Flora Ossette’s ‘feminist visibility’ in her translation of Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour

Abstract

The visibility of the translator has become a pervasive topic of discussion in translation studies ever since it was explicitly approached by Lawrence Venuti in his well known 1995 The Translator’s Invisibility. In Flora Ossette’s translation into Spanish of Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner we cannot only appreciate the voice of the “implicit translator” (Hermans 1996) but also the “explicit” voice. Indeed, the translator actively participates in the text by adding, omitting, reorganizing or emphasizing Schreiner’s ideas. Moreover, led on by the feminist ideals shared by both writer and translator, no less than by her fervent admiration for the South African authoress, she actually becomes an active writer herself by writing a prologue and a critical essay. Both her intrusion in the text and her critique undoubtedly reveal her doubly visible character. In our attempt to identify and interpret the main strategies employed by Ossette in the translation process of a work that deals with social, labour and gender relations, we find it relevant to follow the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, Martin & Wodak 2003, van Dijk 2008, Wodak & Meyer 2009...), as it is particularly interested in unveiling the hidden ideological beliefs or values in discourse.