A Room of One’s Own is generally seen as a feminist text, but the purity of the feminist
concept in ST is a query. At the very first page below the text in chapter one in ST, it (Woolf 5) states:
“The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded”.
This led to the realization that what has been translated has been a translation. It could also denote that the Woolf’s original concept has been distorted away from what it might be. In this case, translating A Room of One’s Own is as Derrida’s comment on Benjamin’s The Task
of Translator, “translating is…the translation of another text on translation” (Munday 172). In
that event, does the translator have the right to correct the ST for restoring Woolf’s true intention? The ordinary illusion of translation is to stick to the ST. The translator turns out tobe modest and self-effacing. The status of a translator is symbolically like a faithful wife.
Therefore, the visibility of translators has recently increased through the efforts of a number of active individuals with western feminist perspective.
Feminist works have entered and had an impact upon this academic discipline. It also came with many of translation theorists’ and Western feminists’ realization that the identity of translators mattered for translation. This matter of translators’ identity depicts the originality and creativity according to the authority, relegating the translation as the figure of the female in the secondary role. Translators should extricate themselves from the traditional notion of submission to the original text. The thought of translators as transporting materials between cultures is outdated. They should express their impressive achievements and receive public recognition. However, how to asserting the translators’ identity had yet to be fully explored, especially in Taiwan.
In this study, it attempts to examine how gender itself is translated and produced according to two Chinese versions of A Room of One’s Own written by Virginia Woolf. By focusing on the comparison of different versions of Chinese translation of Virginia Woolf's works, this study aims to investigate how Woolf's work is translated and it focuses on what translating strategies are considered the better translation than the other and what difficulties a translator may encounter when translating A Room of One’s Own. By the same token, this study will draw attention to the ways in which Woolf's work as a feminist product is produced
and then ensuing impact. It also aims to reveal a perceived patriarchal thought underlying language and gestures toward a new feminine language that would allow translators as women to express themselves if it could be spoken. The purpose of this study is to bring two disciplines gender and translation together through the analysis and discussion. By describing some of the links and interconnections between gender issues and translation studies, it is hoped to inform, stimulate discussion and encourage further research into the intersections of these two fields in order to help “translatress” to gain their voices, assert their identities, justify the subjective aspects of their works and re-evaluate their work from the perspective of the gender-conscious. After this study, translatresses may become more adept at reaching these goals.
1.3 Theme and Literary Style of “A Room of One’s Own”
The book A Room of One’s Own, which comprises of Woolf’s lectures delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, was published in 1929. Virginia Woolf is known as an advocator of feminism, and A Room of One’s Own is also seen as a piece that is full of feminist color. The setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf was invited to lecture on the topic of “Women and Fiction”. She stressed that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she wants to write fiction” (Woolf 6). Her lecture is constructed partly-fictionalized narrative and partly-true statements. The story begins with her investigation at Oxbridge College. She then meets some frustration which is also the fact that women are treated
unequally in real society. To illustrate her point, the figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of an intelligent woman with tragic fate. Judith is just as talented as her brother William, but while his talents are recognized and encouraged by their family and the society, Judith’s are underestimated and ignored. She is engaged with an ordinary man who she begs not to marry with. Her father punishes her for that. She runs away from home. In the end, she commits suicide and is buried in an intersection which symbolizes the center of men’s society.
Woolf invents such a tragic figure of Judith to prove that a woman as talented as Shakespeare could never have achieved success. Talent has brought male Shakespeare success, but women are treated so differently; a female Shakespeare is doomed to failure even if she had had as much talent as Shakespeare. Woolf closes her lecture with an exhortation to her female audience to break the tradition.
In translating this book, translators tackle Woolf’s complicated writing techniques, such as exaggeration, parody, whimsy, and multiple viewpoints. As Showalter (cited in Moi 2-3) remarks:
The impression that Woolf’s use of those techniques contributes to creating an impression of strenuous charm. She goes on to object to the impersonality of Room…The entire book is teasing, sly, and elusive in this way.
