Transnational Feminist Translation: Ongoing Challenges

Professor Luise Von Flotow (University of Ottawa, Canada) in conversation with Dr Anissa Daoudi (Modern Languages, Arabic and Translation Studies).

This first major event in the academic year part of Translation Studies Research Forum, Arabic Studies and of our Forging Links research stream will benefit from the intellectual exchange with the theorist and translation scholar Professor Luise Von Flotow. As part of decolonising Translation Studies as well as Feminism, Professor Von Flotow and Dr Daoudi will engage transnationally with postgraduate students and scholars from the Global South, for example, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Argentina and many more.

This talk begins with a short description/discussion of how locally positioned the early examples of “feminist translation” were, how intermingled with friendships, alliances and shared political motivations. It moves on to discuss how politics of ‘gender’, and more importantly, ‘intersectionality’ have diversified and fragmented work in the field, and how transnational approaches (De Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014, Castro and Ergun 2017, Flotow and Farahzad 2017, Flotow and Kamal 2020) have been brought to the fore in recent years. A few current studies in transnational feminist translation (Yanez 2020, Alsharekh forthcoming, Kamal Mansour 2020) will serve to further expand on the question of how ‘feminist otherness’ has an impact on the work of translation: from selection to translation to dissemination and reception (Flotow 2017/2019).