On the Challenges of Transnational Feminist Translation Studies Luise von Flotow A chorus of voices – scholars, translators, critics –has for years been calling for both international and transnational work in translation studies in general, and in feminist work in translation more particularly: Here is one insistent voice: In her 2009 article Maria Tymozcko argues for internationalizing translation studies, and writes: I do not envision merely increased associations of individuals or groups, good as that is, but a process in which we as scholars, teachers and translators move beyond our enclosed mental worlds to look beyond the boundaries of our own cultures, to see what we can learn conceptually and practically about translation from the world at large. (my emphasis). “Our enclosed mental worlds” here evokes the traditions and conventions with which Anglo-American/Eurocentric cultures conceptualize translation, and which rule their approaches to translation studies. Tymozcko views these as strongly impacted by the changes to print technologies in the late Middle Ages, where highly political questions about Bible translation surfaced, creating and maintaining unfulfillable demands for equivalence See Karen Emmerich’s recent Literary Translation and the Making of Originals for a sustained and very sharp criticism and rejection of the dogma of equivalence, faithfulness, fidelity and the like in literary translation. (Emmerich 2016), and which other cultures may not share. Tymozcko had begun developing these arguments in an earlier publication in which she sought to ‘look ahead’ into the future of translation studies. After commenting quite positively on the increasing involvement of ‘other cultures’ in the discipline, due in part to the rise of English as a global means of communication, she turns to some of the less attractive aspects of this phenomenon, seeing the spread of English-language translation studies as “a form of intellectual hegemony.” She concludes: The reliance on and promulgation of Westernized perspectives in a field dedicated to intercultural communication and in a field becoming increasingly internationalized is clearly an unstable situation (2005, 1087). The “international” voices in the field have doubtless increased in the thirteen years since Tymozcko’s article was published An indication of this internationalization, at least within Europe, is an article which studies the English abstracts of Translation Studies articles published in Spanish, pointing to the need to produce coherent versions summaries for international readers (Linder, 2014)., but in feminist translation studies such voices have only recently begun to emerge. And over this time, the language has changed somewhat: while Tymozcko calls for more “international” translation studies, feminist networks use the term “transnational.” The term international implies official, diplomatic channels and international organizations, transnational evokes concerned usefulness, helpfulness, shared and collaborative communication across borders and languages to promote mutual interests. In the case to be discussed here – my production of Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons (2016) - these are mutual feminist interests, where collaborative knowledge production and knowledge exchange are preferred over what has come to be seen as the major “West to East” or “North to South” vectors of feminist knowledge flows (basically from the Anglo-American Eurozone to the rest of the world.) But the transnational aspect of feminist scholarship in translation studies is not without its own issues, and the problem of English as global language is an important one. Tymozcko may write in 2005 that “The rise of English as a world language has contributed to […] (e)xciting trends in translation studies reflecting the increased internationalization” of the field (1086), but this rise of English is also viewed as an absolute menace. One of the more vociferous recent feminist voices on this point is that of Quebec academic, Francine Descarries (2014). In the special issue of Signs, devoted to “Translation, Feminist Scholarship and the Hegemony of English” she attacks the current situation where she claims “Anglo-Saxon countries exert a virtual monopoly on knowledge dissemination and its evaluation” (564). This situation, largely due to the enormous amount of scholarly publishing produced in English has the following consequences, according to Descarries: The marginalization of large segments of feminist thought worldwide; The isolation of those researchers who work on/in national or linguistic peripheries; The requirement for researchers from other languages and cultures to rely on and work in “structures outside their social framework” (565) in order to read and publish; Gatekeeping functions of English-publishing, which not only privilege materials written by English-language researchers but control the form and content (themes and topics) to be published. The tendency for unilingual anglophone scholars to feel their unilingualism relieves them of any “obligation to know about others’ work” (566), which causes them not to see the need (or be unable to) open up to “other perspectives and cultural realities” (568), a major impediment to transnational