Using and Abusing Gender in Translation. The Case of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own Translated into Italian

This paper is part of a corpus-based research on gender in translation aimed at showing how gender is used and/or abused in the translation of literary texts from English into Italian. Drawing upon feminist theories of language and translation and feminist practices in translation, it is our intention to show how gender is manipulated in translation in an attempt to define feminist translation strategies. Translating a feminist text does not necessarily imply that the translator working on that text is a ‘feminist’. In Italy, moreover, it is very hard to find cases of declared feminist translators as compared to other countries, such as Canada or Spain for instance. Our interest, therefore, lies in the possibility to frame specific strategies as feminist and to see if in the corpus of texts we are analyzing they are carried out or not. The second part of the essay focuses on the first example of our study: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and three of the translations that have been published in the Italian context.