Woolf exposes the way in which language refuses to be pinned down to an underlying
essential meaning. She practices what we call a “deconstructive” form of writing, which engages the duplicitous nature of discourse, supported by Derrida (cited in Moi 9):
According to French philosopher Jacques Derrida, language is structured as an endless deferral of meaning and any search for an essential, absolutely stable meaning must therefore be considered metaphysical.
There is no final element, no fundamental unit, no transcendental
signified that is meaningful in itself and thus escapes the ceaseless
interplay of linguistic deferral and difference. The free play of signifiers will never yield a final, unified meaning that in turn might ground and explain all the others…Woolf rejects the metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology, which hails God, the Father or the phallus as its transcendental signified.
Woolf rejects the essential, absolutely stable meanings because she has seen them for what they are. They are under patriarchal ideology. After she has understood that the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity, she uses many different personae to voice the narrative “I”. It results in frequently recurring shifts and changes of subject position, leaves the readers no single unified position but a multiplicity of perspectives to grapple with. Somehow, her steadily shifting, multiple perspectives built up by these techniques distract attention from the
message she wants to convey in the essay; it is one of the difficult task for translators.
For Woolf, writing was not about waging a gender battle or maligning the characteristics of the opposite sex. On the contrary, writing was intended to bring together the virtues of male and female into an idea without gender constraints. She called this idea as “androgynous mind”. Her central premise of the androgynous mind is that there is not an entirely masculine mind or an entirely feminine mind. Gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and changed. She thought men and women should write without consciousness of their sex in order to resulting in the unlimited literary creativity. “Woolf’s search for the androgynous mind is best exemplified in her experiments with stream of consciousness writing” (Cambria 2005). The idea behind this technique is that a person’s perception of the present is constantly changing because it is confused with impressions, thoughts and memories from the past. Therefore, a person’s consciousness is continually evolving.
Stream of consciousness is another major technique taken by her. “Woolf’s consciousness is requesting changes and novelty; in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life” (Lai 164). By following these consciousness and experience, she presents the identity of things itself through the making of structures, the employment of language, the uniting of form, finally in the social meaning of the artist herself. The stream-of-consciousness novels are often complex, obscure and ambiguous for the readers
because instead of exterior action (which things happen to characters in the narrative), most of the action was interior, with things happening in the minds of the characters. Woolf wanted to explore the depth of her characters, which she felt could not be done with traditional narrative styles.
In the next section, it turns to the demonstration of the current related studies from Taiwan and China.
1.4 Review of Current Studies
Recently, gender studies starts to achieve influence in academic life in Asia due to the late introduction of those pioneer works such as Luise von Flotow’s Translation and Gender and Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation and articles likes Lori Chamberlain’s Gender and
the Metaphorics of Translation. In hindsight, they appeared to be innovative models which
offered a need and theoretical background in feminist translation. Yet there is only a few of studies to be found because feminists’ explicit rejection of traditional views on fidelity and their emphasis on the individualist and creative nature of translation as expressed in meta-texts that feminist translatresses' work is seen as a threat to mainstream translation discourse. Equally, it is precisely for these reasons that feminist translators may make a contribution to contemporary translation studies. In this chapter, it outlines the relative works in China and Taiwan.
