Translation Trouble: Gender Indeterminacy in English Novels and their French Versions

Abstract

In English literature, characters of indeterminate sex created by novelists range from the ambi-gendered narrators in Victorian novels to the protagonists of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. A unique experiment in French is Anne Garréta's Sphinx. Translating such texts from one language into the other is a challenge; different strategies of ‘degendering’ have to be used in Germanic and Romance languages respectively. This essay discusses examples of translations which successfully preserve gender indeterminacy, but also translations which ignore authorial intentions and reintroduce gender markings. Typical strategies are observed as well as imaginative solutions for special situations.

Translation of Narrative Voice and Reproduction of a Simulated Storytelling Mode

“…For this reason, their focus and research agenda can vary. So far, various types of voices in translation have been investigated by such scholars as Schiavi (1996), Hermans (1996), O'Sullivan (2006), Schabert (2010), Alvstad (2013Alvstad ( , 2014, and Law and Ng (2020), among many others. Some describe how the narrator's voice and other types of textual voices are manifested in a translated text, while others study voice in relation to the translatorship and the agents who are involved in the translation activities.…”

“…Some describe how the narrator’s voice and other types of textual voices are manifested in a translated text, while others study voice in relation to the translatorship and the agents who are involved in the translation activities. In the former case, Schabert (2010) finds how French translations of the English novel Shirley render the narrator masculine because of the past participles and adjectives used in them whereas, in the source text, “the narrator’s masculine gender is not made explicit” until the very end (p. 78). She mentions that the French renditions of some English novels usually present their narrator as androcentric while the English text features an “ambi-gendered narrative voice” (Schabert, 2010, p. 80).…”

Narratology and translation

“…The point is that what constitutes a tour de force in French may require less linguistic virtuosity in English and may thus prove less striking and less efficient in suggesting, say, that love transcends sexual and gender differences (cf. Schabert, 2010: 88).…”

“…A good starting point is the narratological category perhaps inappropriately called “voice,” which subsumes narrator, narratee, and narration (Genette, 1980: 212–262). Perhaps because of its importance in literature, criticism, and narratology, this is probably the most studied category from the angle of translation and its troubles, as work by Susan Lanser (1999), Ina Schabert (2010), and Dennis Schofield (1998) attests. If, in any language, a narrator (whether homodiegetic or heterodiegetic) is always a first person, in many languages, different distinctions are made regarding the grammatical category person.…”

“…Similarly, Ina Schabert (2010: 78–80) shows how French renditions of Charlotte Brontë’s (or Currer Bell’s) Shirley gender the narrator masculine as soon as adjectives and past participles referring to it are used whereas, in the English version, the narrator’s masculine gender is not made explicit before the very end. She likewise points out that the French translations of The Mill on the Floss mark its narrator as male from the beginning while, on the contrary, the English original features an ambi-gendered narrative voice.…”