work in the Public Services.
In Training for the New Millennium—Pedagogies for Translation and
Interpreting, ed. Martha Tennent, 153–173. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.
———. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language.
London: Longman.
Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 2005. Paradigmatic Controversies,
Contradictions, and Emerging Influences. In The Sage Handbook of
Qualitative Research, 3rd ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln,
191–216. California and London: Sage.
Hart, Cristopher. 2015. Discourse. In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed.
Ewa Dabrowska and Dagmar Divjak, 322–345. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Holmes, James. 1972. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation
Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1986. An Introduction to Cognitive Grammar.
Cognitive Science 10: 11–40.
———. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Pre-
requisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lawrence, Anthony. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Computer Software].
Tokyo: Waseda University. Available at http://www.laurenceanthony.net/.
Rahimi, Forough, and Mohammad Javad Riasati. 2011. Critical Discourse
Analysis: Scrutinizing Ideologically-Driven Discourses. International Journal
of Humanities and Social Science 1 (16) (November): 107–112.
Risku, Hanna. 2013. Cognitive Approaches to Translation. In The Encyclopedia
of Applied Linguistics, ed. Carol A. Chapelle, 1–10. Oxford: Blackwell.
26
F. Vigo
1 Introduction
Translating literature that seeks to transgress boundaries, specifically
in its articulations of gender identity and sexuality, can be extremely
challenging for a translator on both a professional and personal level.
As José Santaemilia (2009) discusses, translating sex-related language
does not simply involve linguistic or grammatical components but more
broadly encompasses aesthetic, pragmatic, ideological and cultural val-
ues too. Characterized as a ‘highly sensitive’ area in linguistic and cul-
tural transfer, the translation of sex constitutes “a powerful index of the
translator’s linguistic-cultural competence, prejudices, taboos or ideo-
logical assumptions” (Santaemilia 2005, p. 119). While these assertions
are pertinent considerations for the profile of any literary translator,
P. Henry-Tierney (*)
School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 27
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
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P. Henry-Tierney
2 Contexts
When the opportunity arose to design a research-led, final-year under-
graduate BA module at my institution, Newcastle University, in the
UK, I decided that a specialist course in literary translation closely
related to my own research expertise, namely translating gender and
sexuality in contemporary women’s writing in French, would be
an apt choice and one that would create meaningful synergies with
3 Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces …
29
3 Parameters
As the module title encapsulates, this course is specifically concerned
with the changing modalities of women’s writing and its translation,
spanning the experimental feminist writing from France and Quebec
in the late 1970s and early 1980s from writers such as Hélène Cixous,
Louky Bersianik and Nicole Brossard, through to women writers of
the 1990s, including Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes and Marie
Darrieussecq, who focus on topoi including the body, trauma and vio-
lence and finishing with the ‘explicit,’ namely the post-millennial trend
in women’s writing in French, particularly in the genre of autofiction,2 in
which writers such as Catherine Millet, Nelly Arcan and Emma Becker
articulate, in a candid manner, representations of women’s gendered,
sexual and corporeal lived experiences. As Shirley Jordan intimates, this
new wave of women’s writing is characterized by its “meticulous obser-
vation of bodies” with an ‘overwhelming insistence on sexual experience’
(2006, p. 8). While it could be argued that much of the post-1968 wom-
en’s writing has engaged with similar topoi, it is the explicit nature and
range of sexual experiences described that pushes this writing further
into the transgressive. In terms of its translation, as Luise von Flotow has
commented in relation to the translation of experimental feminist writ-
ing, feminist translators’ approach to translation “has appropriated and
adapted many of the techniques and theories that underlie the writing
it translates” (1991, p. 74). As I will discuss in the forthcoming section,
while the translation of linguistically experimental writing is important
3 Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces …
31
4 Thresholds
As delineated by Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2003), a threshold con-
cept can be understood as a new vista, namely the opening up of a new
mode of conceptualization that is essential for the learner’s progression.
They describe this process as being “transformative” in the sense that it
has the ability to alter a learner’s internal view of subject matter, subject
landscape, or even world view (2003, p. 1). They add that the compre-
hension of particular politico-philosophical insights, including feminist
theory, can also lead to a transformation of personal identity or subjec-
tivity. Secondly, they consider a threshold concept to be “irreversible,”
meaning that the new perspective elicited by the acquisition of this new
knowledge is difficult to dismiss, highlighted, in part, by its “integra-
tive” function, namely, its nature of interrelatedness with other con-
ceptual ideas and its “bounded” dimension—that is, its bordering with
other threshold concepts. Lastly, they explain how threshold concepts
can be potentially “troublesome” due to the differing modes of knowl-
edge and means of acquisition (2003, pp. 5–12). Here, I argue that
focussing specifically on issues of gender and sexuality in the translation
classroom constitutes pertinent examples of the introduction of thresh-
old concepts within the learning environment.
Firstly, in terms of situating learning at the confluence of gender
and translation, this module presents the first opportunity in stu-
dents’ educational trajectory for them to study these two domains in
correlation. While students may have been exposed to theories of gen-
der in previous literature and cultural modules taken at earlier stages
in the School of Modern Languages, or in other discipline areas for
Combined Honours students, a base knowledge of gender theory in
not necessarily a given. Likewise, for those students studying for the
34
P. Henry-Tierney
also noted the uncomfortable position that having to adopt the narra-
tor’s ‘I’ through translation entailed, commenting on feeling ill at ease
in their own skin. This very explicit articulation of the affective aspects
of translating highlight it as being a bodily process.
Linked with this idea of translation involving the body comes the
performative dimension of translation. As Sandra Bermann states, trans-
lation is “a verbal play in which both a ‘me’ and a ‘not-me’ take active
roles” (2014, p. 285). As Bermann notes, Judith Butler’s theory of per-
formativity (1990) can be usefully applied to the process of translation.
Butler’s central treatise about the inherent performativity of gender and
the way in which it involves the body, namely through its “repeated
stylization” (p. 44) in order to give the appearance of substance or nat-
uralness, relates specifically to the way in which the performance of
translation also involves the body. A way in which this is enacted in the
translation classroom is through one of the tasks I set students to trans-
late an excerpt from Nicole Brossard’s Sous La Langue (1987). A work
of prose poetry that articulates pleasures of lesbian desire, translating
some of this text proves to be a useful exercise in introducing students to
mimetic translation, since sounds are privileged over semantic content,
yet, perhaps more importantly, this translation also affords students a fur-
ther encounter with alterity. Considering that the class comprises individ-
uals of differing genders, as well as, presumably, a spectrum of sexualities,
some form of othering will take place as their subjectivities become
implicated in the translation process. As this text was originally intended
to be read aloud, I also gave students the optional choice of recording
their own spoken version of their translation of the excerpt. More than
half of the class completed this optional task and sent me their record-
ing, which I then compiled into a collective performative piece of audio.
During subsequent class discussions, students reflected on how this task
encouraged them not only to think more carefully about how sounds cre-
ate specific meanings, but also, they discussed the sense of responsibil-
ity they felt as translators to convey another individual’s articulations of
desire in both fitting words and a suitable vocal tone. This added oral
dimension to the translation process underlined the performative nature
of the task and cemented the centrality of the body, in this case, via the
implication of the students’ own voices, to the translation act.
38
P. Henry-Tierney
5 Liminal Spaces
The final aspect I wish to discuss in relation to designing and teaching a
module on translating gender and sexuality, concerns the incorporation
of digital technologies to create an interactive and supportive space to
facilitate student learning. Specifically, I will discuss the role of the insti-
tution’s virtual learning environment Blackboard and the role played by
3 Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces …
39
6 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined the various challenges and opportunities
I have encountered in designing and delivering a module that explores
the intersections of translation, gender and sexuality. As an educator,
it is inspiring to see students becoming passionate about a field of aca-
demic enquiry that forms the basis of my own research interests and
there is a clear reciprocity of knowledge exchange as students bring
new perspectives and fresh insights to current academic debates. While
introducing sensitive topics into the classroom can seem both daunt-
ing and challenging in the way that it brings the professional and the
personal spheres into what can sometimes feel like uncomfortable con-
tact with one another, it is, nevertheless, an important and productive
practice, since it is through their encounters with alterity that learners
come to understand and acknowledge the Other. This is important not
only for their development as conscientious literary translators but also
for their personal development as individuals and the social relations
that shape, in the phenomenological sense, their ‘being’ in the world.
The framework of threshold concepts has been fruitfully applied to dis-
cuss the ways in which nurturing a conscious awareness of the impli-
cations of gender and sexuality in the translation classroom can be
3 Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces …
41
Notes
1. I am using the term ‘transgressive’ here in the Foucauldian sense,
whereby he understands transgression as a calling into question of lim-
its or thresholds. He considers that the reciprocity in the mutually con-
stituting and contesting dynamic between limit and transgression can
be understood as ‘tak[ing] the form of a spiral which no simple infrac-
tion can exhaust’ (1977, p. 35). Understanding transgression as an
infinite procedure of the pushing of the self towards the limit of where
there is no interpretation is central to this new trend in women’s writ-
ing in French which purposefully seeks to overstep textual boundaries
through candid articulations of women’s sexual, gendered and corporeal
experiences.
2. Autofiction is a term coined by Serge Doubrovksy in relation to his
novel Fils (1977) and can be defined as a genre which elides fiction with
reality, involving the speaking subject being co-extensive with the autho-
rial ‘I’. It can be understood as a narrative mode which flags itself as fic-
tional yet, at the same time, features a narrator whose autobiographical
details are similar, if not identical, to those of its author. As Alex Hughes
states, the disidentificatory nature of the genre ‘shields its practitioners
from the identifying, knowledge-seeking, would-be-classificatory, pow-
er-imbued lectorial gaze’ (1999, p. 113).
3. ‘Even a masculine inanimate object takes precedence over a female
human being’ [my translation]. NB I am not using the English trans-
lation, The Euguelion (1996) here to provide the back translation as the
feminist translator, Howard Scott, does not translate this sentence in his
text since he creates a different example to critique the gender inequali-
ties of the English language.
References
Bermann, S. 2014. Performing Translation. In A Companion to Translation
Studies, ed. S. Bermann and C. Porter, 285–297. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Bersianik, L. 1976. L’Euguélionne. Montreal: Stanké.
Brossard, N. 1987. Sous la langue. Montreal: L’Essentielle.
3 Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces …
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Nolan, J., and S. Oerton. 2010. “Slippery Stuff”: Handling Sexually Explicit
Materials in the HE Classroom. Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences 2
(3): 1–26.
Santaemilia, J. (ed.). 2005. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of
Identities. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Santaemilia, J. 2009. La Vie Sexuelle De Catherine M.: A Journey Through
“Woman”, “Sexual language” and “Translation”. Sendebar 20: 123–141.
Schmidt, U. (ed.). 2012. Eating Disorders in the UK: Service Distribution,
Service Development and Training. College Reports, Royal College of
Psychiatrists, London.
von Flotow, L. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories.
TTR 4 (2): 69–84.
Washbourne, K. 2013. Teaching Literary Translation: Objectives,
Epistemologies, and Methods for the Workshop. Translation Review 86 (1):
49–66.