work. Descarries is not the only one who sees a major source of the problems listed above in academic publishing Other recent authors who have studied the challenges related to English-language academic publishing include Ken Hyland (2016), Linus Salö (2017). , where the language of scholarly discourse “merge[s] almost entirely with that of […] English-speaking science and scholarship” (565). The reasons for this rise of English in international communications of all kinds are, of course, various, and have been described by David Crystal in English as a Global Language (2003, 29-122). They have come out of geographical/ historical and socio-cultural developments of the last 200 years and derive among other things from the effects of British colonialism, the English industrial revolution, the growth of the USA in the early 20th century, its enormous media influence, and the powerful anglophone presence in the internet since the early 1990s. While the question of scholarly publishing is just one, significant, aspect of this global impact, the problem is now being accentuated by the language of search engines and indexing, as authors who publish in languages other than English are systematically missed, ignored, or left out by automated search mechanisms, that have been developed largely in and for English (Tatsuya, Gonzalez-Varo and Sutherland 2016) The numbers of English-language periodicals compared to those produced in other languages are an indication of the overwhelming global power of English in academia. Descarries evokes the problem with regard to women’s studies (565) but it applies across the board. Relatively recent studies show, for example, that enormous gaps exist in numbers of publications: where there were 28,100 academic journals available in English in 2008, there were 6,800 in German, 4000 in Mandarin, 3,500 in Spanish, and 3000 in French (Lobachev 2008). These figures have doubtless changed, and statistics show that English is even more predominant in ‘hard’ sciences than in humanities and ‘soft sciences’ (Research Trends/Elsevier), but they unquestionably help maintain the dominance of English in academic work.. The dominance of English in women’s studies, feminist work, and translation studies cannot help but irritate those ‘others’, who are not part of the ‘dominant voice’ and may therefore be perceived or see themselves as ‘culturally distinct or ‘specific’ (Descarries 564.) This is particularly touchy in regard to feminist thinking, where the binary opposition of ‘dominant’ male sex and ‘other’ second female sex was emphatically pointed out in Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1949). For post-Beauvoir feminisms to fall into the same trap of first/second, or dominant/other, or North/South, West/East is to repeat a nefarious pattern - as has been documented by numerous theorists and critics from Chandra Mohanty in 2003 to María Reimóndez’ in Feminist Translation Studies (2017). Translating Feminist Academic Work And so, the question of translation arises. Can translation serve to address and moderate some of the anxieties and resentments that develop from the apparent dominance of English? Can translation support reciprocal interests and mutual benefits of transnational feminist work? And if so, how does it overcome the problems of power politics that have always existed between cultures and that strongly affect ‘translation flows’. Gayatri Spivak’s 1992 article, “Politics of Translation”, was among the first to point out the less helpful aspects of feminist work in translation; her focus was on the post-colonial weaknesses of certain kinds of literary translation, in particular when she suggested that Anglo-American feminists (translators, publishers, academics) were producing careless and conveniently readable translations of women writers from “Third World” countries without differentiating among them, simply translating – into “translationese” - whoever was considered a woman. This fails to recognize differences between women writers and their political stances; it levels differences between the cultures from which work is imported, and serves reductionist thinking. People continue to remark on how women’s texts from other cultures are appropriated through translation for feminist (or simply easy-reading) purposes: Marilyn Booth, for example, has detailed how her translation of the Saudi novel Girls of Riyadh was adapted by the publisher and the author of the Arabic text to make it “work” according to their purposes in English (Booth 2016); Mengyang Jiang recently discussed how the 1980s English translations of Chinese women’s texts from the People’s Republic of China published by Gladys Yang were given a deliberately feminist slant by Virago publisher in London Presentation given at the Minority and Translation conference at University of Ottawa School of Translation and Interpretation, November 10, 2017.; and Caroline Summers has studied how Christa Wolf’s novel Kassandra (1985) was instrumentalized into an iconic work of American feminism through its translation and reception in feminist academic circles in the USA (2017). Descarries, for her part, does not consider translation – from English into other languages or from other languages into English - a solution for the unequal communications