Women-translation-activism

Translation has often been seen as an activity that passively reproduces the original and has therefore also been associated with the feminine. Moreover, it has long been assumed that translation was primarily practiced in private and thus supposedly apolitical spaces in the past (Chamberlain 1988/2021). There is now a large body of research that demonstrates that women have always used translation to convey socio-critical attitudes, promote activist causes, or participate in political opinion-forming processes of their time. The project focuses on women who were politically active between 1848 and 1933 within the first womens rights movements in the German-speaking world and who translated texts with political or socio-critical content into German. The main research goals are: 1. Translation shall be examined as a strategy that enabled women at the time to participate in politics or to expand and solidify their scope for political action. 2. It shall be analyzed what kind of functions and forms the womens translation work assumed in the transnational exchange of womens political demands, achievements and political practices. 3. The development of the first organized womens rights movements (1848-1933) shall be traced against the background of multiple translation processes, thereby further disrupting the notion of nationally defined feminisms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see also Gehmacher 2019 and Bracke et al. 2021). The theoretical frame of reference is primarily based on feminist thinking about the public (e.g. Wischermann 2003) and the political (Appelt 1994, Sauer, 2001). In line with such thinking, we do not view politics exclusively in terms of the state and its institutions. Rather, we also consider as political those activities which have largely been understood as everyday and private practices in history, such as translating. Finally, Pierre Bourdieus (1997, 2001) theory of social and cultural reproduction as well as Ruth Wodaks (2001) critical discourse analysis also serve as important tools to analyze the activist and ideological dimensions of womens translation practices in the 19th and early 20th centuries.