4
Social Action and Critical Consciousness
in the Socialization of Translators-to-Be:
A Classroom Experience
Robert Martínez-Carrasco
R. Martínez-Carrasco (*)
Department of Translation and Communication,
Jaume I University, Castellón de la Plana, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 45
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_4
46
R. Martínez-Carrasco
2 Language, Representation
and Non-binarism
Bengoechea (2015, p. 8) reflects on first language acquisition as a pro-
cess in which women learn not to be mentioned and acknowledge this
lack of reference naturally. Patriarchal structures, she goes on to argue,
underpin our society, and so language conveys patriarchal tactics of
invisibility and exclusion. The very same assertion could be applied
to other groups of individuals at the “periphery” of reality (Vidal
Claramonte 2010), whose experiences and discourses are treated as
subversive or unacceptable and who are consistently excluded from the
unidirectional narratives that shape reality. As Foucault puts it (2016),
discourses are socially “controlled, selected, organized and redistributed”
such that what we consider true, conventional or acceptable constitutes
one of the rules of exclusion regarding discourse production.
This has a clear impact on the development of one’s social and indi-
vidual identity, since some individuals are provided with reference and
4 Social Action and Critical Consciousness …
49
the ‘royal we,’ historical linguistic research shows evidence of the use of
a singular generic ‘they’ as early as Old English, while it was not until
1795 that a grammar text labelled singular ‘they’ as incorrect (Bodine
1975).
Spanish, as a grammatically gendered language, finds it harder to
represent non-binarism, and indeed many speakers opt for alternating
masculine and feminine pronouns, nouns, adjectives and determin-
ers depending on the context, the audience or the disposition of the
speaker. The neutral ending –e, replacing the canonical (and binary)
–o/–a endings in Spanish, is marginally used by a part of the non-
binary community (“elle está loque,” for instance, which translates as zie
is crazy ), but its use is far from mainstream and in fact most of the pop-
ulation are not even aware of its existence.
Another mechanism used to eliminate cisgenderism in language is the
use of symbols that replace the gendered endings in words: ‘nosotr*s,
nosotrxs’ (both of them non-gendered forms of ‘we’ in Spanish). While
the use of symbols does indeed offer some interesting possibilities and
expands the limits of language in favour of traditionally marginalized
discourses and identities, they present a significant drawback: they
cannot be said. The use of symbols within the non-binary community
only works in written discourse, which leaves its members in a difficult
position, a sort of a gender limbo, insofar as they cannot ‘be’ out loud
(Bengoechea 2015, p. 16). Whenever they express themselves verbally,
they still need to turn to the masculine or the feminine.
class with a number of selected texts in order to reflect and work on the
representation of non-binary identities and the translation challenges
these particular texts pose.
Translating a website would allow students to be exposed for the
first time in their education to a real translation commission embedded
in an authentic situation. The use of authentic materials—that is, the
fact that the project was not a decontextualized classroom activity—
was aimed at empowering the students to realize that their translation
answered a real need. This required them to take full responsibility and
extra commitment in their fulfilment of the project. The fact that a
non-profit organization was picked was also a key element in the pro-
ject, since it allowed us to discuss whether translation without charge
was justified at times, or whether this would pose a threat to profes-
sional translators, thus rendering this kind of commission unacceptable.
In the end, we concluded that translating for non-profit organizations
might be considered a form of volunteering, similar to pro bono work
in the case of lawyers, and so the project they had been presented with
was given the green light. Employability and other relevant questions
that related to the profession were also discussed throughout the semes-
ter: “What should our rate be in the case that we were not translating
for a non-profit organization? How much time do translators normally
have for a project like this?”.
Given the volume of words to be translated (almost 20,000 words),
the text required very close collaboration among all the students
involved. During the very first stages of the project, the students felt
the need to establish general guidelines and a common decision-mak-
ing framework that would allow them to translate their text, fostering
their interpersonal competences. They had to divide the text into differ-
ent sections, and decide who would translate each part. Since most of
the translation took place outside the classroom, the students decided
to create a document that would be shared online where they would
express their concerns, negotiate possible translation solutions and ask
their peers in the case that they found a particular difficulty and did not
know how to proceed. The commission also required revision, so when
the first draft of the translation was ready the text was redistributed for
peer-revision. Once the relevant changes were incorporated, the lecturer,
54
R. Martínez-Carrasco
who scaffolded the whole process and supervised each of the different
stages, made one final revision and suggested some final changes.
Prior to the translation of the website, a workshop was held with a
representative of the LGBT+ organization whose website was to be
translated in class. The students were informed about the objectives and
activities of the organization, and the facilitator of the workshop intro-
duced the relevant conceptual content, adding a number of theoretical
components to the session, including HIV and the LGBT+ community
(since the organization offers psychological support to newly diagnosed
persons); sex, gender and sexuality, so that the students would be famil-
iar with those key concepts within their project, and so on. Introducing
an external voice in the classroom—in our case, our client—proved to
be very enriching for the students since, again, they were able to antic-
ipate the impact that their translation would have once finished, which
might be considered the essence of service learning. The representative
from the LGBT+ organization kept in touch with the students through-
out the project, and students were allowed to contact him to query any
doubts they might have. Since he did not have a linguistic background,
it was interesting to see how students, at times, would become frustrated
with his preference for translation solutions that disregarded typical
translation practice. This further developed the students’ critical skills,
since they had to develop their own professional criteria in order to
decide when the conventions of language might be neglected and why.
As aforementioned, the on-going translation project was comple-
mented by two in-class sessions where students were introduced to
non-binary representation and the challenges it poses in the context
of translation. The use of gender-neutral pronouns was introduced,
in conjunction with the use of the singular pronoun ‘they’, alongside
the rest of strategies explored above. Upon analysis of cisgenderism in
Spanish, a very interesting debate ensued, with regards to whether it
was realistic for gendered languages like Spanish to even aspire to avoid
cisgenderism. It was suggested that the accomplishment of all changes
required to avoid cisgenderism would make speech and communication
significantly harder, or even, to some extent, lead to linguistic incom-
prehension. The aim of these discussions was to consider whether con-
testing the grammar in which gender is given could be, or should be, an
4 Social Action and Critical Consciousness …
55
option, and to make the students aware of the politics and ideology that
shape reality through established discursive practices.
Three texts in total were analyzed, focusing on the possible challenges
of translation; a translation was suggested for each, which was then dis-
cussed and negotiated among the students. During the first session,
students were presented with an extract from a webcomic (Eth’s Skin ),
which features a gender-neutral protagonist. The webcomic, written and
illustrated by Sfé R. Monster since 2014, tells the story of Eth, a non-
binary fisherperson who uses the pronouns they/them. Eth, whose troubles
begin when they encounter a long-lost mythical being, lives in a universe
that could be categorized as “casually queer,” where it is not uncommon to
find other characters who also fall outside the gender binary.
The second text we analyzed was an episode from Steven Universe,
an animated television series created by Rebecca Sugar. The series fol-
lows the adventures of Steven and The Crystal Gems as they try to
juggle fighting evil monsters and their daily lives in Beach City. While
the show features all kinds of queer relationships and non-binary rep-
resentations, we focused on a particular episode, Alone Together (series 1,
episode 37), where the main character, Steven, fuses with his best friend
Connie. Together, they form Stevonnie, who uses gender-neutral pro-
nouns. While Stevonnie is not a central character in the show (they do
not appear often), when they do appear, Stevonnie is presented as a pos-
itive embodiment of both male and female identity, and in fact both
boys and girls seem to be attracted to them indiscriminately.
Finally, we analyzed a character from the Canadian television com-
edy series The Switch. The show features Sü, an American programmer
who moves to Canada in order to transition from male to female. After
losing her job and her apartment, Sü moves in with Chris, a non-binary
character who uses ‘zie/zir’ pronouns.
4 Discussion and Conclusions
In order to conclude the classroom experience and gather the opinions
of the participating students in terms of the translation project, students
were asked to prepare and submit a classroom portfolio as a means to
56
R. Martínez-Carrasco
I really liked the fact that the expert came to class. It was so interesting.
And he was more than willing to answer all doubts we had when we were
translating. It was definitely more motivating. Whenever we were explain-
ing to him what we thought, or the translation strategy that we were
going to adopt, you could tell that he was actively listening to us because
he wanted the translation to be good as much as we did.
Having him help us (…) was particularly good. You see, the main differ-
ence between this project and other translations projects in class is that
we have helped a group of people here. Our translation is going to make a
local website more accessible, which, if you think about it, is much more
than any other translation assignment we have had so far has done.
4 Social Action and Critical Consciousness …
57
The students really appreciated the fact “that the text was real,” even if at
first they thought that the size of the project was too immense, especially
compared with the regular translation tasks set for them at university.
When asked what they had learnt from the project, the most frequent
replies were related to interpersonal competences: justifying translation
decisions, negotiating meaning with the rest of students in the class, dis-
cussing other opinions and translation solutions and, especially, learning
how to work and collaborate with others. Following the replies related
to the translation itself, many students also reflected on how they had
learnt about the local LGBT+ community, what this type of organiza-
tion does, and the challenges (linguistic and otherwise) they face. For
instance, it was interesting to discover that some students were com-
pletely unaware of the significance of HIV for the LGBT+ community.
Furthermore, the students were particularly vocal regarding how
challenging collaboration had been during the project. Indeed, most
replies in the portfolio highlighted how difficult the students had found
working with the rest of their classmates, and stated that this type of
project requires more commitment and patience. Three of the students
wondered whether their translation work in groups at university would
be representative of professional tasks post-graduation, since a lot of
time was considered “wasted” on group work when “translators rarely
work like this.”
Regarding the second part of the project, students were asked for
their thoughts on cisgenderism and the representation of certain iden-
tities in discourse. Questions also arose regarding sexism and gender
bias, in terms of whether they could or should be eliminated from our
linguistic repertoire, and the possible consequences for the practice of
translation and for translators themselves.
None of the students had ever heard the word ‘cisgender’ before, so
in most cases everything was new for them. However, in general, stu-
dents were cautious when sharing their opinions. On the one hand,
they acknowledged that they had never thought of those “who have
never felt represented in mainstream media,” and understood their
need to “exist” in discursive practices. Nevertheless, students were still
somewhat sceptical when it came to implementing any of the possible
changes we had discussed in the classroom:
58
R. Martínez-Carrasco
It’s not that we are not willing to, it’s just that language is so compli-
cated. How are we going to convince the country to change the way
they have always spoken? As a classroom activity this has been very inter-
esting, but I don’t think as translators there’s a lot we can do. Can you
imagine sending a translation to your client for him* to find out that you
have changed all gendered words in his* text? Not if we want to live off
translation.
References
Abdallah, K. 2011. Towards Empowerment. The Interpreter and Translator
Trainer 5 (1): 129–154.
Baker, M. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London:
Routledge.
Baker, M., and C. Maier. 2011. Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training:
Critical Perspectives. Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5 (1): 1–14. https://
doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2011.10798809.
Barth, M., M. Adomßent, D. Fischer, S. Richter, and M. Rieckmann.
2014. Learning to Change Universities from Within: A Service-Learning
Perspective on Promoting Sustainable Consumption in Higher Education.
Journal of Cleaner Production 62: 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
jclepro.2013.04.006.