she describes. She writes: While translation makes it possible to disseminate ideas to a certain extent, there are nevertheless few concepts or models of interpretation that can be shared among different cultures in a completely analogous fashion (566). Most translation studies scholars would agree that translation “in a completely analogous fashion” is hardly likely, and virtually any comparative study of translated feminist texts would confirm this finding. Translation changes a text. Nevertheless, translation continues to be done, and translation studies continue to pay attention to questions of feminism, women’s work, gender critique, and sexualities. Indeed, the need for feminist translation studies is seen as pressing. Various scholars confirm that the “problematic of translation has become an important domain for feminist contention” (Costa and Alvarez 2014, 558), and a recent book on the translational contacts and communicational misfirings between US Latina and Latin American feminists explores this problematic, although in largely metaphorical terms, where “translation” is a term for intercultural contact of all kinds (Alvarez et al. 2014). Similarly, East European studies of the rush of translations produced in the 1990s with funding from organisms such as the Soros and Ford Foundations have focused on the results and effects of this work, and shown that not only do these translations often fall short of expectations (Barchunova 2006), but seriously change and confuse the issues they set out to make available (Slavova 2014). Indeed, as translation studies scholars know, the “travels of discourses and practices across geopolitical, disciplinary, and other borders encounter formidable roadblocks and migratory checkpoints” (Costa 2014, 558), and because documents relating to women, feminism, gender, sexualities are almost always culturally sensitive, they are likely to encounter rather larger roadblocks to easy transnational or cross-cultural communication (Flotow and Scott, 2016). A recent highly-visible publishing and translation project brings together these two issues - diverging feminist interests and English-language “hegemony” - in noteworthy ways: Barbara Cassin’s 2004 Dictionnaire de l’intraduisible, sets up “languages” as one of the most urgent problems posed by Europe, and proposes two possible solutions”: choisir une langue dominante, dans laquelle se feront désormais les échanges – un anglo-américain mondialisé; ou bien jouer le maintien de la pluralité, en rendant manifestes à chaque fois le sens et l’intérêt des différences, seule manière de faciliter réellement la communication entre les langues et les cultures (2004, xvii). [we could choose a dominant language in which exchanges will take place from now on, a globalized Anglo-American [my emphasis]. Or we could gamble on the retention of many languages, making clear on every occasion the meaning and the interest of the differences – the only way of really facilitating communication between languages and cultures (Cassin, et al 2014, xvii)]. Again, the “Anglo-American” looms large as a spectre to be avoided in Europe, and the second solution, which refuses the “globalized Anglo-American”, is the one the CNRS, the French government funding body which supported the enormous project that ensued, evidently privileged. The Dictionnaire de l’intraduisible ended up as a huge compendium of terms from many different languages of European philosophy, philosophy in the widest sense, with lengthy and erudite discussions about the different entries and diachronic descriptions of the many changes in meaning individual terms have undergone as they have been deployed in other European languages. It emphasizes the many differences in meaning that are not only due to the traditions of the source language and culture but that accrue over time and with use, showing, once again, that there is no such thing as a final translation, or a stable source. The feminist aspect of this project arises in the English (ironically) translated version of this book on so-called untranslatables, The Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin et al. 2014), where even more differences were added, in particular in regard to the terms “sex” and “gender” - terminology that is central to feminist concerns. The English-language editors “felt compelled to do more with the cluster of semes associated with “sex” and “gender” and were able “to turn this word grouping into a site of critical cross-examination” (xi). And so, not only was the French entry on the term “gender” translated into English, but Judith Butler wrote an additional 3 pages on “gender trouble” for the American publication. Similarly, the entry on “le sexe” was translated from the French, but Stella Sandford added a page on the term “sex” for the English book, expounding “on the French de-sexing of “sexual difference in English” (2014, xi). “Doing more” in regard to these two terms, meant adapting the discussion to Anglo-American contexts. In view of the potential criticism that both translation into English and translation studies in English can expect for reasons elaborated above, it is perhaps foolhardy to further pursue such work in English. English is just too hegemonic! However, Lola Sanchez, a Spanish