Feminist translation practices: historical perspectives

Location
Online
Dates
Wednesday 8 December 2021 (13:00-14:30)
A painting of a woman

Hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation Research Seminar at the University of East Anglia

Speaker: Dr Hilary Brown (Translation Studies, University of Birmingham)

This talk will consider feminist translation practices present, past and future. It will begin in the present, looking briefly at some examples of feminist literary translation over recent decades from countries including Canada and Spain. We shall then head back into the past to re-visit the ‘origin story’ of feminist translation, namely women translators in the English Renaissance who are held up as beacons of the feminist tradition for their supposedly bold, interventionist approaches to their source texts. The talk will argue that it is time to interrogate the foundations of this origin story: it is much more difficult to label and judge the methods of early women translators than many accounts assume. Finally, we shall think about the implications of revising the feminist narrative, and discuss whether insights from historical study are likely to have any significant bearing on the practice and analysis of translation in the future.