Barthes, R. 2012. Mitologías. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
60
R. Martínez-Carrasco
1 Introduction
Feminist Translation Studies (FTS) is not only a new emerging disci-
pline within translation studies, but it is also a pedagogical skill to teach
in fields such as humanities and social sciences. FTS allows us “to scru-
tinize how various relations of power intersect with gender in different
situations and examine how resistant solidarities are forged against nor-
mative regimes” (Ergun and Castro 2017, p. 94). Therefore, it should
be integrated in the curriculum of translation degrees and put in prac-
tice in teaching when training different text genres in specialized trans-
lation. Santaemilia (2017, p. 7) claims that “la dimensión de género y
el objetivo de la igualdad sexual deberían, sin duda, encontrar cabida en
los programas de formación en traducción.” In general, feminist ped-
agogy is “concerned with gender justice and overcoming oppressions,”
recognizing “the genderedness of all social relations and consequently
A. Montés (*)
Department of Translation and Interpretation,
University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 63
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_5
64
A. Montés
In the rewriting process into the target culture, students are urged to
apply inclusive translation strategies in order to produce a gender-
reinforcing target text. Especially interesting are the language guides
that have been formulated for an inclusive and non-sexist language
usage within the institution in order to create an egalitarian institutional
discourse to be applied at the administrative, pedagogical and scientific
levels. These language guides suggest linguistic strategies to break the
male-as-norm principle by neutralizing explicit gender markers and by
making both genders visible. The overall aim is to offer diverse linguistic
options in both languages to enable a more egalitarian institutional and
academic discourse avoiding linguistic gender discrimination. It is my
contention that a gender-inclusive institutional discourse as part of the
university’s corporate identity and brand personality is of vital impor-
tance, because language is most powerful in creating and transmitting
ideology, therefore, it does have the capacity to break linguistic sexism.
I argue that it might produce a domino effect; when students and staff
become aware of gender equality by using more inclusive and egalitar-
ian language expressions in their work and study, they are likely to use
5 Teaching Gender Issues in Advertising Translation …
73
The analysis of the original text shows that there are gender references
to students and lecturers that are not inclusive, for example ‘alumnos
5 Teaching Gender Issues in Advertising Translation …
77
4 Final Remarks
The ultimate goal of university marketing communication is creating a
strong brand image and brand personality of the institution. There is no
doubt that gender equality has become an additional marketing value
that universities stress in their printed and online marketing performance.
Gender-inclusive language plays an important role in the institutional
discourse of universities, although there are examples that the generic
male is occasionally used on the diverse marketing channels such as print
material (leaflets and brochures) and institutional websites. Translation
can, in such cases, apply deliberately gender-sensitive linguistic strategies
to make both genders visible or to neutralize any gender implications.
Therefore, in this chapter, we have designed a gender-sensitive approach
to teach translation from a gender-inclusive perspective. Within this
study, a teaching methodology has been developed that applied gender
linguistic strategies for making women visible and neutralizing the dom-
inant male gender representation. The effectiveness of this approach was
put in practice by a two-fold teaching method divided into contrastive
dimension and translational dimension. In the contrastive dimension, the
80
A. Montés
Notes
1. Bowden and Wood (2011, p. 139) have classified the different choices
in the selection of a higher education institution. It appears that women
take into account attributes such as location, physical factors, safety
and security, academic excellence, diversity and student–teacher ratios.
Instead, men favour, factors such as quality of faculty, availability of
extracurricular activities and quality for social life.
2. The main target group that university branding addresses are students,
lecturers and researchers, administrative staff and institutional govern-
ance bodies.
3. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Alicante, for example, wel-
comes the academic community by emphasizing that the university is in
terms of gender equality a leading institution, available at https://web.
ua.es/en/oficina-rector/welcome-message.html, accessed 13 November
2018.
5 Teaching Gender Issues in Advertising Translation …
81
References
Arend, Patricia. 2014. Gender and Advertising. In Gender and Pop Culture, ed.
Adrienne Trier-Bieniek and Patricia Leavy, 53–79. Rotterdam, Boston and
Taipei: Sense Publishers.
Bartrina, Francesca, and Eva Espasa. 2012. Evaluating Creativity from a
Perspective of Feminist Pedagogies: Translating Print Advertisements in
the Virtual Classroom. In Challenges in Language and Translation Teaching
in the Web 2.0 Era, ed. M. Cánovas, G. Delgar, L. Keim, S. Kahan, and
À. Pinyana, 93–104. Granada: Comares.
Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on
Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Bowden, Jana, and Leigh Wood. 2011. Sex Doesn’t Matter: The Role of
Gender in the Formation of Student-University Relationships. Journal of
Marketing for Higher Education 21 (2): 133–156.
Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and
Transnational Perspective. London: Routledge.
Chapleo, Chris, María Victoria Carrillo Durán, and Ana Catillo Díaz. 2011.
Do UK Universities Communicate Their Brands Effectively Through Their
Websites? Journal of Marketing for Higher Education 21 (1): 25–46.
Corrius, Montse, Eva Espasa, and Marcella De Marco. 2016. Situated
Learning and Situated Knowledge: Gender, Translating Audiovisual Adverts
and Professional Responsibility. The Interpreter and the Translator Trainer 10
(1): 59–75.
———. 2017. Balancing Gender Awareness and Professional Priorities in
Advertising and Audiovisual Translation: An Overview. In Traducir para
82
A. Montés
1 Introduction
Over the last two decades, translation practices within the field of
translation studies have been theorized as instrumental in the produc-
tion of cultural change (Tymoczko 2007, 2010; Baker 2013). This
understanding of translation as a political tool for transformation fol-
lows in the footsteps of feminist translation as first theorized in the
1990s in Canada and includes more recent feminist perspectives within
translation studies (Castro and Ergun 2016; von Flotow and Farahzad
2016). Some of these perspectives can be inserted into the field of queer
understandings of gender and sexuality in translation (Larkosh 2011),
in which queer refers to a consideration of these categories as con-
structed and non-essentialistic.1
M. Baldo (*)
Honorary Fellow in Translation Studies, University of Hull, Hull, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 83
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_6
84
M. Baldo
were asked to translate together and discuss their translation choices. The
language pairs included English paired up with major European languages
(such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek) and non-Euro-
pean languages (such as Arabic), and the texts that students were asked
to translate concerned the medical, technical and legal field. As expressed
by Kiraly (2000), these assignments can teach students how to work as
members of a professional team. Moreover, as part of these assignments,
students were asked to think about how making their positionality visible,
outside of the constraints of the translation brief (which, in real life pro-
jects is often not present or is very general). Presentations run by students
and involving their potential dissertation topics were also a good way to
boost interest, by encouraging students to engage with each other’s ideas.
However, despite the optimistic description of these activities and
pedagogical efforts, the problems I faced in what is nowadays defined as
the British Neoliberal University, were numerous. Rather than the prac-
tical difficulties of finding agencies that were ready to partner with the
university in order to deliver authentic translation projects to students,
or the difficulty of rearranging tables and chairs into a circle, in order to
lessen the hierarchical divide between teachers and students, other prob-
lems occurred that challenged my pedagogical approaches. In the next
section of this chapter, I will discuss these challenges and my attempts
at addressing them, by drawing on the concepts of trouble and desire,
which stem from queer pedagogy.
such a hierarchy is for the lecturer to embrace the students’ (and the
teacher’s own) weaknesses, as well as their strengths. Since positionality
is important according to feminist and queer pedagogy and to socio-
political approaches to translator’s training, lecturers should reveal their
positionalities and share their views on a variety of issues with the stu-
dents. Although Baker and Maier (2011) recognize that knowing where
the teacher stands is likely to influence the opinion of the students, they
also stress the fact that the teacher merely stating their own position-
ing does not imply an imposition of a specific view on the students.
Moreover, sharing this information with the student by the lecturer
complies with feminist pedagogy’s ideas of fostering a more mutual rela-
tionship between teachers and students of translation. However, this
practice of sharing has not always been favoured by all the universities
in which I have worked. At the University of Leicester, for my job inter-
view, I was asked to present a sample MA class that could be included in
their ‘Translation Theory’ module, called ‘Development of Translation
Studies.’ After my presentation, in which I outlined the content of a
class that integrated feminist and queer approaches to translation, I
was asked by the interview panel if I had considered how this content
could be delivered to a cohort of international students from Asia and
the Middle East, for whom these topics could be understood as “sen-
sitive” or “upsetting,” given that the majority of their students came
from these two areas of the world.7 Further doubts and critiques were
also raised by translation studies colleagues, working in the Chinese and
Arabic language sections, when I expressed the idea of teaching a couple
of extra classes on the module ‘Current Issues in Translation,’ including
perspectives on queer feminist activism and translation. These colleagues
suggested that such topics were not appropriate for our teaching con-
text. Considering that my queer and feminist research interests are also
grounded on my queer subjectivity, teaching classes in this area of study
could be perceived as a legitimate desire, as well as a social need, in line
with the pedagogical ideas presented in the previous section. Yet, this
desire has been perceived as a source of trouble.
One could dismiss these comments, which also came from a
University manager present at the interview, as subtly homophobic.
However, I would argue that these comments also highlight normative
6 Queer(y)ing (Im)Possibilities …
95
These risks and dangers also relate to the place occupied by teach-
ers within the institutions where they work. In my case, like in the case
of many other lecturers on zero hours and/or temporary contracts, my
precarious contract meant that I occupied the position of a vulnerable
subject. Theorizations concerning queer and feminist pedagogy and
translator’s training in academia therefore cannot dismiss the importance
of looking at the social, economic and political positionalities of teach-
ers in the context of the neoliberal universities where they teach, since
teachers are increasingly affected by the austerity politics of such context.
Self-reflexivity and critical thinking, as advocated by feminist, queer ped-
agogy and translator’s training studies should, thus, also be directed at
the neoliberal university, which, as Critical University Studies have high-
lighted (Morrish 2018), is suffused with the same issues of gendered,
racial and sexual power that feminist and queer pedagogy, and politicized
approaches to translator’s training, critique.
6 Conclusion
This chapter has argued for the potential benefits of applying queer and
feminist pedagogical theories and practices to translation pedagogy,
by exploring the notion of possibilities and impossibilities of queer
and feminist pedagogies to inform a politicized approach to transla-
tor’s training. Furthermore, the chapter has proposed a notion of ped-
agogy as troubling and informed by desires—a pedagogical praxis that
is not interested in giving answers but in formulating questions. It
has argued that in order to be transformative and productive of social
change, queer and feminist pedagogical praxis, in the context of a polit-
icized translator’s training approach, needs to appeal to the notion of
desire. This notion of desire may be understood as being simultaneously
a pleasurable and a disruptive force, capable of generating a spark that
may ignite the potentialities that students and teachers bring to class.
Embracing this idea of pedagogy, I believe, can foster the process of crit-
ical self-reflexivity invoked by studies of translator’s training, with the
aim of nurturing translators who are capable of making an ethical inter-
vention in our contemporary society.
6 Queer(y)ing (Im)Possibilities …
99
This pedagogy requires the recognition that “no one speaks, hears,
writes, reads, or acts from a neutral, objective position” (Wallace 2002,
p. 66), and therefore adopting a critical stance to translation, which is
informed by feminist and queer pedagogy, also involves critiquing the
non-neutrality of the institutions in which translation is taught.
Notes
1. A seminal work on queer theory is Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble.
2. Universities have been labelled as such by Critical University Studies
(CUS), a new field of studies that takes a critical stance toward the neo-
liberal privatized model of higher education. It has emerged in the USA
and in the UK and in other countries confronting neoliberalism. See the
blog of scholar Liz Morrish who writers on the topic. https://academicir-
regularities.wordpress.com, accessed 2 December 2018.
3. These modules were respectively called ‘Introduction to Translation
Studies’ (2010–2012) in Birmingham, ‘Development of Translation
Studies’ and ‘Contemporary Theories of Translation’ in Leicester (2014–
2016), and ‘Issues in Translation Studies’ (2016–2018) in Hull.
