Gender studies

In recent decades, gender perspectives on the history, theory and practice of translation have given rise to varied and fruitful international research. Although the dyad woman and translation existed for centuries in world literature, it was in the eighties, in Quebec, that it began to take hold as a demand, together with debates over the construct of gender. Various social, political and identity coordinates converged (second-wave Anglo-Saxon and French feminism, the “cultural turn” in translation studies, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, etc.) and inspired some feminist writers and translators to subvert and manipulate the dominant androcentric discourse in their writings or (re)writings. In the late 1990s, new initiatives sprung up outside North America. With Italy, Spain was one of the first countries where many researchers focused on gender and translation. With the incoming millennium, gender studies expanded to other European territories and gained currency on other continents, while in Spain conferences, publications and theses proliferated. In sum, in the last twenty-five years the study of the intersection of “women, gender and literary translation” has achieved several milestones in universities all around the world, including: (a) the recovery of translators, texts and paratexts otherwise rendered invisible by the dominant discourses; (b) the interrogation, criticism and self-criticism of feminist theories and translation practices here and abroad; (c) reflection on the ethics and responsibility of feminist translators and publishers who publish their texts; (d) the study of the linguistic representation of gender in translation; (e) the promotion of metaphors and myths in the feminine to replace the androcentrist patriarchal translational discourse for so many years in force in translation theories. In this article we will present the current state of the art of the two most fruitful lines of research in recent years: on the one hand, the feminine and feminist historiography of translation; and on the other, the theory and practice of feminist translation. In this sense, we seek to add and make visible two subaltern stories, which have not been addressed by the dominant discourses of History with a capital letter: the history of translation and the history of women and gender