academic writing in English, provides some encouragement. She investigates the Spanish contribution to transnational feminist work in translation in a study of the Spanish Feminismos series, a collection that sought to make known and circulate diverse feminist works in that language. Her findings confirm the importance that was assigned to feminist work in English by the numbers of texts translated into Spanish from the US and the UK, but they also show that other work, from the Middle East and beyond, was translated and circulated, and that most interestingly, no work at all was included from Latin America, work that would not even have required translation. Questions of colonialism and hegemony seem to exist beyond English-language academia. The questions Sanchez raises about academic feminism (in Spain) as a result of this study apply broadly in assessing the transnational aspects of any translation or translation studies project: “Which women appear [in the “cartography” of translations], and which ones do not? Where are they from? Which feminist currents, positions, spaces or situated knowledges do they represent?” (65). In her conclusion, she recommends that given the ongoing imbalance in translation flows, “western feminists should acknowledge the epistemic violence that underlies and undergirds the biases that translation imposes upon our “global” dialogues” – and find ways to work towards a broader politics of translation. ------------ In the research and publishing project that produced Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons (2017), a first attempt at transnational feminist translation studies, the major issues hampering the development of such a broader politics were found to be at least threefold: power relations, mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, and the representation of women’s diversity. I address them below in regard to this one specific project in which an attempt was made to invite and incorporate work precisely from beyond the Anglo-American Eurozone on the topic of “translating women.” This was a project that sought to address some of the ongoing issues in feminist transnational translation studies by doing the work necessary to compile an anthology of academic texts focusing on, analyzing, and discussing the use and impact of translations by women and of women’s texts, worldwide. Produced in Canada, published in New York/London, the book includes work from twelve different parts of the world, with research compiled and written up by scholars who overwhelmingly use English as their second or third language. Power Relations The decision to seek out, commission, and then compile a selection of texts for such a transnational anthology of feminist translation studies, implies the power to do so. This includes the time to do the research on what exists, on who is working in the field beyond the usual boundaries, and who might collaborate in circulating a call for submissions – where internet and other communications systems may be different or hard to access. It also includes strong communicative capacities (functional internet, functional languages beyond English), and a publisher who is willing to look beyond the confines of Canada Academic publishing in Canada is severely affected by funding issues that restrict support to Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Transnational feminism, by definition, moves beyond those borders. . Finally, it involves hard, detail-focused work, in inviting and assessing text proposals, negotiating with and contracting authors, editing every detail of the texts as they go into rigorous enough academic English, for unapologetic broadest dissemination, in English. It requires scholarly initiative and entrepreneurship, and the confidence that such a project can be brought to a fruitful end – with a publisher that will distribute the final product, worldwide. This “power” can, obviously, be criticized (as some of the voices evoked earlier will do), for excluding certain participants, or favouring a certain theorization/approach to a subject or publishing in a hegemonic language. However, it can also serve to make voices heard that would otherwise hardly register outside a local context (Reimondez 2017), and translation projects visible that would otherwise be ignored or set aside. Publishing feminist work in English can bring ideas from elsewhere into the ‘conversation’. This was precisely the purpose of the anthology: an attempt to not only revive feminism in translation studies but to open up the field to that “elsewhere”. A shared effort, co-edited by a Canadian and an Iranian, in two very distant locations currently with rather strained political relations, and assisted by research assistants with linguistic competencies in Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and French, the anthology brought together work from China and Hong Kong, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Sri Lanka, as well as Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Japan and Serbia. This diversity made necessary and possible a number of those much-desired and lengthy ‘conversations’ across multiple boundaries, at least between editors, researchers and writers. It empowered them all in a complex and heady project. Mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion One of the most compelling and potentially destructive conversations had to do with an article entitled “Negotiating Western and Muslim Feminine Identities through Translation: Western Female Converts Translating the Quran”, by Rim Hassen (2016). In Hassen’s comparative study of three recent Quran translations by western women converts, she raised the issue of cultural translation, when Muslims who do not speak/read Arabic ‘translate’, or rather, interpret the Quran. In the first draft of her text, Hassen included a lengthy reference to the Somali activist Hirsi Ali and the film Submission she made with Theo van Gogh (2004), a film in which Quranic texts written across a woman’s bare shoulder and uttered aloud are used to criticize Islam. These texts evoke the types of beatings the main female figure has suffered, and imply that the details of how to beat a woman actually stem from the Quran. Hassen used this excerpt as an example of a non-scholarly, textually un-informed, abusive translation of Quranic texts that contrasts sharply with the actual translation work she was discussing. She wrote: In this text, Hirsi Ali intermixes the woman’s voice with the translation of verse 4:34 in order to blur the boundary between the original and the translation, the sacred and the ordinary. This, however, allows her to mask the fact that the information contained in the deleted section is not part of the Quran, even though it is presented as such. In reality such forms of beating do not occur in verse 4:34 or anywhere in the Quran, which raises the question why were these forms of beatings inserted in the translation? […] Hirsi Ali, like millions of Muslims, does not read or speak Arabic; she may therefore have relied on a secondary source to read the Sacred Text. Another possibility could be that Hirsi Ali has intentionally inserted these elements and presented them as part of the original text for specific ideological reasons” (np.) Ali’s misrepresentation of Quranic text for her political purposes is at issue here, but Hassen does not push the questions further. She simply surmises that there are “ideological reasons” for this outcome, and then contrasts this version with the actual Quran translations by convert women. The question of inclusion arose when it turned out that regardless of Hassen’s critique of Hirsi Ali’s work, the Iranian co-editor could not in any way be associated with a book in which such a reference appeared. Such association could cost her her university position, her passport, and perhaps other rights and freedoms, already rather restricted in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Either Hirsi Ali or the entire article by Rim Hassen had to be excluded. Luckily, the author Hassen was fully cognizant of the difficulties the co-editor might face in Iran, and therefore willing and able to find another excellent example of the many ways the Quran has been willfully and deliberately translated and interpreted “against” women. This example is also in regard to verse 4:34, and taken from the English translation of a textual exegesis of the Quran by Shi’a cleric Mohammad Baqir Behbudi, and titled The Quran: A New Interpretation (Turner 1997). It reads as follows: Men are the protectors of their women, for they surpass them in strength, intellectual acumen and social skills. A male doctor is better than a female doctor, a male laborer is better than a female laborer, and so on. Furthermore, men are the protectors and maintainers of their women, for it is the men who provide dowries and support their women financially throughout their married life. Therefore it is incumbent on righteous women that they obey their husbands. And when their husbands are absent they must, with God as their aid, strive to protect their reputations and do nothing to shame them. As for those women whose righteousness is open to question, and whose obedience and loyalty you doubt – whether their husbands are present or not – admonish them in the first instance; if their disobedience continues, refuse to sleep with them; if their disobedience continues further, beat them. If they see reason and obey, do not chastise them any further (46). In the final and published version of her article, Hassen comments gently that it is difficult to ignore the implication in this text that men are superior to women. She contrasts it with the translation produced by Laleh Bakhtiar and also with a more conservative version by Umm Mohammad: here is Bakhtiar’s text, in which the (f) refers to (and emphasizes) the feminine form of the pronouns/nouns in Arabic, an aspect that English cannot reflect: Men are supporters of wives Because God has given some of them an advantage Over others And because they spend of their wealth So the ones (f) who are in accord with morality Are the ones (f) who are morally obligated, The ones (f) who guard the unseen Of what God has kept safe. But those (f) whose resistance you fear, Then admonish them (f) And abandon them (f) in their sleeping place Then go away from them (f) And if they (f) obey you Surely look not for any way against them (f). (Bakhtiar 2007, 94) A further comment by Hassen points out how in comparing the two texts one notes that the first text shifts the