4. For what concerns the MA, this module runs only for the first semester
at the University of Hull, contrary to Birmingham and Leicester where it
runs for two semesters.
5. Feminist translation principles could also be taught as part of another
class devoted to questions of post-coloniality and politicised approaches
to translation.
6. This discussion will be mainly based on my MA courses as the time ded-
icated to theoretical issues in translation within the BA programmes was
even scarcer.
7. At the University of Leicester in the years 2014–2016, MA classes in
Translation were composed of 30 students; students from China and
from Arabic countries represented two thirds of the class (about 20 stu-
dents or more).
8. Fraser and Lamble (2015) propose various activities for encouraging
students to formulate desires outside of the prescribed career-driven
desires; for example, by asking them to write notes at the beginning of
the semesters, store them for some time and eventually asking students
to comment on the evolution of their desires at the end of semesters.
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M. Baldo
9. I do not necessarily think that every teacher has a duty to come out to
their students as it depends on circumstances and it is a personal decision.
However, what I denounce here is the fact that, in classes where discussion
of queer feminist matters arise, withholding this information might be
going against the desires and the political agenda of the lecturer involved.
References
‘Academic Irregularities’. Blog by Liz Morrish. Available at https://academicir-
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102
M. Baldo
1 Introduction
Against the backdrop of studies in second language acquisition with
audiovisual tools and with the aid of audiovisual translation (AVT) in
particular, this chapter illustrates the results of a translation test/question-
naire aimed at verifying how MA and BA students of translation (English
to Italian) respond to the translation of dubbed films and TV series fea-
turing characters using words related to homosexuality. After viewing
film excerpts in the original and dubbed versions, and being provided
with the transcripts of both texts, groups of varying numbers of students
(30–68) were asked to rate and to answer open-ended questions on the
dubbed versions of various audiovisual texts. Students were asked to offer
both their insights and their own, motivated, translation solutions. The
aims of this questionnaire and subsequent analysis are to shed light: (1)
on the degree of sensitivity and overall response to homosexuality-related
I. Ranzato (*)
Sapienza University, Rome, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 103
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_7
104
I. Ranzato
reinforce the idea that students who are taught a second language with
the extensive use of video improve their listening comprehension skills
better and faster than fellow students that are taught without being
exposed to video materials.
Just the single scenes and not the whole films were shown, after a
brief explanation of the general context from which the dialogues were
taken. Most of the excerpts (all except the first) were purposely taken
from films and TV series that I previously had the occasion to ana-
lyze elsewhere. This was done for two reasons: (1) I wanted students
to work on audiovisual texts I could relate to, having examined them
from many points of view and (2) for the purpose of this chapter, com-
ments can be restricted to the experiment at hand and readers can be
referred to previous bibliography for an ampler discussion of the same
texts.
4 The Questionnaire
In this section, the organization and contents of the different tests/ques-
tionnaires administered to the various groups of students will be illus-
trated. Due to the significant amount of qualitatively interesting data
that have been collected, only some of the most relevant aspects can be
described and discussed.
The first excerpt is a short scene from the film Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée
2016), which describes in highly realistic brushstrokes the real life of
Ron Woodroof, a heterosexual man who suffered and eventually died
from AIDS. Described as a homophobic man at the beginning of the
film, in the scene chosen for the students Ron is seen at the time of the
first diagnosis of his illness. In the excerpt, Ron has just met another
patient for the first time, a trans woman called Rayon, whom he
addresses using disparaging terms. Just 3 of the 44 students had previ-
ously seen the film, although most of them had heard of it.
This example was chosen expressly as an opener: it is the most
straightforward of the excerpts, in the sense that it does not pose any
problems of interpretation, and its dubbing adaptation into Italian is
quite close to the original meaning of the dialogue exchange.
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I. Ranzato
Original dialogue:
Ron: Get the fuck out of here, whatever you are, or I’ll kick you in the
fucking face. […]
Ron: All right, Miss Man, what you got?
Rayon: Full house. Jacks over threes.
Ron: Well, I’d have figured you for queens. Motherfucker!
Back translation:
Ron: Get the fuck out of here immediately, whatever you are, before I
break your face. […]
Let’s hear, Little Miss Man, what have you got?
Rayon: I have a nice full house. Full of jacks and threes.
Ron: Well, I’d have figured you more as a type for queens, piece of shit.
(him-her) and Signora Uomo (Mrs Man). There were two occurrences
of more derogatory terms as in Mister Effemminato (Mister Effeminate)
and especially Signor frocetto (Mister little fag). In the rest of the
instances, the synthetical expression that combines the two sexes was
eliminated, thus losing much of the derisive irony of Ron’s original term
of address: principessa (princess), signorina (Miss), signorino (sir, young
master, as referred to a young boy), bellezza (beauty) are all solutions
that do not do justice to Ron’s sarcastic original term.
For what concerns the phrase containing the word queen (in the sense
of, usually effeminate, male homosexual), most of the students, similarly
to the Italian dubbing, translated the word literally, virtually losing the
double entendre (card/queer), as regine does not carry the same homo-
sexual reference in Italian, or at least not in the same mainstream way.2
Some respondents sought effective compensations, such as: pensavo che
te la facevi con le regine (I thought you messed around with queens),
or the similar in meaning pensavo andassi per regine. In one occurrence,
queen was translated into drag queen, a compound term more easily
recognizable by Italian people. In one occasion, the translation com-
pensated the use of the non-descript calque regine by adding a highly
derogatory term to translate the following ungendered swearword moth-
erfucker: checca di merda (shitty/fucking fag).
Finally, students were also free (but recommended) to write their
comments to the adaptation. Although in most cases the comments
were broadly focused on translational aspects (such as: “the translation is
coherent with the source text as it maintains a meaning close to the orig-
inal, without any particular ambiguities”3) or aimed at commenting in
terms of slang words and idiolects, some of the comments interestingly
made reference to prosody and voice, understanding that these elements
are integral components of audiovisual texts. Therefore, comments were
made on the more or less aggressive tone, or on the more or less effem-
inate tone of the respective dubbing actors, and similar remarks. This is
not at all an obvious outcome, since AVT has only recently delved into
matters of the ‘voice’ in translation (see, e.g., Bosseaux 2015, Sánchez-
Mompeán, forthcoming) and even more rarely into matters in connec-
tion with gender (but not queer) issues (Bosseaux 2008).
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I. Ranzato
The second scene shown to the first group of students was an excerpt
from the pilot episode of the TV series Six Feet Under (Ball 2001–
2005, discussed in Ranzato 2012, 2015, 2016, pp. 187–220), the
story of a family of undertakers described in crude, dramatic, but also
humorous tones. Only two of the students had seen the episode and
knew the series, although most of them had heard of it. In this scene,
a still closeted gay man, David, is talking with his mother, Ruth. This
example was chosen to gauge the students’ ability to grasp manipula-
tive and censoring practices in translation, as the Italian adaptation of
Ruth’s final phrase, in the following exchange, evidently distorts the
source text meaning in order to build a heteronormative discourse
(Ranzato 2012):
Original dialogue:
Ruth: Well, I’d much rather [your father] buy himself a fancy new hearse
than leave me for a younger woman, or a woman my age for that mat-
ter, or, heaven forbid, a man, like my cousin Hannah’s husband did.
God sure has dealt that woman some blows in this life.
Back translation:
Ruth: Anyway it’s always better that he satisfies himself with a new car
than betray me with a young girl or a woman my age. Heaven should
punish men like my cousin Hannah’s husband. God has reserved that
poor woman some hard trials.
Results: Opinions this time were mixed, with 7 students judging the
adaptation ‘inappropriate,’ 7 ‘insufficient,’ 11 ‘acceptable,’ 15 ‘good,’
and 2 ‘very good’ (2 students did not give an opinion), with the most
positive comments clearly not grasping the manipulation.
7 Gayspeak in the Translation Classroom
111
When one matches these ratings with the translation proposals and
with some of the comments, the picture becomes more interesting but
also more intricate: 35 students translated Ruth’s words semantically
well, thus apparently understanding the reference to the homosexual-
ity of Hannah’s husband. Ratings, however, and especially some of the
comments, did not seem to match this awareness. Few students wrote
explicitly of manipulation or censorship (just 12). The rest of the com-
ments mostly tackled translation problems in general terms with no ref-
erence to the sensitive issue at hand. A student declared explicitly that
they “did not get the full point of the phrase”, even if his/her translation
was semantically correct. Others expressed themselves in vague terms.
In the cases of a positive evaluation of the dubbing, the comment did
not reveal a real awareness of any form of censorship having occurred;
for example, in this case: “In the Italian adaptation some words have
been added to make the meaning of the text more explicit […]. [Ruth’s]
line expresses the woman’s thoughts but in my opinion the addition is
excessive.” This comment was puzzlingly matched to a correct transla-
tion of the phrase. In my opinion, the response to this particular test
reveals a low level of awareness of manipulative dubbing practices and
perhaps some degree of unawareness or even uneasiness in relation to
the subject at hand.
The test on Six Feet Under was completed by the transcription of two
other lines from the series, which included ‘gay’ culture-specific references:
one was the title of the sitcom Will & Grace (Kohan and Mutchnick,
1998–2006; 2017-in production), which notoriously features two gay
characters, and the other was the Californian town of West Hollywood, the
first city to create same-sex domestic partnership registration and various
related benefits for its residents. The test was meant to gauge the students’
familiarity with these cultural references, which were both eliminated
from the Italian official dubbing. All of the students were familiar with
the title of the sitcom and thus judged the Italian adaptation negatively.
The response to the second example was more varied, because only one
student declared that they knew and could explain the reference to West
Hollywood. At the same time, some of the students intuitively grasped
the value of the reference and, when proposing an alternative transla-
tion, offered some interesting solutions. One of them translated West
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I. Ranzato
Hollywood with San Francisco (also commonly associated with gay rights);
another one proposed Hollywood arcobaleno (rainbow) alluding to the
LGBT pride flag; while yet another student made a reference to the gay
pride movement.
Overall, students in this case seemed more alert to cultural specifici-
ties than to the suppression of more delicate issues.
The third scene shown to the first group of MA students are actually
two scenes taken from the (1959) film by Joseph Mankiewicz, Suddenly,
Last Summer (analyzed in Ranzato 2009). Just one of the students, a
cinéphile, knew the film, while, sadly, none of the others reported hav-
ing heard of it. Based on Tennessee Williams’s play, the story revolves
around the memory of Sebastian, a homosexual man (whose sexuality
the audience can suspect at times, but learns only for certain towards
the end of the film) who is never seen but only remembered, after his
death, by his cousin Catherine and his mother, Violet—the latter mor-
bidly attached to him. In the first scene, Catherine, a patient of the asy-
lum where her aunt is keeping her segregated, is talking to a nurse about
her deceased cousin’s tastes.
Original dialogue:
Nurse: I’m blond.
Catherine: Are you? Funny. We were going to blonds next. Blonds were
next on the menu. […] All last summer, Sebastian was famished for
blonds. Fed up with the dark ones. Famished for blonds. The travel
brochures he picked up were advertisements of blond northern coun-
tries. […] Fed up with the dark ones, famished for the light ones.
That’s the way he talked about people, as if they were items on a menu.
That one’s delicious-looking. That one’s appetizing. Or that one is not
appetizing. I think really he was half-starved from living on pills and
salads.
Back translation:
Nurse: I’m blond.
Catherine: Are you? Funny. That reminds me of something. It was
the next dish on the menu. […] Sebastian had been dreaming
about blond hair for a long time now. He was tired of the South.
