Gender in the Spotlight: (In)Visibility in Translation 

The complex question of visibility and its counterpart, invisibility, has troubled the study and practice of translation for a long time. According to Kate Briggs, Thomas Mann’s English translator Helen Lowe-Porter described her own task as that of an “an unknown instrument: a tool to be used, a service provider, engaged in undressing and carefully redressing the literary work of art for the purposes of a new market … Like a lady’s maid”(Briggs 2018: 36). This fantasy of invisibility, whereby the voice of the sanctified author would be expected to pass through a translational “glasspane” (Kratz & Shapiro 1986) into a new language without the reader becoming aware that the text has been transformed through linguistic, cultural and stylistic shifts, is a phenomenon that Venuti already rose against in 1998. Venuti reminds us that if translators must adopt strategies of visibility, it is precisely because translation is “stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organisations” (Venuti 1998: 1). These strategies of resistance aim to counter the homogenising and hegemonic project of the West, which has only grown more productivist in the past 25 years with the advent of machine translation.

In today’s translation industry, where women and other gender minorities account for 78% of practising translators (Gilbert 2025), the question of visibility directly intersects with that of gender. Since the 1970s, translation has found its place in gender debates, for example through the works of feminist activist translators such as Barbara Godard and Lori Chamberlain. These translators have highlighted the perceived secondary and ancillary status of translation, supposedly subordinate to the original. In her seminal 1988 article, Chamberlain demonstrates that gendered metaphors – such as the so-called “belles infidèles” – are pervasive in translation-related discourse, and contribute to anchoring translation within a patriarchal framework. Translation, construed as feminine and derivative, is then expected to serve a masculine, authoritative source text. The figure of the translator, The figure of the translator, and especially a translator belonging to a gender minority, remains discreet even today, and translational ethics is often governed by the pressure to be “transparent”.

In an interview, the Québecoise poet Nicole Brossard touches on the idea that writing allows one “to bring into existence what already exists”. Writing generates “a new kind of reality, one that had no existence within the patriarchal universe”. Thus, “casting a few sentences onto the page, taking the risk of asserting something that had no right to exist, was, in my view, a way of disturbing the law” (Karim Larose and Rosalie Lessard 2012, our translation). This statement largely applies to translation too, as a practice that literally brings into existence something that did not previously exist in the target language. However, not every text is granted the right to exist at any given time in every language: many works by women and gender minorities have been and are still neglected by the literary canon. As demonstrated by Translation Studies, languages of inclusivity develop differently across languages, while some texts written by women take longer to emerge, or undergo suppressions and alterations that fail to give the target audience the means to fully grasp the source text in all its complexity.

The shift brought about by Canadian feminism in the 1970s introduced a new conception of translation, underpinned by theoretical works such as that of Luise von Flotow and Sherry Simon, as well as feminist practices by translators like Barbara Godard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Translation was then redefined as a symbolic and political gesture foregrounding and making use of the performative power of language. Conversely, feminist and queer discourses are arguably translations in and of themselves: in Godard’s words, translation is an impetus towards the other; it is both “movement and plurality”. “I am a translation,” wrote de Lotbinière-Harwood (1989) in Re-Belle et Infidèle/The Body Bilingual (1991), where she analyses her own dissident translational practices, such as writing “amante” and translating it as “lovher” or translating “auteure” as “auther”, a creative gesture that contributes to building a visibly gendered vocabulary. These practices aim to give a voice and visibility to the experiences of women and all other gender minorities, when languages and their histories tend to erase them.

More than 50 years after the special issue “Femme et langage” of the avant-garde journal La barre du jour (1975), we can only welcome the organisation of international conferences such as “Les mots du genre”, in partnership with the World Gender IRN, or “L’émancipation par la traduction? Trajectoires féminines en Europe centrale et orientale”, as well as publications such as Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception (2018), the Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender (2020), and the recent translation into French of Sherry Simon’s foundational Gender in Translation (2023). Equally encouraging are the creation of the Feminist Translation Network at the University of Birmingham and the Feminist Translation Studies journal in 2024.

