Poroi May 2017 Open Access

The Transcoding of “Women Empowerment” as “Empoderamiento de la Mujer”: a Post-colonial Translation Theory for Transnational Feminist Rhetorics

Cristina Sanchez-Martin

Abstract

In the work of transnational feminist scholars, there is a share interest in investigating the colonial practices that affect women’s lives around the globe. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) Mohanty claims that scholars in the field should “detect (…) colonialist move(s) in the case of a hegemonic first-third world connection in scholarship” (349) in order to recognize the peculiarities of the cultures whose discourses are being created and thus, avoid the universalization and “homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women” (348). In this regard, Dingo touches upon the vital role of translations in the transcoding of arguments: “the way policy makers and development experts <strong>translate</strong> the term gender mainstreaming into policy documents should be <strong>a crucial concern for feminist rhetoritians</strong> because this act of translation demonstrates how arguments shift and change due to economic and geopolitical contexts and thus <strong>shows how power informs rhetorics</strong>” (2012: 31). Dingo´s conceptualization of the term “translation” is ambiguous, sometimes used to refer to “transcoding” (resituate a taken-for-granted term within the same language in order to fit certain ideologies, 31) and other times as the transfer of words from the source language to the target language (104). In this article, I aim to investigate the “transcoding” of the concept "women empowerment" as it is translated from English to Spanish and vice versa with the attempt to “make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated” (Queen 2008: 486) from the perspective of a post-colonial theory of translation.

Journal
Poroi
Published
2017-05-31
DOI
10.13008/2151-2957.1227
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
feminist rhetorics gender and writing affect and writing
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