He longed for the North. He had many flyers and all boasted of the
beauty of Northern countries. […] He was obsessed by the thought
of blond hair. The way he talked about peoples, as if they were items
on a menu. Those ones should be very nice, those are appetizing. Or
those are not inviting. All the more surprising from him since he was
living on pills and salads.
Original dialogue:
Violet: You were the stranger, the outsider, the destroyer. We were life.
Catherine: You fed on life. Both of you. Taking, taking. People were
object for your pleasure. That’s what you taught him and he taught
you. […]
Catherine: We were decoys.
Doctor: Decoys?
Catherine: For Sebastian. He used us as a bait. When she was no longer
able to lure the better fish into the net he let her go.
Doctor: Bait? For what? What were the better fish?
Catherine: We procured for him.
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I. Ranzato
Back translation:
Violet: You were the intruder in the life I had given him.
Catherine: What did you give him? Taking, only taking. He, too, could
do nothing but take. You had taught each other, hadn’t you? […]
Do you know what we were? We were decoys.
Doctor: Decoys?
Catherine: Yes, decoys. That was our only use and when she wasn’t useful
any longer as a decoy, he left her home.
Doctor: Yes, but all this to what end?
Catherine: —(scene and soundtrack are edited out)
This time, students were not asked to translate the excerpts but, after
watching them in the original version and then in Italian, they had to rate
the dubbing and state which of the elements of the two dubbed dialogues
were, in their opinion, more distant from the source text. The dubbing of
the first scene was rated as ‘inappropriate’ by 4 students, ‘insufficient’ by
5 students, ‘acceptable’ by 18 students, ‘good’ by 12 students and ‘very
good’ by 1 student (4 students did not rate any of the excerpts). The
adaptation of the second scene was considered ‘inappropriate’ by 5 stu-
dents, ‘insufficient’ by 6 students, ‘acceptable’ by 11 students, ‘good’ by 7
students, ‘very good’ by 1 student (14 students did not rate the scene).
Surprisingly, these scenes, which were evidently submitted to a heavy
ideological manipulation that erased and rendered more confusing the
homosexual discourse that constitutes the backbone of this film (to
the point of cutting an unpleasant reference to the two women being
7 Gayspeak in the Translation Classroom
115
Original dialogue:
Louis: I always get so closety at these family things.
Prior: Butch, you get butch.
Prior: Oh, and by the way, darling, Cousin Doris is a dyke.
Prior: You don’t notice anything. If I hadn’t spent the last four years fellat-
ing you I’d swear you were straight.
Back translation:
Louis: They would have understood and I didn’t want them to realize.
Prior: Homosexual. Always hide the faults.
Prior: And, sweetheart, by the way, your Cousin Doris is a lesbian.
Prior: You didn’t notice. If I hadn’t spent the last four years having sex
with you I’d say you were innocent.
Students were asked not to search the internet but were provided
with the basic meaning of all the relevant words, taken from the Oxford
Dictionary of English online. The point of this exercise was, in fact, not
so much to test their previous knowledge of the respective words, but
their ability to find suitable terms to translate them into the target lan-
guage. This class demonstrated a higher degree of awareness of possible
manipulations of homosexuality-related words and themes, in compar-
ison with the MA class, expressed both in their rating of the film’s dub-
bing and in the discussion that ensued. This was partly due, probably, to
the fact that the situation described in the scene is one of overt homo-
sexuality. It portrays a gay couple in unambiguous terms. At the same
118
I. Ranzato
There are sometimes large gaps in the coverage of the set of lexical items.
When there is a large gap, many individuals in the domain do not fall
easily into any of the opposed categories. Gaps within domains are not
in any way unusual— they can be found even in very large sets of basic
colour words, for example—but they are especially prominent in domains
where the folk ideology of binary opposition holds sway, as it certainly
does in the domains of sex and sexuality. A great many people will be
located at some considerable distance from the “ideal types” (butch versus
fem(me), for instance). (ibid., p. 25)
Lesbian versus dyke. Here, too, many see a distinction, of behaviour ver-
sus identity or in a neutral versus an “in your face” stance or in degree of
“butchness”. Dyke is also, a reclaimed epithet, a term of derision that has
been to some extent rescued as an expression of pride. […] Dyke has fairly
recently been reclaimed; for some speakers in some contexts and for some
purposes, it is no longer an epithet.
The great majority of the students (46) did not go further than the
standard explanation of the word read in the dictionary’s entry and
translated dyke with the standard Italian lesbica (lesbian). Only nine stu-
dents resorted to the slang lella, thus demonstrating that they felt that
the word needed a different handling than the standard. However, lella
carries a very different load with respect to dyke. It is not, as dyke is, an
originally derogatory term that has been reclaimed and “rescued as an
expression of pride.” Translating dyke with lella thus shows more of a
translational effort but is a not a completely satisfactory solution. Most
of the other (12) proposals (one of the students did not translate this or
other words), suggest omosessuale (homosexual), gay, lesbicona (big les-
bian, a way to render the word more informal and derogatory), checca
120
I. Ranzato
(fag, usually used for gay men) as possible translations, as well as the
more elaborate (and effective): a tua cugina Doris piace la vagina (your
Cousin Doris likes vagina).
In the case of the interesting word closety, which does not have a
direct equivalent in Italian, apart from two non-answers, and five
answers that appeared to have missed the point and meaning of the
phrase, the majority of the students answered with periphrases contain-
ing words along the lines of riservato (reserved). However, five students
decided to render the gay theme more explicit, by producing the fol-
lowing solutions: non mi comporto mai troppo da gaio (I never behave
too much as a gay), where gaio, the Italian literal translation of gay, has
probably a more humorous overtone than the plain, and more com-
mon, loan word gay; mi comporto sempre da non dichiarato (I always
behave as a closeted [gay]), a rather cumbersome but not ineffec-
tive solution; la mia parte gay è sempre repressa (my gay part is always
repressed); faccio sempre l’etero (I always play the hetero); non faccio mai
troppo il gay (I never act too much like a gay).
Butch was also felt as a translation hurdle by the students, as the
word, whose full meaning was grasped, does not have a mainstream
Italian equivalent,4 although it can be used as a loan word in more lim-
ited circles. It was never used as a loan word in this test by the students,
however, who generally preferred to use the word maschiaccio (tomboy)
or, in a few instances, macho. The sense in which maschiaccio is generally
employed in Italian, however, that of a ‘bad boy’ in a benign, playboy-
esque sense of the term, and especially the complete loss of Prior’s ironic
allusion (he is using butch to address a gay man, not a woman, as it
would normally be the case), do not seem to make this kind of transla-
tion completely satisfactory.
The last line of the transcription contained two sexual items: the not
exclusively gay-related fellating and the word straight. If the first was
invariably translated with the various words—standard and slang—
which express oral sex in Italian, the second was, apart from two excep-
tions, transposed with eterosessuale, the Italian equivalent of the standard
heterosexual, simply because there is virtually no other concise alterna-
tive in the target language. Murphy (1997: 43) reminds us that:
7 Gayspeak in the Translation Classroom
121
Today, straight is the catch-all antonym for all of the colloquial same-
sex orientation and identity labels (gay, lesbian, dyke, queer). The use of
straight as an antonym for this range of labels may have begun with its
contrast to queer in counterfeiting slang (Dynes, 1985) and/or through
the contrast of gay (‘promiscuous, prostituting’) and straight (‘chaste, vir-
tuous, respectable’). (Oxford English Dictionary [OED], v. XVI: 818)
It is perhaps with this old meaning of the word still ingrained that
two students translated straight with the dubious sano (wholesome) and
normale (normal).
Perhaps of more interest are some of the handlings of the appellative
darling, uttered by Prior. If the great majority of students (53) resorted to
the most common Italian translation of this word—caro (dear, darling),
tesoro (literally, treasure) and, in one case, amore (love)—some offered
other solutions that seemed devised as a way to compensate for the use
of the standard lesbica for dyke in the same sentence, thus showing an
awareness that something lost should somehow be balanced. Those solu-
tions included, for example, the use of teso, an abbreviation of tesoro; and
amo, a rarely used abbreviation of amore (not to be confused with the
more common, Roman, amò, with a final accent), the latter comple-
mented by an explicative footnote: “colloquial mode, used especially in
the LGBTQ community to address someone as ‘tesoro’ or ‘amore.’”
Overall, this last questionnaire, and the discussion that followed,
offered various insights on the students’ horizon of expectations, on
their ability to nuance certain words and to come to terms with themes
related to sexuality. In spite of a general openness and lack of shyness,
shown by the majority of these BA students, one of the questionnaires
was returned with no translations and with just this statement: “The
first sentence is too difficult and the last one is too vulgar.”
what the tests illustrated above tend to demonstrate are the possible
benefits of an altogether different modus operandi. Being taken una-
wares, so to speak, by being confronted without prior preparation with
manipulative or simply unsatisfactory translations of words and themes
related to homosexuality, students may experience a minor shock, which
is beneficial in provoking them to question their assumed notions. A
course based on this experience would guide students through a thor-
ough analysis of both original and translated texts, testing the instru-
ments that the target language offers them to transfer these contexts
into their own culture and language. In the case of Italian, the com-
parative poverty of the homosexual lexicon at their disposal is itself a
motivation to explore all possible translation avenues by delving deep
into the sociocultural context from which the original words stemmed.
It is at this point that some introductory lessons on gender studies in
translation would help to raise the level of students’ awareness of this
topic. To enhance the linguistic/translational perspective of this type of
course, the following lessons could be organized to revolve around the
presentation of a single relevant word (i.e. closet ), exploring its etymol-
ogy, history, possible polysemic nuances, and use in different contexts.
Reflecting on the ways each relevant word can be translated without
seeing its sociocultural load compromised and by possibly incorporating
new resonances is a challenge that I am sure students are ready to wel-
come and that would naturally make them more alert to the potential
dangers of handling so-called sensitive issues with superficiality.
6 Conclusions
As Susam-Sarajeva (2014, p. 162) observes, class experiments such as
the one illustrated, encourage critical thinking on the relationship
between translation and gender and introduce “the central concepts
of gender-conscious approaches to translation,” “showing how these
approaches could be implemented in terms of certain translation strate-
gies” (ibid.).
7 Gayspeak in the Translation Classroom
123
Notes
1. Students are free to attend or not attend classes.
2. Italian dictionaries do not normally mention this meaning of the word,
although gay glossaries (such as the one featured in www.gay.it) do.
3. My translations for all the students’ comments in Italian.
4. The slang word camionista, which is close to the meaning of butch, is not
generally known outside gay circles.
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8
Indirect Sexism in John Grisham’s
Sycamore Row (2013): Unveiling Sexual
Inequality Through a Gender-Committed
Pedagogy in the Translation Classroom
José Santaemilia
1 Introduction
In the ongoing fight for sexual equality, discourse and translation are
key mechanisms. This paper describes a teaching experience within my
Legal Translation (English–Spanish/Catalan) class at the University
of Valencia. Students were required to translate some passages from
Sycamore Row (2013), a best-selling legal thriller by John Grisham. In
class, we analyzed and discussed these passages, and compared them
with the students’ versions as well as with the versions offered by Jofre
Homedes Beutnagel in the 2014 Plaza and Janés Spanish edition, enti-
tled La herencia.
