(Freud 1933:113)
The aim of this essay is to address some questions related to gender issues, such as to what extent gender matters in translation and whether it may constitute a significant factor in the process of translation. The discussion centres on the translations of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own ”” (“Własny pokój ” [Own Room] ), “Orlando(“Orlando”), and “Written on the Body(“Zapisane na ciele” [Written on the body] ) by Jeanette Winterson into Polish. While certain grammatical aspects in English allow for sexual ambiguity, Polish is an inflected language, which means that verbs, adjectives, and nouns have different endings for males and females. Because of this, a Polish translator is forced to make a difficult decision regarding gender choice from the very first sentence. In my essay, I will prove that additional factors may aggravate the problem and, as a result, translation of canonical texts may become a means for fostering feminist ideology. I will also show that translating sexual ambiguity into Polish is impossible and it always deprives the original text of its primary meaning. I will therefore begin by introducing some concepts of the feminist theory of translation. I will critique it, showing that many of those aspects concern translation studies in general, and most of those problems refer to another thing, namely cultural awareness. Then, I will analyse the Polish translations of the books in question by applying some concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of sociology: habitus, illusio , and capital. I will also analyse how the translators explicitly and implicitly constructed the biological sex of the characters in question in “Orlando ” and “Written on the body ”. I will use the following abbreviations to mark the gender: M for male and F for female.