THE INTERACTION BETWEEN FEMINISM, TRANSLATION AND BASQUE LANGUAGE

Abstract

Until recently Basque translators have not devoted much space to feminist approaches, and feminist activists and scholars have neither considered the reality of the Basque language. Additionally, feminist theories have come to Basque Translation Studies later than to other neighbouring cultures, and it is in recent years that activity has begun to develop.
This study aims to revise the interaction between feminism, translation and Basque language with special emphasis on the literary field. Considering the difficulty to embrace the wide space occupied by feminism and translation (Arrizabalaga 2007: 81), this study will focus on three main areas. First, the article will observe the translator, the subject who translates, in order to know the presence of men and women in the professional sector. Quantitative data obtained from previous studies will be analysed for this purpose. Feminist reflection will be the second focus of the article, for which both the literary and the academic fields will be addressed. This section will offer an overview of the status of the issue by observing the increasing number of approaches that combine Basque language, translation, and feminism. In the third place, the article will examine the translating practice and the gender vision of practitioners. To do so, translators’ testimonies were collected from those who work with Basque language as their source and/or target language. Special attention will be paid to the asymmetric relations between Basque and Spanish to see to what extent they influence the translation process.
One of the principal contributions of the study is that the Basque professional sector of translation is increasingly feminizing. At the same time, the article demonstrates that the translation of books with feminist perspective has grown exponentially in the last years, and the production of academic studies that combine feminist perspective and translation studies approaches is gaining ground. Finally, the study shows that there are some specific difficulties in the transfer between Basque and other languages when translating gender specific concepts.