My Legal Translation class is a third-year module (one semester) in
the four-year Translation and Interlinguistic Mediation degree at the
University of Valencia, whose main learning outcome is to provide
students with an introduction to the English legal system—that is, an
J. Santaemilia (*)
University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 127
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_8
128
J. Santaemilia
In his study on official (or sworn) translation from English into Spanish,
Mayoral (2000, p. 315) underlines the fact that “the translator feels the
tension between different ways of translating and different ‘fidelities’ and
must come to intermediate translation solutions.” Venuti posits an “eth-
ics of location” whereby “the cultural authority and impact of translation
vary according to the position of a particular country in the geopoliti-
cal economy” (Venuti 1998, p. 187). More boldly, feminist translation
practitioners (von Flotow 1991; Massardier-Kenney 1997) have sug-
gested strategies like prefaces, footnotes, supplementing, resistance, col-
laboration between author and translator, and even hijacking—that is
8 Indirect Sexism in John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (2013) …
131
4
Sycamore Row in Translation, a Potential
Site for Unveiling Indirect Sexism
For one of the sessions of my Legal Translation (English–Spanish/
Catalan) class at the University of Valencia, students were required to
translate some passages from Sycamore Row (2013), with the aim of
getting familiar with a number of basic legal terms and institutions in
the USA. In class, we analyzed selected passages from Grisham’s book
and students compared their own translations with those offered by
Jofre Homedes Beutnagel in the Plaza and Janés 2014 edition, entitled
La herencia [Eng. ‘the inheritance’].
Sycamore Row was published in 2013, a sequel to Grisham’s first
book, A Time for Killing (1987), and presents the story of two lawyers
(Jake Brigance and his assistant Ellen Roark) who fought in court for
the acquittal of a black man (Carl Lee Hailey) who killed the men who
had raped his 10-year-old daughter. The recent sequel features the late
Seth Hubbard, a timber tycoon in Mississippi who has hanged him-
self from a sycamore tree due to a painful terminal illness and out of
remorse for his father’s lynching and hanging of a black landowner,
Sylvester Lang, and for the unjust treatment given to Sylvester’s family.
Seth Hubbard—who hanged himself from the same sycamore tree from
which Sylvester was hanged—leaves a holographic will, leaving nearly
all his fortune to his own employee, Lettie Lang, Sylvester’s grand-
daughter. In order to do so, Seth Hubbard replaced a previous will that
allocated all his money to his own two children. The ensuing trial brings
about issues relating to the racist attitudes towards the black population;
the testamentary capacity of an old, dying man; the suspicion that the
old man and his employee were having sexual relationships which, nat-
urally, affected his testamentary decisions; the surprise and discrediting
witnesses; and so on.
Reading this book proved really useful, as Grisham “liberally seasons
his pages with legal jargon and procedure” (Swirski and Wong 2006, p.
318), making him an apt author for a legal translation class. The exer-
cise ended up providing a wider focus on socio-ideological concerns,
particularly those connected to sexism and gender-based discrimination.
8 Indirect Sexism in John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (2013) …
135
There had been so many. He had hired young ones because they were
more plentiful and worked cheaper. The better of those got married and
pregnant and wanted six months off. The bad ones flirted, wore tight
miniskirts, and made suggestive comments. One threatened a bogus
action for sexual harassment when Jake fired her, but she was arrested
for bad checks and went away.
He had hired more mature women to negate any physical tempta-
tion, but, as a rule, they had been bossy, maternal, menopausal, and
they had more doctors’ appointments, as well as aches and pains to talk
about and funerals to attend.
(Chapter 3, p. 24)
Spanish translation:
tight miniskirts,” most students suggested just leaving the term mini-
falda [Eng. “miniskirt”]. Once again, indirect sexism proves difficult to
avoid or circumvent in translation, just as the published version of a
text carries with it an authority that is, perhaps, difficult to ignore.
Translation constitutes one of the most powerful ways of identifying
and, later on, challenging the sexist manifestations of reality. As with
the previous passages, our students commented at length on these con-
siderations, and agreed that something should be done through trans-
lation. Admittedly, they were reluctant to act boldly (i.e. ‘hijacking’ the
text or omitting certain elements) but they also believed that an ethical
translation should lead them to a careful reconfiguration of the trans-
lated product. Unlike with overtly sexist forms (clearly discredited),
they found it difficult to intervene in the case of indirect forms of sexist
discourse. As with the other passages, they found downtoning fully jus-
tified, and ethically necessary, since it is commonly done with the trans-
lation of sexual language (Santaemilia 2005). The boldest decision a few
students would be ready to take was to render some passages insubstan-
tial, almost ambiguous, in order for their translation to accommodate
their ethical principles concerning sexism and discrimination.
In the debates generated by the texts translated, one of the main real-
izations has been the enormous power of the translation classroom, if
inspired by a feminist, gender-committed pedagogy, to unveil forms of
indirect sexism and, subsequently, activate a growing awareness of the
need for an honest, ethical individual response through translation.
Maier devotes an essay to “encourage translators to consider the ques-
tion of gender with regard to translation practice” (Maier 1998, p. 95).
Translation as a didactic tool can be used to interrogate not only the
linguistic structures of the original, but also its (androcentric) logic, and
in this respect both feminist translation strategies (von Flotow 1991;
Massardier-Kenney 1997) and a feminist pedagogy (Shrewsbury 1993;
Ergun and Castro 2017) will be most useful. An ethics of responsi-
bility (Vidal and Martín Ruano 2003) or an ethics of the first person
(Larkosh 2017) invite translators to go beyond the absolute require-
ments of faithfulness and neutrality, in order to assume their own
specific ideological commitments; for example, to truth, to justice, to
gender equality.
The perpetuation of sexist scripts and associations in popular lit-
erature certainly has a damaging effect on society, and on the cause of
gender equality. We may wonder whether translation can prevent this.
Probably the burden is too heavy, but translation, undoubtedly, forces us
to re-evaluate the beliefs, values, assumptions and clichés of all texts and,
consequently, to take up a position and (hopefully) produce a commit-
ted, ethical text. While mass literature is a very popular commodity and
its ideological values are easily and unreflexively swallowed, it is trans-
lation that always adds the possibility of critical reflection, of casting a
further look at all types of texts. Students were undoubtedly aware of
this potential, and were presented with a range of feminist- or gender-
informed strategies, but were mostly unable to put them into practice.
While critical reflection was carried out, very few practical steps were
taken to confront sexism through translation. Undoubtedly, more time
and experience are needed in order to develop an independent ethical
attitude.
140
J. Santaemilia
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143
1 Introduction
The role of the translator as a cultural mediator has been widely
acknowledged (Bedeker and Feinauer 2006; Katan 2016; Nida 1998)
as well as the use of translation as a form of resistance and activism
(Tymoczko 2010). Also, the relation between the translation activity and
Gender Studies has long been the object of academic attention (Federici
et al. 2011; Nissen 2002; Von Flotow 2011). All these perspectives are
particularly relevant when the translator is dealing with alternative texts
because special attention must be paid to “the values, beliefs, and rep-
resentations that constitute those differences and of which translation
itself is the vehicle and support” (Venuti 2017, p. 2). However, this
coalition of them all rarely constitutes the object of study nor is it used
in the translation classroom. Particularly in the Higher Education sector,
we find that it is of the utmost importance to train prospective transla-
tors with a gender perspective.
In the Spanish context, gender issues are considered relevant, as
stated in Article 25 of the 2007 Law for Effective Equality between
Women and Men (authors’ translation for Ley Orgánica 3/2007 de
22 de marzo ). Yet, in 2017 no Spanish university offered a Bachelor’s
degree in Gender or Women’s Studies (Bernárdez Rodal 2017) and
the topic is frequently addressed in the form of cross curricular con-
tent (Asián Chaves et al. 2015). As university lecturers, we feel urged
to consciously include the gender perspective in our translation course.
For this purpose, appropriate texts where traditional gender configura-
tions and social meanings of sexual differences are altered may be very
useful, since they show distinctiveness in the use of language (Orme
2010), characters (Martin 2010) and symbols (Cutolo 2012). We agree
with Simon (1996, p. 8) in that “both feminism and translation […]
are tools for a critical understanding of difference as it is represented in
language.” Indeed, the relation between gender and translation has led
to many questions about linguistic and social stereotypes to the point
that it “can be seen as a discursive construction which, through transla-
tion practice, moulds and transforms gender identities and stresses the
notion of difference” (Federici et al. 2011, p. 10).
In light of these considerations, the aim of our study was to raise
awareness among third-year students of a Spanish Language and
Literature Degree of the ideological transfer implied in translation activ-
ity. These students had never studied translation before but they had a
B1–B2 level of English. Through the detection of different translation
problems and difficulties in particular, we expected not only to raise
awareness of gender issues among our students but also to foster a criti-
cal perception of the translation activity and the translator as a cultural
mediator (Bedeker and Feinauer 2006; Katan 2016; Nida 1998) and
an active agent (Tymoczko 2010). All of this could only be achieved
through an adequate educational intervention that went beyond the
text as an object to translate, in order to explore the nature of the alter-
native text, its contextualization, the values embedded within it and
9 Ideological Transfer in the Translation Activity …
147
used, including the author’s official website and an interview she had
given on “Women and Gender” for TVO (Donoghue 2011). Once the
groups had been formed and the selected texts distributed, each group
was given a grid to fill in after a first reading. Its aim was to help the
students reflect on the plot and recognize its alterations with respect to
the traditional forms (see Annex 1). This critical reading would facilitate
their process of understanding the text in English and help them reflect
upon power relations and gender inequalities embedded in the selected
short stories.
From our point of view, these two sessions were essential for two
reasons. First, none of the students had had any instruction on gen-
der issues before. Second, Emma Donoghue and the literary tradition
of women writers in the English language were totally foreign to them
and as Andone (2002, p. 144) has affirmed, criticism and explanation
within the source language and culture is essential for understanding the
literary piece before proceeding with its translation. Only when the stu-
dents were familiar with the author and her activism, did we proceed
with the translation practice.
The second phase of our study consisted of the translation activity. The
students were divided into five groups of two or three members, always
ensuring that each group had at least one native Spanish speaker. Each
group was given a fairy tale to translate from English into Spanish.
To foster a thorough reading of the tales and to increase our students’
critical awareness towards the texts, they were required to compare the
characters, gender relationships, contexts, plot developments and final
outcomes of traditional fairy tales with Emma Donoghue’s adaptations.
As Henderson affirms, the gender pedagogy approach “involves a con-
stant movement between doing things and asking what doing those
things in those ways does to those things” (2015, p. 5).
In addition, the subsequent translation task should integrate a con-
scious analysis of the translation difficulties, which included their
152
M. A. Barros del Río and E. Alcalde Peñalver
3.2.1 Translation Problems
3.2.2 Translation Strategies
Once students had classified the translation problems they had found,
they were required to solve them according to Hurtado Albir’s categori-
zation of translation strategies. Students also had to justify their decision.
The translation strategies that they were exposed to were the following:
4 Analysis and Discussion
Despite the absence of a Higher Education policy for the advancement
of Gender Studies in the Spanish academia, item analysis of the AWS
test yielded 14 responses with a result of 3.7 average out of 5. This
high result may be attributed to a positive attitude among the students
towards women’s emancipation prior to our intervention. This first
phase was completed with a subsequent debate on the topic, and an
introductory session on women writers in English (Emma Donoghue,
in particular), before undertaking the translation practice. Considering
that we worked with students of Spanish whose knowledge of the liter-
ary tradition in English was limited, these sessions were much appreci-
ated according to the results of the final survey.
