Subjectivity and Gender through Simultaneous Conference Interpreting at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/belasinfieis.v11.n2.2022.42298Keywords:
Transnational feminist translation. Simultaneous conference interpretation. Subjectivity. Latin America. Commission on the Status of Women.Abstract
This article seeks to explore the way interpretation, as a form of translation, may (or may not) contribute to the transnational processes of production and dissemination of a Latin American gender agenda. For contextualization purposes, some of the research carried out on gender in interpreting studies is briefly reviewed. Then, I examine the way subjectivity is materialized in simultaneous interpretation from Spanish into English at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, one of the most prominent fora for the promotion of women’s political, economic, civil, social, and educational rights. Through a qualitative analysis of cases, I evidence how certain syntactic focalization procedures in interpreted discourse impact the way subjectivity is configured. The hypothesis underpinning this study is that focalization procedures operate actively in the (re)creation of institutionally ingrained and validated discursive practices. Results show that some focalization phenomena operate as attenuation mechanisms of a gender-based agenda for the fight against gender inequities and stereotypes adjusted to mainstream heteronormative and patriarchal schemes.
Downloads
References
Alvarez, Sonia, Costa, Claudia de L., Feliu, Veronica, Hester, Rebecca, Klahn, Norma, & Thayer, Millie. (Eds.). (2014). Translocalities/Translocalidades. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv120qs7g
Amossy, Ruth. (2010). La presentación de sí. Ethos e identidad verbal. Prometeo.
Andres, Dörte, & Fünfer, Sarah. (2011). TV interpreting in Germany: the television broadcasting company ARTE in comparison to public broadcasting companies. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 16, 99–114. https://www.openstarts.units.it/bitstream/10077/8257/1/NL_16_8.pdf
Anscombre, Jeane-Claude. (1990). Thème, espaces discursifs et représentation événementielle. En J.-C. Anscombre & G. Zaccaria (Eds.), Fonctionalisme et pragmatique. A propos de la notion de thème. Unicopli.
Benveniste, Émile. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale I. Gallimard.
Bergvall, Victoria, Bing, Janet M., & Freed, Alice F. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking Language and Gender Research. Theory and Practice. Addison Wesley Longman.
Binder, Pauline, Borné, Yan, Johnsdotter, Sara, & Essén, Birgitta. (2012). Shared language is essential: Communication in a multiethnic obstetric care setting. Journal of Health Communication, 17(10), 1171–1186. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2012.665421
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Stephen. (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge University Press.
Burdach Rudloff, Ana M., & Poblete Vallejos, Mario. (2005). El fenómeno de focalización en el habla pública de Chile. Onomázein, 11(1), 23–42.
Castro, Olga, & Ergun, Emek. (2017). Feminist Translation Studies. Local and Transnational Perspectives. Routledge.
Castro, Olga, Ergun, Emek, Flotow, Luise von, & Spoturno, María Laura. (2020). Towards translational feminist translation studies. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 13(1), 2–10. https://doi.org/10.27533/udea.mut.v13n1a01
Castro, Olga, & Spoturno, María Laura. (2020). Feminismos y traducción: apuntes conceptuales y metodológicos para una traductología feminista transnacional. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 13(1), 11–44. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v13n1a02
Crenshaw, Kimberle. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 139-167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
De Lima Costa, Claudia. (2016). Gender and equivocation: Notes on decolonial feminist translations. En Wendy Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 48–61). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3
Ducrot, Oswald. (2004). Sentido y argumentación. En Elvira Arnoux & María Marta G. Negroni (Eds.), Homenaje a Oswald Ducrot. Eudeba.
Femenías, María Luisa. (2019). Itinerarios de teoría feminista y de género: algunas cuestiones histórico-conceptuales. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. http://www.unq.edu.ar/advf/documentos/5cf00faf7c05d.pdf
Flotow, Luise von (Ed.). (2011). Translating Women. University of Ottawa Press.
