Appropriating Feminist Voice While Translating: Unpublished but Visible Project

Abstract

Translating a text and making it comprehensive for others is an essential job of the translator, but when a woman translator transfers a text and intentionally stresses the female voice, the act becomes a gender-significant distinction. This study aims to understand the 'feminist' translation strategies used by translators in producing her works. It also aims to study the feminist movement in the Arab world. This paper adopts Skopos's theory to justify using specific strategies in their translation and explain why translators' identities are becoming more visible. The databases from ProQuest, Taylor and Francis, EBSCO, and Google Scholar, were used to explore research articles and books published between 1980 and 2021 for western feminist studies and between 2000 and 2021 for Eastern (Arab) feminist studies. Systematic analysis methods were used, and findings were reported in this study. The results were discussed and presented thematically. Additionally, this paper opens more discussions on the politics of feminist texts in different ways and methods via translation. It shows how the translator's interventions and strategies reshape the Translations so that the force of the feminist message is amplified in some places and mitigated in others. However, further research is needed to investigate more questions, such as the effect of understanding feminism(s) and the translator's ideology on the translation of feminist texts produced. This paper is a crucial contribution to feminism in the Arab world because very few works have been published, and few scholars have discussed this topic.