0000000000364291
AUTHOR
José Santaemilia
Woman and translation: geographies, voices, identities
In this article we wanted to reflect any of the numerous intersections that women and translation studies have generated. We have divided it into three parts: Geographies, Voices and Identities.
Indirect Sexism in John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (2013): Unveiling Sexual Inequality Through a Gender-Committed Pedagogy in the Translation Classroom
In the ongoing fight for sexual equality, discourse and translation are key mechanisms, that deserve careful scrutiny. This chapter describes a teaching experience within my Legal Translation (English–Spanish) module 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’ translations as well as with the 2014commercial Spanish version, entitled La herencia. Sexist and/or patronizing comments are common in this book, disguised under the veil of irony or humour. Thus, John Grisham manages—through humour and ir…
Sexuality and Translation: Rewriting Identities and Desires
Abstract This chapter offers a panorama of research on sexuality and translation, a promising field of research still underexamined. Two directions are identified: the translation of sexuality and the sexualization of translation. The cooperation between disciplines has generated a number of new areas of study, including erotic/pornographic translation, (self)censorship in translation, and gay/queer translation. These promising lines of inquiry are briefly presented, and a few examples of analyses are added. Though much more work is needed, the critical alliance of translation and sexuality seems to be offering valuable insights into the ideological construction of a given society, particul…
News values as evaluation. Main naming practices in Violence Against Women news stories in contemporary Spanish newspapers: El País vs. El Mundo (2005-2010)
Violence Against Women (VAW) is a very sensitive, and highly ideological, topic in the Spanish society, as well as in Western societies generally. In Spain, media accounts of VAW are very closely related to two quality newspapers, El País and El Mundo, providing a variety of naming practices for VAW, with differing ideological and evaluative implications. In this paper, I compare and contrast these two dailies in their use of the three main naming practices —violencia de género ‘gender-based violence’, violencia doméstica ‘domestic violence’ and violencia machista ‘male violence’— used in VAW news. To do so I resort to the news values approach proposed by Bednarek and Caple (2012, 2014, 201…
Amor y erotismo en Vargas Llosa y su traducción al inglés
En este artículo analizaremos uno de los ejes de la creación novelística de Mario Vargas Llosa (la exploración del amor y el sexo) a través de las traducciones inglesas de las novelas Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973), La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), Elogio de la madrastra (1988) y Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997). Si bien en casi todas las obras de Vargas Llosa el amor juega un papel relevante, en estas cuatro obras hay una fabulación explícita sobre la sexualidad humana y un notable trabajo sobre la elaboración lingüística y retórica del lenguaje del amor y el sexo. Traducir el lenguaje relativo al sexo es, sin duda, un área muy sensible, el lugar de confluencia entre las inter…
Translating international gender-equality institutional/legal texts
Drafting international institutional/legal texts is one of the most delicate instances of social writing, as it affects our lives at personal, social and collective levels. In an era in which full equality between the sexes is promoted, international legislative and political bodies are especially encouraged to remove any traces of racial, ethnic or sexual discrimination. In this paper my primary aim is to analyse how international gender-equality texts – carefully worded and crafted in English – are translated into Spanish, one of the world’s leading languages and one of the main doors to (international) effective gender equality. Gender-equality institutional texts are highly sensitive, a…
A reflection on the translation of sex-related language in audio-visual texts: the Spanish version of J.K. Rowling’sThe Casual Vacancy
Studies on the way sex-related language has been approached in audio-visual translation are still rather limited. This article documents the range of solutions given in Spanish to the sex-related l...
The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse
‘Woman’ is a key social actor, and a central conceptualization, in the construction of media discourses of gender-based violence. Scholarly research at the turn of the 21st century (Bengoechea 2000; Lledó 2002; Fernández Díaz 2003; Jorge 2004) showed that in the Spanish press, media discourses had a tendency to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes. In this paper we explore the treatment of the phrasemujer maltratada(EN ‘battered woman’) in intimate partner violence newspaper articles from 2005 to 2010. Our aims are: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary …
Sex and translation: On women, men and identities
Synopsis Much has been written on gender and language over the last two decades with an emphasis on feminist translation, on the translation of woman's body or on the re-discovery of a growing genealogy of translating — and translated — women in diverse languages and cultures (see Santaemilia & von Flotow, 2011). In this paper we wish to focus on the translation of sex-related language. Without a doubt, sex — and more specifically, sex-related language — is overwhelmingly present in our daily lives, in our texts, in our symbolic projections. Though traditionally proscribed for a number of reasons, the study of the translation of sex is nowadays more openly dealt with. Translating the langua…
The Translation of Sex-Related Language: The Danger(s) of Self-Censorship(s)1
While censorship is an external constraint on what we can publish or (re)write, self-censorship is an individual ethical struggle between self and context. In all historical circumstances, translators tend to produce rewritings which are ‘acceptable’ from both social and personal perspectives. The translation of swearwords and sex-related language is a case in point, which very often depends on historical and political circumstances, and is also an area of personal struggle, of ethical/moral dissent, of religious/ideological controversies. In this paper we analyse the translation of the lexeme fuck into Spanish and Catalan. We have chosen two novels by Helen Fielding—Bridget Jones’s Diary (…