Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The aim of the paper is to pose questions concerning the current perspectives of a gender focused approach within Translation Studies, as well as to examine its potential to influence every day translation practices. From the academic perspective, the cultural turn in Translation Studies resulting from interest in poststructural and deconstructivist philosophy and, more generally, from the new politics of identity, may be seen as something which can be taken for granted. Nevertheless, I will argue that in a country like Poland, where the absence of critical theorizations of identity was for quite some time intentional absence, the gap thus created is clearly discernible in both translators’ approaches and in the reception of translated texts. This gap, which has never been fully made up for, is also reflected in the absence of linguistic customs which are adequate to address various materializations of gender. In the light of the rise of new gender politics (to use Judith Butler’s term) and well beyond the end of the era of feminism (to allude to the phraseology of Luise von Flotow), gender and translation related issues seem to be a timely matter to consider; particularly in the Polish context. Within the educational institutions whose teaching and research are strongly based on the assumptions and values of universal humanism as well as in the institutions of public life cultural differentiation, including that of gender, is of marginal interest. I will attempt to show how the lack of certain gender-related linguistic customs of translators and the lack of gender-related academic research and teaching are interrelated, and result in translations in which significant aspects of the translated texts are obfuscated or eliminated. It can be argued that Polish political changes of 1989 in fact have positioned gender-sensitive discourses as marginal, rebellious, and subversive to the publicly legitimate order of things.