Preserving Femininity in Translation

In 1993, a dispute arose in the French literary press concerning the merits of the two French translations of Virginia Woolf''s "The Waves", a translation by Marguerite Yourcenar, and a second version by Cécile Wajsbrot. Kathleen Shields explains that a critic had accused Wajsbrot of having rendered Woolf incomprehensible to the French reader. This is connected to the fact that, according to feminist translation scholars, the deletion of significant elements in key texts by women writers is a recurrent tendency. This, together with the latest trends in translation studies since the 1980''s, prompted a comparison of two French translations of "To the Lighthouse", a key text by a writer who has iconic status within modernism and feminism. We took as the basis for the analysis the paradigm proposed by Massardier-Kenney (1997) in order to answer the following questions: are any of these translation strategies implemented by the French translators? How does its use or non-use affect the translation product? How effective are these in order to translate Woolf? This analysis should be of interest to researchers in translation studies and, particularly, those who study feminist translation.