ABSTRACT
In this early essay, Godard pinpoints the exact moment when the problematics of sexual difference enters translation studies in the early 1980s. Aligning herself with feminist scholarship that posits gender as one of the fundamental categories organizing human experience in social, cultural, and political spheres, she reviews the work of reader-reception theorists (Steiner) and feminist linguists (Dale Spender and Robin Lakoff), who show how gender operates in language. Godard considers the implications for the practice of translation of the existence of two separate linguistic domains differentiated by gender. Focusing specifically on the problems encountered in translating feminist writing of the body, she discusses her own choices in working on her translation of Brossard’s L’Amèr.