centre of attention to husbands by repeating the word “husbands” three times, when in the original Quranic verse (as in Bakhtiar’s translation) the term does not occur even once. Further, it is noteworthy that, perhaps unwittingly, a strange situation arises whereby the male “you” of the text is exhorted to refuse to sleep with the wives “whether the husbands are present or not.” The exclusion of Hirsi Ali from this article, and this book, led to the inclusion of a different, but equally strong, demonstration of how an ancient text can be deliberately misrepresented. More importantly, for questions of feminist inclusion or exclusion, this incident also cast a bright light on much broader ‘geo-political’ issues that arise when ‘west’ (in this case, a Canadian academic) sets out to work with ‘east’ (here, an Iranian academic). The risks of life in a theocracy such as the Islamic Republic of Iran are not something western academics encounter or face on a regular basis, and the effects that these risks have on colleagues working under them are difficult to know or understand. They can lead colleagues in such places to pursue research on less immediate, less pressing questions – on the ancient history of Persia, for example – themes that may be of less interest to Anglo-American feminisms and therefore less publishable for feminist purposes which, in turn, can raise accusations that “an Anglo-Euro-centric epistemology is privileged over other kinds of knowledge” (Reimóndez 2017, 45). The inclusion of work from well beyond the purview of Anglo-American translation studies thus brings with it difficulties that are added on to the usual academic issues about a coherent corpus, research methodology, or proper theoretical underpinnings, let alone rigorous academic writing in English. The article on “The Translation of Islamic Feminism at CERFI in Morocco” (Laghzali 2016) presented other challenges, the first triggered by the juxtaposition of “Islamic” and “feminism”. This set off a flurry of research on a topic that was also beyond the purview of the usual translation studies of Anglo-American, Canadian or Iranian academia. However, the article’s insistence on the need to mobilize translation in order to “mitigate clichéd ideas about women in Islam” (210) for non-Muslim audiences on the one hand, and to dispel preconceptions that local Arabic-speaking communities might have about the role of Muslim women on the other (due to misogynist interpretations of the ancient texts), soon placed this text squarely into the range of materials the anthology was seeking. The decision to include it led to extensive further research on the topic so that the text could be reviewed, revised, and rewritten to make it accessible to a general academic English-language reading public The question of revision and rewriting into English academic form is another sore point: from the perspective of those who object to Anglo-American “hegemony”, rewriting can wipe out the idiosyncracies and creativeness of the original work. From the perspective of the English-language editor, it helps produce readable text. . This required many hours of work, and transnational communications. However, Laghzali’s concluding segment on the practical translation problems that stymie efforts to produce text that might nourish Islamic feminism revealed another interestingly ethnocentric obstacle worthy of all the work invested: she writes, “many religious scholars specializing in religious sciences in Morocco do not master languages other than Arabic, which may make them less open to new ideas about religious issues” and therefore other terminology. In such an environment, any introduction of other perspectives can be “perceived as writing that serves the Western agenda and threatens Muslim identity” (218). This comment resonated with the much criticized Anglo-American “hegemony”, where academics are accused of knowing only English and excluding all else. In some respects, like the Sanchez article, it relativizes hegemony. The decision to include this text on translation as an instrument that promotes “Islamic feminism” in the anthology addressed both types of hegemony. Representation of women’s diversity The distrust and rejection of ideas deemed ‘western’ came up in numerous articles/abstracts submitted for inclusion in the book and they helped mitigate the notion that ethnocentricity resides primarily in the Anglo-American-Eurozone. Other cultures, too, assert their specificity, their exclusivity, their difference. In the articles published in Translating Women, however, translation often serves to undermine nationalistic rigidity. This occurs through demonstrations and discussions of how many different ways women’s work in translation is related, yet different – carried out under the most various circumstances, and in situations that require great presence of mind and creativity. The text from Sri Lanka by Kanchuka Dharmasiri (2016) imagines and puts into motion “creative translational strategies” that are designed to counter a situation where “nationalist discourses too easily dismiss feminist concepts as “Western imports””(175). She sets out to integrate already existing feminist materials from the local culture in a set of parallel “western” texts, thereby demonstrating