9 Ideological Transfer in the Translation Activity …
155
found in “The Tale of the Needle” was the use of the word “spinster”
for the character, which means both a woman whose occupation is spin-
ning and a woman who has remained unmarried. There was not a word
in Spanish with the same double meaning and thus they decided to use
“hilandera,” which only reflects the professional meaning.
When it came to the distinctive use of language, some of the prob-
lems students encountered were pragmatic as well as linguistic. For
example, in the case of “The Tail of the Spinster,” students reported that
there were some instances in which the author expressed movement
with some gender connotations, such as in the following examples: “red
rose just opening” (which they translated as una rosa que empezaba a
difundir su esplendor—a rose that began to spread its splendour—thus
using an amplification technique), or “doggish submission” (translated
as sumisión perruna, thus opting for a literal translation). Students also
noted that with the use of the first person of the main character as a
grammar feature, the author gives more power to women and breaks
the stereotype of traditional tales, in which female characters have no
relevance per se. In the case of “The Tail of the Hair,” students also
noted that the author portrays a new way to look at reality. This is illus-
trated in the sentence, “We lay there, waiting to see what we would see”
(translated with the use of an amplification technique as Permanecimos
en la misma posición, esperando a ver lo que nos depararía el mundo,
which in English would be literally translated as “We remained in the
same position, waiting to see what the world would bring us”). Other
expressions in this tale with gender connotations that students identi-
fied and that they translated with an amplification technique were the
following: “The smell of sheep’s wool on her back” (el olor de la lana
de oveja en sus ropas ) which in English would literally mean “the smell
of sheep’s wool in their clothes” or “You are helpless as a lamb still wet
from the ewe” (estás tan necesitada como el cordero que sigue mojado tras el
parto, literally translated in English as “you are as needy as the lamb that
is still wet after childbirth”).
Interestingly, Donoghue does not separate characters’ dialogue inter-
ventions from the rest of the narrative, which also caused a reaction
of surprise among the students. Once the students identified that this
was a way to portray the characters’ boldness and lack of fear to express
9 Ideological Transfer in the Translation Activity …
157
their feelings, they used the same style in Spanish to convey the author’s
intention. Nevertheless, two groups used a more common technique for
dialogues in Spanish, opting for the inverted commas and colon, as in
the following example of “The Tale of the Rose”: “I whispered, Which
of us would not sell all we had to stay alive” (Suspiré: “Quién de nosotros
no vendería todo lo que posse por mantenerse con vida” ). On the contrary,
the rest of the groups decided to follow Donoghue’s style and included
dialogues as part of the indirect style of the text.
Finally, regarding instrumental problems, the students turned to
different monolingual and bilingual dictionaries such as Collins and
Oxford, but in some cases it was not until they had reread the story a
few times that they were able to grasp the author’s connotations behind
the words she had used. They also resorted to databases such as Linguee
or specific websites to find images and explanations for some terms, as
in the case of the word “coronets” in “The Tale of the Apple.”
Overall, the translations showed that the students were fully aware
of the notions behind the words they were translating and they strove
to transmit the same values the author had included in her writing. We
believe that the previous contextualization of the author and the book,
the gender-based pedagogy implemented and the pre-analysis of the
translation problems used in the first sessions allowed them to adopt
a gender lens towards translation and identify the references that the
author conveyed in the original text.
The outcome of the final qualitative survey (Annex 3) on gender
awareness and critical translation practice confirmed these conclusions.
The items related with acknowledging gender awareness (1, 2 and 6)
scored 3.1. In particular, item 2, which related the translator’s gender
awareness with the text was favourably scored with 3.2. This suggested
a positive effect of the introductory sessions on gender and women’s lit-
erature. However, the items related to the critical and mediating role of
the translator in the translation practice (5, 7 and 9) scored 2.8. This
poor rating was particularly significant for item 5, which only reached
2.1. This statement related a good translation practice with impar-
tiality and precision on the part of the translator. Thus, the results
indicated that the students still supported the invisibility of the trans-
lator in the translating practice and tended to decline their right to
158
M. A. Barros del Río and E. Alcalde Peñalver
5 Conclusions
Through the monitored process of translation presented here, our stu-
dents realized that translators are indeed the professionals in charge of
the delivery, in a target language, of work written in a source language,
and thus have a responsibility in terms of the way their writing will be
read by a potential audience.
The three-phase methodology used in our study allowed the students
to identify problems according to the different categories they had been
shown and to apply different strategies to solve them and transmit the
meaning and connotations of the original text. This gave way to a suc-
cessful transposition into Spanish of the characters, symbols and the dis-
tinctive use of language that are characteristic of Donoghue’s fairy tales.
The resulting translations were embedded with a gender perspective,
and the scores of the final survey indicated that our introductory ses-
sions had served to reinforce the students’ gender awareness.
Our educational intervention, which was student-oriented, also suc-
ceeded in fostering a critical and reflective translation process, according
to survey. However, the majority of our students identified impartiality
and precision with high-quality translation. This meant that their per-
ception of their role as translators did not evolve towards activism and
engagement as desired, despite the care we took in the design of our
teaching scheme.
As translation trainers, we believe that the act of translating should
be vindicated as a cultural mediating process where ideology and iden-
tity are key elements. Under this perspective, the translation from the
original text to the target text needs to be enriched by including other
meaningful elements—that is, both the author and the target read-
ers’ cultural frameworks, the intention underlying the selected text,
and the role of the translator. In order to empower prospective trans-
lators with a gender lens, it is necessary to insist on translation as an
9 Ideological Transfer in the Translation Activity …
159
Note
1. The Likert scales are useful to measure attitudes. In the given test, for
every given question or statement, the range of responses varied from
4 = Strongly agree, to 1= Strongly disagree. This method was also
applied to the final survey. For a more detailed explanation on its use, see
Jamieson (2004).
Annex 1
Explain in short sentences the form and structure of the traditional tale:
Annex 2
After reading the tale carefully, take some time to think about it, review
the text and try to detect the following aspects in the text before and
after you translate it:
Categories Examples
Extralinguistic issues (cultural, moral
and social values transmitted in the
tale, symbols, etc.)
Distinctive use of characters (gender,
age, looks, personality, attitudes,
reactions)
Distinctive use of language (cohesion,
coherence, thematic progression, tex-
tual typologies and intertextuality)
Instrumental problems (other resources
of information, dictionaries, glossa-
ries, parallel texts, data bases, etc.)
Linguistic problems (terminology,
style, cohesion, coherence, thematic
progression, textual typologies and
intertextuality)
Pragmatic problems (speech acts, inten-
tionality and presuppositions of the
author)
Other remarks
9 Ideological Transfer in the Translation Activity …
161
Annex 3
– The introductory class on gender made me reflect and/or deepen my
knowledge on some aspects that I had not previously thought of.
A B C D
Totally agree Somewhat agree Somewhat disagree Totally disagree
– Contextualizing the author and her work before translating the text
facilitates the translation process.
A B C D
Totally agree Somewhat agree Somewhat disagree Totally disagree
– The intention of the author when writing the text must be consid-
ered when translating it.
A B C D
Totally agree Somewhat agree Somewhat disagree Totally disagree
– The story contains politically incorrect elements that I did not trans-
late literally, but I have neutralized their meaning.
A B C D
Totally agree Somewhat agree Somewhat disagree Totally disagree
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1 Introduction
Since the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Elimination of
Violence against Women, approved on 20 December 1993 by the
General Assembly, the term “violence against women” is used to refer to:
any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in,
physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including
threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether
occurring in public or in private life.
C. Toledano Buendía (*)
Department of English and German Philology, University of La Laguna,
San Cristóbal de La Laguna - Tenerife, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 167
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_10
168
C. Toledano Buendía
For the past 50 years, many legal orders have protected women’s rights
to a violence-free life, urging governments to adopt the necessary meas-
ures to guarantee women’s rights in accordance with the principle of
non-discrimination, to develop policies and plans that help implement
these rights, and to provide redress and reparation to those whose rights
have been violated. Some examples include the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW),
approved in 1979 by the UN; the acclaimed Fourth World Conference
on Women held in Beijing in 1995; and on a more recent European
level, the Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on
Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic
Violence), signed in 2011, and Directive 2012/29/EU of the European
Parliament and the Council of 25 October 2012.
These documents pinpoint the special attention that must be paid
to the specific needs of certain groups, which, for various reasons, such
as age, religion or origin, may find themselves in a situation of greater
vulnerability. This is the case for immigrant women who either do not
speak the language of the community in which they live or they have a
very limited knowledge of it. This is explicitly acknowledged, for exam-
ple, in articles 3 (the right to understand and be understood) and 7 (the
right to interpretation and translation) of the aforementioned directive,
which contemplate the need for a free interpreting service in order to
ensure effective communication.
10 Integrating Gender Perspective in Interpreter Training …
171
In the case of immigrant women who cannot speak the language, inter-
preters must provide the same guarantees as the other links in the chain:
professional competence and no preconceptions. The performance of
these interpreters may, or may not, be the key that opens the door to the
effective exercise of the rights of some immigrant women. [Translated
from Spanish] (Naredo 2015, p. 43)5
In order to get help, victims usually have to describe their experiences and
share very intimate information when filling a report or during an initial
intake meeting. This usually includes details about the physical or sexual
assault that may feel shameful to discuss –even though the abuse is not
the victim’s fault- especially in front of a male interpreter. These details
have important implications for a court case, and could affect the other
types of services to which the victim is entitled. For example, substitut-
ing the word chest for breast in describing the assault, even if motivated
by respect for the victim’s modesty, conveys a very different meaning and
could lead to a much different outcome. (2007, p. 23)
In most cases there were conversations with victims that went beyond
the professional interview, which is unacceptable and this at times ham-
pered the intervention. In most cases, they were from immigrant commu-
nities with unknown languages (African dialects, etc.) and we contacted
174
C. Toledano Buendía
victims (Del Pozo et al. 2014b, p. 19). Such training should encom-
pass the mastery of various interpreting techniques, familiarity with and
applicability of a professional or ethical code of conduct, knowledge of
the fields of intervention and resources for coping with emotions and
stress, and gender training (Abraham and Oda 2000; Toledano and Del
Pozo 2015). Within the latter field, the interpreters participating in the
Delphi survey agree on various topics as relevant to their specialization.
Items relating to gender violence are mentioned, such as manifestations
of violence against women/gender-based violence; the concept of vio-
lence against women/gender violence or the cycle of violence received a
high level of consensus. Other items relating to gender equality such as
the sex/gender system; the private, public and domestic space; the main-
streaming of the gender perspective; and stereotypes and gender roles or
the gender perspective received a moderate level of consensus (Del Pozo
et al. 2014b, p. 15).
Interviewee: Well, it’s true. The interpreter who was at the… when there
was a quick trial, three days after I reported my case, the interpreter
was a Moroccan boy and of course, he didn’t need to explain anything
to me because I understood perfectly, but when he said that—well!—
that I should go back to him, that I should try and sort things out, for
my children…
Sociologist: The interpreter?
Interviewee: The interpreter, the Moroccan boy. I was amazed. I was
shocked. Really! And I just stood there and I said…
(Interviewee number 8. Moroccan woman) [Interview transcript.
Translated from Spanish]9
3 Conclusion
The complex process of acquiring awareness and agency that women
must negotiate in order to report the violence to which they are being
subjected is personal and unique. Organizations can facilitate or con-
tribute to this process by providing information, guidance, support,
means, accompaniment and so forth. However, the ultimate decision
to face the problem is personal and non-transferable. Taking the deci-
sion on behalf of victims always results in failure. It is therefore not a
question of speaking for victims but of giving them a voice, a subtle
moral imperative in which all expectations of technical neutrality must
be framed. Such neutrality certainly does not derive from a distanced
attitude, but entails committed involvement in a training process that
begins with the deconstruction of interpreters’ own technical capacity.
