Postcolonial and Feminist Translation
Postcolonial and feminist approaches examine how translation participates in relations of power between cultures and genders, and how it can resist or reinforce them.
Definition
Approaches in translation studies that analyse translation through the lenses of colonial power relations and of gender.
Scope
This topic covers the politically engaged strands of translation studies that grew out of the cultural turn. Postcolonial translation studies analyses how translation served empire and how it can be reclaimed for resistance, drawing on metaphors such as the Brazilian 'cannibalist' appropriation of the colonizer's texts. Feminist translation studies examines the gendering of translation, recovers women translators, and theorizes interventionist practices that make the feminine visible. The treatment is descriptive and historiographic.
Core questions
- How was translation used as an instrument of colonial power?
- How can translation be turned into a tool of resistance?
- How is translation gendered, and how have women translators been treated?
- What are feminist interventionist translation strategies?
Key theories
- Translation in the colonial context
- Tejaswini Niranjana's argument that colonial translation constructed and subordinated the colonized, and that postcolonial criticism must rethink translation as a site of historical and political struggle.
- Feminist translation
- Luise von Flotow's and Sherry Simon's account of translation as gendered and of interventionist strategies—supplementing, prefacing, and 'hijacking'—that make women's presence and feminist meaning visible in the target text.
History
These approaches emerged in the 1990s as the cultural turn met postcolonial and feminist theory. Feminist translation developed notably among Canadian scholars and translators, while postcolonial translation studies drew on writers from South Asia, Latin America, and Africa to analyse and contest translation's colonial legacies.
Debates
- Intervention versus fidelity
- Feminist interventionist strategies and postcolonial 'thick' or resistant translation raise the question of how far translators may rewrite a text for political ends without overstepping the ethics of representing another's words.
Key figures
- Susan Bassnett
- Harish Trivedi
- Luise von Flotow
- Sherry Simon
- Tejaswini Niranjana
Related topics
Seminal works
- simon1996
- vonflotow1997
- bassnett1999
Frequently asked questions
- How can translation be a tool of colonial power?
- Colonial administrations and scholars used translation to represent, classify, and control colonized peoples, often constructing distorted images of their cultures that served imperial interests.
- What is feminist translation?
- Feminist translation makes gender politics visible in translated texts and in the recovery of women translators, sometimes through interventionist strategies that foreground feminist meaning.