Intersexions: Reflections on Sex and Sexualities within Socio-Legal Studies (Post-Conference Reportage)
Tara Beattie
Photo by Laura Fontanella
Durham’s Law School was the proud host of an interdisciplinary conference on sex, gender and sexuality within socio-legal studies during Easter term. The event gave postgraduate and early career researchers the opportunity to present work which draws on feminist, queer and intersectional studies, and drew attendees and presenters from across the UK, and abroad. Laura Fontanella, a graduate from the University of Milan, presented her research on translation and gender/sexuality. She has written a short piece on her work, exclusively for the Qstinovian. Thank you to Laura, and to all of our participants!
Translating LGBTQI+ narrative: a challenge that must be faced
Laura Fontanella
Laura presenting her research during the Intersexions conference, Durham Law School.
Photo by Laura Fontanella
Among the tools that can be considered in fighting the so-called heteropatriarchy, there is one that is sometimes forgotten, sometimes believed useless, sometimes retained on the margins: this tool is the translation.
Through centuries, translation has been considered as a mere linguistic process, an action that anyone could do, an operation not so different from copying. Translation has been an invisible process, the simple movement of sentences from one language to the other.
Since the Eighties, fortunately, translation has started to be considered as a cultural study, thanks to research by scholars such as Mona Baker. This new look at translation has let new areas of academic interest emerge, such as the interaction between translation and gender studies.
If a written text, such as a novel, contains an LGBTQI+ character, how can we, through translation, keep all the elements, aspects and peculiarities that compose her\his\* identity? How can we do this if some languages conjugate nouns and adjectives following just the feminine or the masculine declination? How can we translate non-binarism into languages built on linguistic binarism? How can we preserve some queer elements in the passage from one code to another? And, last but not least, can translation be a political tool for fighting sexual and gender discrimination? These are just some of the questions that this interaction (between language and gender/sexual identities) has allowed to emerge.
Translating LGBTQI+ characters in narrative can be difficult because of various motivations: first, we have to consider the fact that expressions of identity may be through a different use of pronouns. If, in a novel, the character speaks about himself using the pronoun ‘she’, this fact must be, first, recognised, and then translated properly. In some languages, this gender shift affects not only pronouns but also word-suffixes and adjectives – and for that reason is sometimes complicated to manage. Moreover, in some cases, it will be more difficult to maintain these elements because of grammar incompatibility between two chosen languages.
Difficult or not, these elements are of great importance – narratively and politically. The elimination through translation of these salient aspects could generate great damage to the meaning of the entire written work, and contribute to the common occurrence of LGBTQI+ people’s marginalisation and erasure.
To take an example, according to Annarita Taronna, in the Italian version of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, there are manifestations of similar problems, including the weakening of Orlando’s gender and sexual fluidity through the choices of the translator. In the transition from being a male to a female, Orlando passes through a phase of identifying as ‘they’, through an identification as ‘both’, that in Italian – because of the language grammar rules – is rendered with ‘due visi’, ‘two faces’, giving a very binary version of the transformative event, a limited vision of what truly happens to Orlando. The English Orlando appears more gender fluid, more queer than the Italian one and the culpability lies within the translation.
Secondly, we have to consider the fact that every LGBTQI+ community has its own inner language, its slang, its own terms that do not always have an equivalent in other languages. The LGBTQI+ Italian community uses very culturally specific terms that, for example, do not exist in a country such Spain. There, for instance, the LGBTQI+ community prefers generally to use the term ‘transmaricabollo’ that literally means trans-lesbian-gay. They use this word instead of ‘queer’, which is felt to sound too Anglophonic. A word like this can be translated literally – as we have done – but what we are losing in this process is the necessity and the motivations of the Spanish LGBTQI+ community of showing a sort of detachment from the English-speaking one. Moreover, there are also, in Italian, some pejorative words – claimed back by the LGBTQI+ community – that are difficult to translate in other languages because of their particular history, social and local origin, their dialectal birth: words such as ‘finocchio’, ‘checca’, ‘bulicciu’, are examples of this.
Some of these linguistic limitations can be circumvented – paraphrasing and compensations are the most-used methodologies. For that reason, Lawrence Venuti, another prominent scholar in translation studies, affirms that translation has the purpose of breaking some rules, in order to transpose, into the other language, what is truly important: for some translators, states Venuti, this lies in the form. For others, however, it will lie in the political content. If a translator choses the political content instead of the form, she\he\* can thereby practice a form of hetero-binary resistance.
In the case of LGBTQI+ narrative, preferring contents over form, and thereby speaking about LGBTQI+ subjectivities in a society that still heavily discriminates against them, is of the utmost importance. Writing about queer people and translating texts that narrate their stories first provides a source of knowledge about their own lives and, secondly, serves as a counter-narrative to homo-bi-transphobic contents, thereby generating a more inclusive culture. Accordingly, Maria Tymoczko states that translation is a political tool: it is not only a linguistic and cultural process, but an action, that has deep and profound consequences in people’s lives.
In the struggle against homobitransphobia, against heteropatriarchy, bigotry and ignorance, there are a lot of other tools that can be used: translation, the sharing of contents among languages, the commonality of LGBTQI+ topics – in a correct way that maintains its queer elements, that is respectful of all the elements that compose the character’s identity – is something that should be treated as a fundamental. Good translation can be a tool of influence in changing our reality and society for the better.
References
Baker, M. (2006). Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community, The Massachusetts Review, 47(3 (Fall 2006).
Castro, O. (2012). Translating Gender, Translation Studies, 5(3).
Castro, O. (2013). Introduction: Gender, language and translation at the crossroads of disciplines. Genl, 7(1).
Taronna, A. (2006). Pratiche traduttive e gender studies, Roma, Aracne.
Tymoczko, M. (2000). Translation and Political Engagement, The Translator, 6(1).
Tymoczko, M. (2007). Enlarging translation, empowering translators. Manchester, UK, St. Jerome Pub.
Tymoczko, M. (2010). Translation, resistance, activism. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press.