10 Integrating Gender Perspective in Interpreter Training …
181
Notes
1. To mention just a few examples, in Canada, a pilot project involving a
group of specialist interpreters was created to provide mediation in the
domestic violence court in Ontario and at a service about domestic vio-
lence at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto (Abraham and Oda
2000). In the USA, we find resources such as those of the National
Center for States Courts (Access to Justice: Limited English Proficiency
(LEP) and Access to Protection Orders ), or the Department of Justice
Office on Violence Against Women (Resource Guide for Advocates &
Attorneys on Interpretation Services for Domestic Violence Victims ); also in
the USA, the training programme and resources offered by the Voice of
Love (Healing Voices: Interpreting for Survivors of Torture, War Trauma
and Sexual Violence http://www.volinterpreting.org/); in Australia mate-
rials published by the Community Relations Commission for a multi-
cultural New South Wales (Using Interpreters in Domestic Violence and
Sexual Assault Matters ) and the project “Breaking through the language
barrier: Empowering refugee and immigrant women to combat domestic
and family violence through cultural and language training”, led by Dr.
Sandra Hale, with government funding through the NSW Department
of Premier and Cabinet, Domestic and Family Violence Grant scheme.
In Ireland, the Dublin Rape Crises Center created a manual for inter-
preters in cases of gender violence, Interpreting in Situations of Sexual
Violence and Other Trauma (2008) (http://www.drcc.ie/wp-content/
uploads/2011/03/RCC_Interpreting.pdf ). See also Costa (2015),
Lemon (2006), and Wallace (2015) for the importance of interpreter
training in US Civil courts for victims of domestic violence. And finally,
practical recommendations aimed at professional interpreters and pub-
lished in the bulletins of professional associations such as Polzin (2007)
and Huelgo et al. (2006).
2. Speak Out for Support (SOS-VICS) (JUST/2011/JPEN/2912) is a
European project co-funded by the Criminal Justice Programme of the
182
C. Toledano Buendía
European Union. All results can be accessed through the project web
site: http://cuautla.uvigo.es/sos-vics/.
3. The following research studies were performed within the SOS-VICS
project framework: a questionnaire survey of 586 agents with experience
in assisting foreign female gender violence victims (social, health, police
and court fields); a Delphi survey of 27 interpreters who had experience
in assisting foreign female gender violence victims, and semi-structured
interviews with 12 victims and 12 agents. For complete reports see Del
Pozo et al. (2014a, b). For confidentiality purposes only, project partners
have access to the transcripts of the interviews with agents and victims.
4. For an exhaustive review of this directive, see Hertog (2015). For an
overview of European and international human rights instruments that
set down the obligation of states to provide specialised interpreting to
victims of gender violence, see Naredo (2015). Specific to translation
and interpreting and the need for professionalization and specialisation
of interpreters that intervene during the criminal process is Directive
2010/64/UE of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20
October 2010 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal
proceedings (Blasco and Del Pozo Triviño 2015).
5. En el caso de mujeres extranjeras que desconocen el idioma, es preciso
aplicar a los y las intérpretes las mismas garantías que al resto de eslab-
ones de la cadena, competencia profesional y ausencia de prejuicios. De
ello puede depender que su actuación constituya, o no, la llave que abre
la puerta al ejercicio efectivo de los derechos paro parte de las mujeres
extranjeras.
6. Lemon’s research focuses on the need for free professional interpreters in
civil domestic violence cases in the United States and the importance of
their training.
7. No existe la neutralidad ante una víctima de violencia: hay que saber que
hay quien ejerce violencia y hay quien la padece. La neutralidad técnica
del terapeuta no es lo mismo que la neutralidad moral. Trabajar con per-
sonas victimizadas exige que se tenga una actitud moral de comprom-
iso. Es necesario tomar una postura de solidaridad con la víctima, lo que
no supone una idea simplista de que ésta no pueda hacer nada malo o
equivocado sino que “exige el entendimiento de la injusticia esencial de
la experiencia traumática y la necesidad de devolver a la víctima alguna
sensación de justicia” y a esto contribuye el claro posicionamiento del
profesional contra la violencia.
10 Integrating Gender Perspective in Interpreter Training …
183
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from https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/userfiles/file/Immigrant
Women/IPV_Report_March_2009.pdf.
11
The Future of Academia,
Gender and Queer Pedagogy:
Concluding Remarks
Marcella De Marco and Piero Toto
M. De Marco (*) · P. Toto
London Metropolitan University, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Toto
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2019 189
M. De Marco and P. Toto (eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_11
190
M. De Marco and P. Toto
One that refuses normal practices and practices of normalcy, one that
begins with an ethical concern for one´s own reading practices, one that
is interested in exploring what one cannot bear to know, one interested
in the imaginings of a sociality unhinged from the dominant conceptual
order. (Britzman 1998, p. 16)
References
Britzman, D. 1998. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Cao, D. 1996. Towards a Model of Translation Proficiency. Target 8 (2):
325–340.
11 The Future of Academia, Gender and Queer Pedagogy …
193
comprehension 14, 23, 33, 54, 70, ethical neutrality 130, 175, 180
104 ethics of responsibility 139
corpus/corpora 19–22 ethics of the first person 131, 139
Corrius, Montse 3, 70, 104
courtroom drama 132
crime fiction 132, 133 F
critical pedagogy 47, 87, 89, 149 feminist pedagogy 41, 63, 64, 70,
critical translation 157 87, 88, 91, 94, 98, 139, 149
Cruising 116 feminist translation 3, 34, 64, 65,
cultural translation 129 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 96, 129,
cultural turn 129 130, 139, 140
feminist translation strategies 3, 139
Fernández Cruz, Marco 104
D fidelity 64, 129
Dallas Buyers Club 107 footnotes 58, 130
deconstruction 129, 180 framework 2, 4, 10, 14, 16, 17,
De Marco, Marcella 3, 70, 104, 105 22–24, 36, 40, 48, 53, 65, 68,
desire 37, 84, 93–99, 131, 135, 158 70, 75, 87, 95, 158, 182
detective 133, 137 Friedkin, William 116
Díaz-Cíntas, Jorge 104
discourse 2, 4, 15, 16, 24, 46, 48,
50, 52, 57, 59, 65, 66, 68, 70, G
72, 73, 76, 79, 90, 95, 110, gay 19, 21, 88, 97, 110–112,
114, 127, 128, 132, 133, 138, 116–121, 124, 132
140, 177, 190–192 gayspeak 105, 106, 116, 118, 123
discourse analysis 4, 14, 15, 24 gender 2–5, 13, 17–19, 21, 23, 24,
discursive turn 129 27, 28, 31, 33–35, 37, 38, 40,
dubbing 106–112, 114, 115, 117, 42, 50–52, 54, 55, 57, 63–66,
118 68–76, 78–80, 83, 85, 86, 88,
Duras, Marguerite 32 91, 99, 104, 105, 109, 121,
122, 129, 133, 139, 145, 146,
148, 150, 151, 154–161, 167,
E 168, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182,
equivalence 59, 85, 129, 130 189, 190
ethical/ethics 5, 11–14, 16–18, gender advertising translation 68
21–23, 38, 47, 50, 89, 98, gender awareness 3, 5, 34, 35, 50,
105, 130–132, 135, 138–140, 51, 56, 70, 104, 105, 150,
174–176, 179, 181, 190–192 157, 158, 170
Index
197
gender-based violence 167, 173, 175 interpreters 5, 11, 12, 29, 84, 169,
gender-committed pedagogy 127, 171–177, 179–182
138–140 interpreter training 167, 169, 181
gender-neutral pronouns 51, 54, 55, irish literature 150
58
gender perspective 66, 146, 147,
150, 158, 161, 169, 171, 175, K
177–179, 181 Kaindl, Klaus 105
gender-sensitive approach 65, 79 keyness 9, 12
gender violence 5, 167–169, 171– Kohan, David 111
178, 180–182 Kushner, Tony 116
Grisham, John 127, 132, 134, 135,
138
L
Laufer, Batia 118
H lecturer 47, 53, 56, 76, 80, 89, 93,
Hanley, Julia 104 94, 97, 98, 100, 146, 149
Herron, Carol 104 legal translation 3, 127–130, 134
hijacking 130, 138 Le Monde 34
homosexual 19, 21, 104, 105, 109, lesbian 19, 21, 37, 88, 117, 119, 121
112, 114, 117, 119, 122, 131 linguistic 4, 14, 17, 24, 86, 90, 105
homosexuality 103, 106, 111, literary translation 4, 28, 38
117–119, 122
human rights 167, 182
M
Mankiewicz, Joseph 112
I methodologies 10, 16, 45, 92
ideological/ideology 4, 15–17, 27, Morris, Matthew 104
28, 47, 49, 50, 55, 64, 72, 80, Mutchnick, Max 111
86, 106, 114, 116, 119, 123,
128–131, 135, 139, 146, 147,
154, 158, 192 N
imagery 14, 148 naming practices 131
inclusive language 3, 64–66, 71, Nation, I.S.P. 118
73–76, 79 neoliberal university 93, 95, 97, 98
indirect sexism 128, 133, 135, neutral/neutrality 51, 52, 58, 74,
138–140 78, 84, 87, 99, 119, 128–131,
interdisciplinary 10, 104, 189 139, 153, 173, 174, 176–178,
180
198
Index
O
objectivity 128, 129, 175, 179 S
same-sex marriage 129
Sánchez-Mompeán, Sofía 109
P second language acquisition 103
pedagogical(ly) 15, 17, 18, 32, 34, Secules, Teresa 104
41, 48, 63–65, 72, 84, 86, 87, service learning 48, 54, 56
89, 90, 92–95, 97, 98, 140, sex 27, 50, 54, 117, 119, 120, 132,
192 148, 150, 175
performativity 37, 41, 85, 190 sexism 57, 64, 72, 87, 95, 128,
politics 55, 64, 85, 91, 96, 98, 105, 133–135, 138–140, 192
116, 131 sexist politics 64
positioning 69, 84, 94 sex-related stereotypes 133
preface 58, 130 sexual equality 65, 71, 127
presupposition 133, 153, 160 sexual inequality 128, 130
sexuality 4, 13, 21, 23, 27, 28, 31,
33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 50, 54, 83,
Q 86, 88, 91, 119, 121, 129,
queer pedagogy 4, 84, 86, 88–90, 132, 133
93–99, 190 Six Feet Under 110, 111
social 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 15–17, 22,
23, 25, 34, 38, 40, 41, 46–49,
R 59, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, 75,
Ranzato, Irene 5, 104, 110, 112, 80, 87–89, 91, 94, 98, 104,
116, 118 105, 118, 123, 129–131, 133,
relationships 4, 15, 55, 87, 88, 94, 135, 140, 146, 148, 155, 159,
122, 134, 151, 159, 160, 168, 160, 168, 174, 177, 179, 182,
175 190–192
research 1, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16–19, social change 3, 87, 98, 140
23, 24, 28, 40, 48, 52, 65, socio-political perspective 90
68–70, 76, 80, 85, 86, 89, ‘soft’ legal texts 132
91, 92, 94, 97, 104–106, 123, specialized language 33, 34
Index
199
W Z
Will & Grace 111 Zwicki, Arnold M. 118, 119