ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, translation has come to be thought of as a process rich in cultural and social complexities, an act of creativity in its own right. This is largely due to changes that have taken place in the field of translation studies inspired in part by Benjamin, Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom have invited us to think of translating as a means of ensuring the life of a work, discovering its multiple and ever-evolving meanings, and transferring it from one sociocultural context to another. Also influential have been theorists such as Lefevere and Venuti, who have taught us to see translations as ideological constructs, rewritings emanating from new contexts, influenced by factors such as gender, patronage, and even the marketplace, and by manipulations dictated by the translator’s beliefs, place in time and space, purpose, and audience. 1 Furthermore, practice upholds theory in seeing translation as an active, and indeed creative, process involving interpretation and re-creation. Translators actually take far more opportunity to intervene and appropriate the text than detractors of translation imagine. Their work entails making choices: selecting a source text, determining which methods and strategies to adopt in transferring it, and deciding how to deal with its lexical, syntactical, and stylistic features. Finally, as the male- and female-authored paratexts of the early modern period reveal, translators believed that their work was useful and saw the translation of religious, classical, or Continental works for the less educated as a service to state, church, and population. As Micheline White states, “translators of both sexes saw themselves as powerful cultural agents.” 2 In the case of religious works, in particular, they also saw themselves as possible instruments of reform and even savers of souls, and their translations played a crucial role in pre-Reformation, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation England. Women contributed by making available a variety of foreign texts: devotional, theological, polemical, and meditational works, prayers, sermons, and saints’ lives. 3
