Given the political weight that both feminist thinkers and the ‘political correctness’ reaction have assigned to language, it is clear that gender must become an issue in translation.
-- Luise Von Flotow （Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism”, 2004）
Luise Von Flotow, Canadian by birth with strong German cultural influences, is a full professor and former director of the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. Regarded as the leading light in translation and gender studies in the world, she is the author or editor of many books, including Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism” (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2004) .
When talking about the relationship between gender studies and translation studies, she says, “Gender studies and translation studies are both interdisciplinary academic fields. When they are brought into relationship with one another, a number of issues intersect: cultural gender differences, the revelation and formulation of these differences in language, their transfer by means of translation into other cultural spaces where different gender conditions obtain. Questions arise about the importance of gender politics in institutions, and the gender affiliations of the translator and the critic become an issue. Language is, of course, highly pertinent to both areas of investigation; discussions of ‘patriarchal language’ have played an important role in feminist research on gender, and language transfer is the basic element under discussion in translation studies. Given the political weight that both feminist thinkers and the ‘political correctness’ reaction have assigned to language, it is clear that gender must become an issue in translation.”