(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.