Article,
Translating Sex(uality) from English into Spanish and Vice-versa: a Cultural and Ideological Challenge
Atlantis, 37 (1): 139--156 (2015)
Abstract
Much has been written on gender and translation over the last two decades with an emphasis
on feminist translation, on the translation of woman's body or on the (re)discovery of
a growing genealogy of translating and translated women in diverse languages and
cultures. In this paper I wish to focus on the translation of sex-related language. Without
a doubt, sex and more specifically, sex-related language is overwhelmingly present in
our daily lives, in our texts, in our symbolic projections. Though traditionally proscribed
for a number of reasons, the study of the translation of sex is nowadays more openly dealt
with, though it has been given little attention in the field of translation studies (Larkosh
2007, 66). Translating the language of love or sex is a political act, (Flotow
2000, 16) with important rhetorical and ideological implications, and is fully indicative
of the translator's attitude towards existing conceptualisations of gender/sexual identities,
human sexual behaviors and society's moral norms. Here I explore the fluid, two-way
relationships between sex and translation: first we explore the sex of translation, which
might prove to be an essentialist search; and then we deal with the translation of sex,
focusing on the treatment of love and sex in the Spanish or English translations of the
works of John Cleland, Almudena Grandes and Mario Vargas Llosa. This is a privileged
vantage point from which to explore the complex construction of women and men in
different languages and cultures, and to gain ideological and discursive insights into the
constitution of gender and sexual identities.