how ancient local stories can be read as inherently feminist. The materials she proposes take the reader into the texts of Buddhist nuns that date from the fourth century B.C.E; these are juxtaposed with excerpts from Beauvoir and Wollstonecraft, among others, proposing translation as an effort to “counter the facile dismissal of feminism as an alien entity, explore discourses of women’s liberation situated in South Asia, and to further explore the liberatory aspects present in the Therīgāthā” (175). In her conclusion, Dharmasiri turns to the question of hegemony: in answer to another academic’s question “If translation is ‘hegemonic’ is it a one-way process necessarily”? she responds: “It does not have to be a one-way process […] Rather, a consideration of notions of women’s bodies, gender, and freedom as they appear in different contexts could open up fertile space for dialogue” (190). Dharmasiri’s comment invites readers to think about a certain universality in women’s lives and fates (bodies, gender, freedom) and their representation. While differences are important, a rigid focus on difference divides. Her work shows the striking parallels that translation can reveal between the words of Buddhist nuns from over 2000 years ago and the European writings of 18th-20th century women thinkers. It is through the translation and the comparative juxtaposition of texts and lives that we gain access to diversity in universality, and expand understanding. This point is also made by María Reimóndez in another recent collection, entitled Feminist Translation Studies (2017); she calls for “polyphony” in the field. While she vehemently echoes all the existing critique about the hegemony of English in feminist efforts to translate and publish, she devotes the last 3 pages of her article to a project that translated Tamil women’s poetry and documentary film materials into Galician. The fact that both “Galician and Tamil feminists spoke non-hegemonic languages offered a common ground to discuss interlocking oppressions” (2017, 53). Luckily, she was able to report on this event and the translations that made it happen in English, a language that moved it beyond Galician, where its dissemination would have been somewhat reduced. In a similar vein, the Lucotti-Rosas article from Mexico that was published in Translating Women (2016) reports on a project that connects indigenous women poets from Canada with those in Mexico, and supports the translation of their work between their indigenous languages – Cree, Innu, Huichol, Maya, Purepecha, Triqui, Taseltal, Tsotsil, Zapotec and Zoque. As this project negotiates between the multiple indigenous languages, it brings the question of translating women’s diversity to a new level, for the translations must pass through one of the old colonial languages - Spanish, French or English – which serve as ‘pivot’ languages. No one translator has yet been found who can translate Cree (an indigenous language in Canada) directly into Tsotsil or Maya (in Mexico). And so, while the colonial languages have done their work of destruction, they are being newly implemented for creative, re-constructive purposes. Finally, a question of internal diversity that arose in an article for the Translating Women anthology resonated with Alvarez and Costa’s work on Latin American topics. Victoria Tipiani’s study of how translation served to introduce ideas about women’s suffrage to 1930s Colombia through a particularly long-lived women’s magazine entitled Letras y Encajes, made the point that all of those involved in the creation and running of this magazine were white. This was left uncontextualized in the first drafts of the article, baffling reviewers. What was the purpose of this information? The final version of the article explains that issues of social class, power, education and opportunity inherent in the term “white” in Colombia of the 1930s clearly pits the elite, Catholic women of the political class who created and ran the magazine against those (non-whites?) who couldn’t, but whom they represented in seeking the vote. In her article, the author, Tipiani (2016) is conciliatory: despite the acknowledged differences of race and class, translation served as a political vehicle here, helping “certain women with economic advantages devise strategies to use the voices of others to express their own ideas” (100) in a place and a time where their social class would normally have prohibited such ideas. Her discussion of the “fluctuating” feminisms of this elite group – and their magazine – which were affected by the political turbulence of the time, as the Catholic church supported dictatorial right-wing governments, shows how even this apparent advantage could only occasionally be put into action. Many of the women involved in Letras y Encajes ended up living in “exile” – in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Nevertheless, Tipiani recognizes the contentious aspects of social diversity on the one hand, and sees how these can be put to positive use on the other. …….. In my view, the same applies to power relations and issues of inclusion and exclusion today: just as diversity can be seen negatively or positively in translation as well as in the study of translations, so does the translation process reveal both