On Establishing the Locus of Women’s (In)Visibility in Two English-Into-Romance Translations of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Abstract

In this paper the Spanish and Catalan translations of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook are compared to examine what translation practices have been used to assign grammatical gender to English personal nouns, pronouns and adjectives and to determine to what extent these practices are responsible for women’s (in)visibility in the target texts. The analysis of a self-collected corpus of comparative data revealed that three particular translation strategies result, to different extents, in gender-inclusive language (which is non-discriminatory, but which does not make women linguistically visible) in the two target texts. The three strategies are (i) the omission of grammatical subjects, (ii) the use of non-adjectival categories to translate adjectives and (iii) the pronominal substitution or omission of objects of verbs and prepositions. While subject omission is a locus of women’s invisibility in both target texts, adjective transformation and object pronominal substitution or omission are so in Spanish and Catalan respectively.