Concluding Remarks

The intersection of feminist work on gender and translation studies comes at a time when the field of cultural studies is the focus of much academic interest. Yet work in cultural studies tends to reserve the concept of translation for metaphorical use to describe the increasingly global aspects of cultural production and the situation of those who are exiled, displaced or otherwise caught between different worlds and different languages. As Sherry Simon points out, it is not uncommon to talk about women “ ‘[translating] themselves’ into the language of patriarchy, migrants striv[ing] to ‘translate’ their past into the present” ( Simon 1996 : 134) Yet the material realities of translation are occluded in such metaphorical use. This is all the more true when scholarship is conducted primarily in English or on texts translated into English and the ‘translation effect’ of those texts is not recognized as a feature of their meaning. The erasure of translation that occurs when women are viewed as ‘translating themselves into language’ rather than translating recalls certain theoretical discourses in the realm of translation. Theories that concern themselves with overarching abstractions about ‘translatability’, ‘equivalence in difference’ or ‘dynamic equivalence’ and view translation as a primarily linguistic operation carried out between two languages eschew the concrete issues of cultural difference, of context and of the discursive possibilities and options available at a specific historical moment. When, however, the focus is directed toward the cultural and historical specificities of translation—as it is when gender is brought into play—attention is drawn toward the way meaning can be and is constructed in translation. The recognition of the gendered construction of meaning in any textual practice makes possible a more differentiated understanding of translation processes. Not that gender is the only element in cultural difference that translators, readers, researchers, theorists, or people interested in Kulturpolitik need to be aware of; there are numerous others. However, the demonstration of the importance of gender coupled with the demonstration of the ‘translation effect’ in feminist translation draw attention to the subtle shading of cultural difference.