In a state of the art updated research on feminist translation is Mu Lei’s (穆雷) Gender
Perspective in Translation Studies《
翻譯研究中的性別視角》. Mu presented an extensive study of translation in China influenced by feminist thought. There are three parts in Mu’s studies. In the first part, she summarizes and stresses out the foci of the three feminism waves.She then combines the feminist ideas with translation practice. Feminist translators translate and intervene the ST if there is any misogynist aspect of patriarchal language for political reasons. Feminist translators re-evaluate translation. Translation is considered to be the writing project of author and translatress’ collaboration. In the second part, she reviews Flotow’s strategies that translatress can use such as gender focus, hijack/appropriation, and use of paratext with examples. Gender focus regards language as a built-in gender-bias. The fact that the masculine form is the norm in many structures, while the feminine form is a marked form, is an example of such male-biased characteristics. For instance, translatress may use the word chairperson instead of chairman. The strategy of hijack or appropriation attempts to use language in order to master the disorder of what lies beyond language. Take Levine’s translation (Flotow 1997:26-27) as an example, “No one man can rape a woman.” It is a sentence full of misogynist aspect. Levine translates like this, “No wee man can rape a women.” in order to weaken the gender discrimination involved. Following Flotow’s (et al) lead, Mu has done the contrastive analysis of the two Chinese versions of The Vagina
Monologues with feminist perspective. The last part, she echoes Woolf’s androgyny concept.
There are two thoughts processed in human’s mind at the same time, namely, male’s and
female’s thoughts. Because the target text is alien to translatresses, they must forge an alliance with these two thoughts in order to conduct a harmonious translation product.
Likewise, other articles provide more examples making use of the feminist translation strategies, such as “Analysis of Feminist Translation”(女性主義翻譯觀探析) written by Huang Chingyun (黃青云). She addresses to some translation works in China that combines gender issues, applies the approach of feminist work, and analyzed from inside feminism’s point of view. Huang argues the limitation of feminist translated strategies such as using puzzling puns and word play in translation may confuse the moderate readers. Conversely, in my view, it will not confuse the ordinary readers as long as the translatress puts her clear explanation in the footnote. Therefore, readers’ literacy ability is not a consideration in using feminist translated strategies.
“The Feminist translators in 20th in China”(20世紀中國女性翻譯家研究) by Tan Fang (譚芳) is a prototype of feminist research that links Western feminist concept to Chinese concept. Tan’s article explores from oblivion the work of the contemporary translatress work and translating styles in China. She discusses the translatress in two groups: the one is the
translatress during the May Four Movement while the other is the translatress after the May
Four Movement. The main vulnerability is that many examples provided in the article come with less actual and academic explanation from any scholars. At the end, she informed us to unearth translatress from the margins of literature field and from the silence situation.
In the same manner, there is small amount of relevant works to be found in Taiwan. One of them is Wang Zhihung’s (王志宏) “The Problematic of Self-other Relationships in Translation Studies”(翻譯自我與他者). Wang scrutinizes the self-other relationship involved in translating Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. For Wang, translation is a border-crossing activity. Wang describes the border from many aspects of ideology. From the feminist aspect, women have “self”, but men see women as “others”. It happens in translation as well, the author (ST) sees translatress (versions) as other. However, a version is still an entity. The “I”
is everywhere in the version. The translatress should not be satisfied with the author and just copies the source text, avoiding the responsibility of adjusting and improving the source text as well as asserting translatress’ own identity.
In “How Virginia Woolf’s Works Are Presented In Taiwan” (吳爾芙在台灣), Lee Genfang (李根芳) uses the Itamar-Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory to discuss Woolf’s books.
The translators’ task is to deal with a ST written in one language, at one moment, for a particular readership and to render that same work into a different language, at another point in time and for a completely different readership. The translator has to steer between extremes, between staying so close to the source text that the new readership is alienated by unfamiliar concepts, forms or language. Woolf’s works are seen as a subsystem; the source text may conflict or cooperate with the Taiwan literary and culture systems while translating. She signals the foreignness of the text may not only demonstrate proper respect for otherness. She
wonders whether the Chinese version will influence Woolf’s readers in Taiwan in the same way as its original to her English readers. Lee’s work deals with the issue whether
translatresses is able to translate Woolf’s feminine writing. To follow the rule of equivalence
in the traditional view, the tranlatresses must be subordinated to the source text and culture.
Contrary to Lee, I focus on the subjectivity of the translatresses and translation.
Translatresses may use feminist translated strategies to ensure the survival and the voice of a text.