power and the problematic of inclusivity/exclusivity as double-edged problems. These are persistent challenges. They can, however, be addressed in ways that eschew angry, resentful victim positions and complaint, and be recognized and put to constructive use. Indeed, they offer the chance to “utilize power within relationships for transformation and coalition building” (Canales 2000). This, however, involves work as well as the curiosity and interest that can penetrate borders, and that inquires and seeks to understand rather than pit women and their languages against one another in geopolitical ways. In fraught situations like that of transnational feminism, where evident power differentials meet accumulated resentments, where ancient histories are recycled (or ignored) for new purposes, and where translation is being assigned a rather broad role as “politically and theoretically indispensable to forging feminist, pro-social justice and anti-racist, postcolonial and anti-imperial political alliances and epistemologies” (Costa and Alvarez, 558), feminist translation studies play an important part in helping the different worlds engage in their conversations, conduct meaningful and useful discussions, always aware of the fact that translation is not only approximate but driven (and funded) by specific interests and powers. Bibliography ALVAREZ, Sonia et al. (2014). Translocalities/translocalidades : feminist politics of translation in the Latin/a Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. BAKHTIAR, Laleh (2007). The Sublime Quran. Chicago : Kazi Publications. 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COSTA, Claudia de Lima and Sonia ALVAREZ (2014). “Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation.” Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39, 3, pp. 557-563. DHARMASIRI, Kanchuka (2016). “Voices from the Therigātha: Framing Western Feminism.” In L. von Flotow and F. Farahzad, eds. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. EMMERICH, Karen (2016). Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. London: Bloomsbury. FLOTOW, Luise von and Farzaneh FARAHZAD, eds. (2016). Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. FLOTOW, Luise von and Joan W. SCOTT (2016). “Gender Studies and Translation Studies: ‘Entre braguette’ – Connecting the Transdisciplines.” In Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer, eds. Border Crossings. Translation Studies and Other Disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. HASSEN, Rim (2016). “Negotiating Western and Muslim Feminine Identities through Translation: Western Converts Translating the Quran.” In L. von Flotow and F. Farahzad, eds. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. HYLAND, Ken (2016). “Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice,” in The Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58-69. LAGHZALI, Bouchra (2016). “The Translation of Islamic Feminism at CERFI in Morocco.” In L. von Flotow and F. Farahzad, eds. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. LINDER, Daniel (2014). “English Abstracts in Open-Access Translation Studies Journals in Spain (2011-2012)”, in Information Resources Management Journal, 27 (3). LOBACHEV, Sergey (2008). “Top languages in global information production”, in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 2-12. LUCOTTI, Claudia and María Antonieta ROSAS (2016). “Meridiano 105: An E-Anthology of Women Poets in Mexican and Canadian Indigenous Languages.” In L. von Flotow and F. Farahzad, eds. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. MOHANTY, Chandra (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. REIMÓNDEZ, María (2017). “We Need to Talk … to Each Other. On Polyphony, Postcolonial Feminism and Translation.” In Feminist Translation Studies, edited by Olga Castro and Emek Ergun. London: Routledge. SALṎ, Linus (2017). The Sociolinguistics of Academic Publishing, Language and the Practices of Homo Academicus. London: Palgrave. SANCHEZ, Lola (2017). “Translation and the Circuits of Globalization.” In O. Castro and E. Ergun, eds. Feminist Translation Studies. London: Routledge. SLAVOVA, Kornelia (2014). “‘Gender’ on the Move: Shifting Meanings between Western and Non-Western Worlds.” In G. Leduc, ed. Comment faire des études-genres avec de la littérature : Masquereading. Paris: L’Harmattan. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty (2004 [1992]). “Politics of Translation.” In Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 369-388. SUMMERS, Caroline (2017). Examining Text and Authorship in Translation. What Remains of Christa Wolf? London: Palgrave Macmillan. TATSUYA, Amano,GONZALEZ-VARO,Juan P. and SUTHERLAND, William J. (2016). “Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science”, http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2000933:Tatsuya Amano, Juan P. González-Varo, William J. Sutherland TIPIANA LOPERA, Maria Victoria (2016). “Translation with Fluctuating Feminist Intention: Letras y Encajes: A Colombian Women’s Magazine of the 1930s”. In L. von Flotow and F. Farahzad, eds. Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. London: Routledge Publishers. TURNER, Colin (1997). The Quran: A New Interpretation. 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