Flotow, Luise von. (2018). Feminism, gender, and translation. En Lieven D’hulst & Yves Gambier (Eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge: Sources, Concepts, Effects (pp. 347-352). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.142.48flo
Flotow, Luise von. (2019). On the challenges of transnational feminist translation studies. TTR, Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction, 20(1–2), 173–194. https://doi.org/10.7202/1060023ar
Flotow, Luise von, & Scott, Joan W. (2016). Border crossings. Translation studies and other disciplines. En Yves Gambier & Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Border Crossings. Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (pp. 349–373). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.126.17von
Flotow, Luise von, & Farahzad, Farzaneh. (Eds.). (2017). Translating Women. Different Voices and New Horizons. Routledge.
Flotow, Luise von, & Kamal, Hala. (Eds.). (2020). Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender. Routledge.
Gile, Daniel. (1983). Des difficultés de langue en interpretation simultanée. Traduire, 117, 2–8.
Gile, Daniel. (2009). Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.8
Gile, Daniel. (2015). Effort models. En Franz Pöchhacker (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (pp. 135–137). Routledge.
Godayol, Pilar. (2019). Translation and gender. En Roberto Valdeón & África Vidal (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies (pp. 102–117). Routledge.
Goffman, Erving. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.
Gutiérrez Ordóñez, Salvador. (2000). Temas, remas, focos, tópicos y comentarios (2a ed.). Arco Libros.
Hadziabdic, Emina, & Hjelm, Katarina. (2013). Working with interpreters: Practical advice for use of an interpreter in healthcare. International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 11(1), 69–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/1744-1609.12005
Hale, Sandra. (2004). The Discourse of Court Interpreting. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.52
Holmes, Janet. (1990). Hedges and boosters in women’s and men’s speech. Language and Communication, 10(3), 185–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(90)90002-S
Jiménez Serrano, Oscar. (2011). Backstage conditions and interpreters’ performance in live television interpreting: quality, visibility and exposure. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 16, 115–136. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/8258
Kamal, Hala. (2016). Translating feminist literary theory into Arabic. Philological Studies at the Jan Kochanowski University, 29, 57–73.
Labov, William. (1990). The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change, 2(2), 205–254. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000338
Lázaro Gutiérrez, Raquel, & Sánchez Ramos, María del Mar. (2015). Corpus-based interpreting studies and public service interpreting and translation training programs: The case of interpreters working in gender violence contexts. En Jesús Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2015. Current Approaches to Discourse and Translation Studies (pp. 275–292). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17948-3_12
López Varela, Alicia. (2019). Gender issues during simultaneous interpreting in violence against women. Polissema- Revista De Letros Do ISCAP, 16, 53–66. https://doi.org/10.34630/polissema.v0i16.2959
Magnifico, Cédric. (2016). Impoliteness and interpreting: A question of gender? Translation and Interpreting, 8(2), 26–45. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9815/597c8e37e62ebe8be28357ec0c1808428f99.pdf. doi: 10.12807/ti.108202.2016.a03
Magnifico, Cédric, & Defrancq, Bart. (2017). Hedges in conference interpreting. The role of gender. Interpreting, 19(1), 21–46. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.19.1.02mag
Marey-Castro, Cristina, & Del Pozo Triviño, Maribel. (2020). Deconstruir mitos y prejuicios para interpreter mujeres migrantes en contextos de violencia de género y/o prostitución en España. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 13(1), 64–92. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v13n1a04
Maryns, Katrijn. (2013). Disclosure and (re)performance of gender-based evidence in an interpreter-mediated asylum interview. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5), 661–686. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12056
Mason, Marianne. (2008). Courtroom Interpreting. University Press of America.
Nakane, Ikuko. (2008). Politeness and gender in interpreted police interviews. Monash University Linguistic Papers, 6(1), 29–40. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=417707670689358;res=IELHSS
Pöchhacker, Franz. (2010). Media interpreting. En Yves Gambier & Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies . (vol. 1, pp. 224–226). John Benjamins.
Pöchhacker, Franz. (2012). Simultaneous interpreting. En Kirsten Malmkjær & Kevin Windle (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 1–12). Oxford University Press.
Pöchhacker, Franz. (2016). Introducing Interpreting Studies (2a ed.). Routledge.