These studies and those of many other scholars explore translation operating within language and power. They provide a rejection of the old terminology of translation as faithlessness and betrayal of an original, the foregrounding of the manipulative powers of the
translatresses and a view of translation as bridge across the space between source and target.
Their works indeed mark the beginning of a new discursive regime for translation in China.
However, as this idea is considerably new to Taiwan, more concrete theoretical and practices are still needed to progress in this field. The following section is the demonstration of my approach of a mingling of deconstructionist and feminist ideology in this research.
1.5 Theoretical Background
The thesis is geared to apply a mix of Derrida’s différance theory and feminist translation theory so as to discuss the translating skills in two Chinese versions of Woolf’s A
Room of One’s Own. The similarity of Derrida’s différance theory and feminist ideology do
not convey a coherent and systematic meaning and take translation as a holistic and comprehensive subject. They deal with specific issues and isolated problems of the nature of translation and the translational activity. By adapting these concepts, it reveals that it is surprisingly meaningful for a much clearer and more profound understanding of A Room of
One’s Own and the theme that Woolf attempted to convey. Before illustrating my approach,
the next section will outline the relevant concepts and theoretical background beforehand.
1.5.1 Connecting Derrida to Translation
Ordinarily, every language often appears with binary oppositions. Within this dichotomized relationship, one pole always tends to dominate (e.g., male over female, us over them, author over translatress), bringing issues of dissimilarity and power to the fore within a representation. Translation work has been always caught up in the series of hierarchical binary oppositions in the lower status. Many earlier structuralists, such as A. J Greimas held that meaning is produced precisely through binary oppositions: “in the opposition feminine / masculine, each term only achieves significance through its structural relationship to the other;
masculine would be meaningless without its direct opposite feminine and vice versa” (Moi 105). Against this binary thinking, translatresses should transfigure themselves in literary works and translation by representing Derrida’s difference theory. The basic significance of différance is to produce an open-ended play between the presence of one signifier and the absence of other. Derrida (cited in Weedon 25) deconstructs and theorizes the representation
in translation as the relationship difference between original texts which is explained as follows:
There can be no fixed signified (concepts), and signifiers (sound of written images), which have identity only have their difference from one another, are subject to an endless process of deferral. The effect of representation, in which meaning is apparently fixed, is but a temporary retrospective fixing. Signifiers are always located in a discursive context and the temporary fixing of meaning in a specific reading of a signifier depends on this discursive context. …Social meanings are produced within social institutions and practices in which individuals, who are shaped by these institutions, are agents of change, rather than its authors.
For Derrida, there is no fixed meaning of signifiers, they can be challenged and redefined according to the translation. Translatresses interpret what they understand in the original texts, and then, the original texts are interpreted by them in a different way, so that meaning is always in a continuous changing. By the agency of these ideas, translatresses can make their translation become the after-life of the original text, a kind of new original in other language without the consideration of fidelity. As Derrida (cited in Sergio 331) stated:
Difference is never pure, no more so in translation and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a
regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact have never had, to do with some
‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one language to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying instrument would leave virgin and untouched.
Compared with the traditional way of evaluating a translation, it suggests a new notion of fidelity in deconstructionist terms triggering a redefinition of translation as equivalence in difference.
In order to adapt Derrida’s différance theory in translation, it is important to understand that translation and tranlatresses as a concept is closely related to feminist ideology. In the next section, a summary of the pivotal feminist branches in the West will be given.
1.5.2 Connecting Feminist Ideology to Translation
Briefly speaking, Western feminists set up three schools in theoretical field, liberal feminism (Anglo-American), radical feminism (French) and Social feminism. “English and French language creative writing is usually carried on with entirely separate institutions and traditions” (Simon 22). Liberal feminism started from America and Britain, it is an ideology
Briefly speaking, Western feminists set up three schools in theoretical field, liberal feminism (Anglo-American), radical feminism (French) and Social feminism. “English and French language creative writing is usually carried on with entirely separate institutions and traditions” (Simon 22). Liberal feminism started from America and Britain, it is an ideology