Pöllabauer, Sonja. (2015). Interpreting in asylum proceedings. En Holly Mikkelson & Renée Jourdenais (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting (pp. 201–216). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.6.2.03pol
Russo, Mariachiara. (2016). Orality and gender: A corpus-based study on lexical patterns in simultaneous interpreting. MonTI. Monografías De Traducción E Interpretación, 3, 307–322. https://doi.org/10.6035/MonTI.2016.ne3.11
Russo, Mariachiara. (2018). Speaking patterns and gender in the European Parliament interpreting corpus: A quantitative study as a premise for qualitative investigations. En Mariachiara Russo, Claudio Bendazzoli & Bart Defrancq (Eds.), Making Way in Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies (pp. 115–131). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6199-8_7
Russo, Mariachiara, Bendazzoli, Claudio, & Defrancq, Bart. (2018). Making Way in Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies. Springer.
Schiavi, Giuliana. (1996). There is always a teller in a tale. Target, 8(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.8.1.02sch
Shlesinger, Miriam. (1998). Corpus-based Interpreting Studies as an offshoot of corpus-based Translation Studies. Meta, 43(4), 486–493. https://doi.org/10.7202/004136ar
Singy, Pascal, & Guex, Patrice. (2015). Gender. En Franz Pöchhacker (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (pp. 169–170). Routledge.
Spoturno, María Laura. (2017). The presence and image of the translator in narrative discourse. Moderna Språk, 111(1), 173–196. http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/modernasprak/article/view/3694/3176
Straniero Sergio, Francesco, & Falbo, Caterina. (Eds.). (2012). Breaking Ground in Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0351-0377-9
Suchet, Myriam. (2013). Voice, tone and ethos: A portrait of the translator as a spokesperson. En Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov & Myriam Suchet (Eds.), La traduction des voix intra-textuelles / Intratextual voices in translation (pp. 159–184). Vita Traductiva.
Tannen, Deborah. (1990). You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow & Co.
Tannen, Deborah. (1994). Gender and Discourse. Oxford University Press.
Tipton, Rebecca. (2020). Community interpreting. En Mona Baker, & Gabriela Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (3ra. ed., pp. 79–84). Routledge.
Toledano Buendía, Carmen. (2019). Integrating gender perspective in interpreter training: A fundamental requirement in contexts of gender violence. En Marcella de Marco & Piero Toto (Eds.), Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom Training the Doers (pp. 167–187). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04390-2_10
Toledano Buendía, Carmen, Abril Martí, María I., Del Pozo Triviño, Maribel, & Aguilera Ávila, Laura. (2015). Hacia una especialización en interpretación en el ámbito de la violencia de género: investigación, formación y profesionalización. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 2(2), 139–160. https://doi.org/10.6035/monti.2015.ne2.5
Tsuruta, Chikako. (2011). Broadcast interpreters in Japan: bringing news to and from the world. The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 16, 157–173.
Urbaniak, Ewa. (2018). La atenuación y la estructura informativa: el caso de focalización. Études romanes de Brno, 39(1), 59–78. https://doi.org/10.5817/ERB2018-1-5
Viveros Vigoya, Mara. (2016). La interseccionalidad: una aproximación situada a la dominación. Debate feminista, 52, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.df.2016.09.005
Wadensjö, Cecilia. (2009). Community interpreting. En Mona Baker & Gabriela Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2a ed., pp. 43–48). Routledge.
Weber, Orest, Singy, Pascal, & Guex, Patrice. (2015). Gender and interpreting in the medical sphere: What is at stake? En José Santaemilia (Ed.), Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities (2a ed., pp. 137–147). Routledge.
Zicarelli, Natasha. (2016). Fluency in Interpreting: A Native-Like Quality Factor [Universidad de Bologna]. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/10757/
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 CC BY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Given the public access to this journal, the texts are free to use but requires the recognition of the original authorship and initial publication in this journal to be properly stated.
 The journal allows the use of works published for non-commercial purposes, including the right to submit the work to publicly accessible databases. Published contributions are the sole and exclusive responsibility of the author(s).Â