The conference Gender in the Spotlight: (In)Visibility in Translation, to be held on 22–23 October 2026, is part of this lineage of feminist research aiming to (re)centre translation around the voices of women and queer practitioners and scholars, and more generally to give more visibility to gender minorities. This event is supported by PRISMES and TRACT at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, IMAGER at Paris-Est Créteil University and Oxford Brookes University. It is part of the HERMES research programme “Les écritures du matrimoine à l’ère du numérique: (re)découverte, découvrabilité et reconnaissance” at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and has the support of the Institut du Genre.

The conference will feature two keynote presentations by Luise von Flotow (University of Ottawa) and Charlotte Bosseaux (University of Edinburgh).

Possible themes and topics:

Inclusion and visibility

Participants may wish to explore the many aspects of the visibility, visibilisation and empowerment of translators belonging to gender minorities. What practical, professional or artistic strategies enable the visibility of women and other gender minorities in feminist translation practices? What specificities emerge for translations that are literally visible, though not always visibilised, such as sign language translation, audiovisual translation, or any form of performed and corporeal interpretation? How can formal innovation (inclusive writing, neologisms, subversion of typographical norms, etc.) be a feminist and/or queer act of resistance? How can translation influence political resistance at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecocritical concerns? How can translation be practised, conceptualised, and taught through a gendered lens? How much scope is there today for interventionist practices such as “hijacking” (von Flotow 1991) – for instance in the case of women translating men? Might interventionism itself contribute to the counter-productive invisibilisation of sexism in the source text (Zoberman 2014)?

Translation as a professional practice

How are women and gender minorities represented in translation and publishing industries today? To what extent do they act as agents of their own strategies of visibility when working on translations commissioned by clients or publishers? What role do official and awarding bodies such as juries or festivals play in either recognising or invisibilising translators and their translational choices? What about interpreting and audiovisual translation, where the translator’s work is literally visible and audible? Also crucial to consider is the impact of machine translation, post-editing, and more recently artificial intelligence with its well-documented gendered biases, on translators’ working conditions, visibility, and recognition.

New forms of visibilisation

What are the new sites, actors, formats and processes impacting translators’ visibility today? What, in particular, is the role of collaboration, marginal and collective spaces, and new digital tools in this work of visibilisation? Participants might want to examine the rise of independent translation collectives (such as UnderCommons or Cases Rebelles); the emergence of translation memoirs (among many others, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat); or the use of social media to make one’s translational process more visible, as Emily Wilson did on Twitter during her translation of The Odyssey and The Iliad. Papers addressing the question of paratexts (prefaces, afterwords, notes, book-jackets…) are also welcome, as well as those exploring how publishers are redefining the translator’s place within these spaces, and how new digital platforms can develop the visibilisation of their work (online corpus, online libraries…).

Feminist translation as creation

Recognising the translator’s active agency and creativity is equally central to making the translator more visible and her voice more audible. Participants may want to explore self-(re)translation, performative and embodied forms of translation (readings, stage performances, live surtitling…), in which body and voice become integral to the creative gesture; the contributions of practice-based research and transcreation; or the role of archives and conservation tools in bringing to light creative processes often rendered invisible.

Reception and transnational mapping

How do feminist and queer translation practices unfold in non-Western contexts and/or in minority languages? What narratives emerge among critics, activists or in the media around these translations? Contributors may examine how transnational circulations – particularly south–south and south–north – reshape linguistic and cultural hierarchies, or how audience expectations and tastes shape or hinder feminist or interventionist translation practices across cultural contexts.

Guidelines for submission

The conference Gender in the Spotlight: (In)Visibility in Translation will take place on 22–23 October 2026 at the Maison de la Recherche of the Sorbonne Nouvelle (4, rue des Irlandais 75005 Paris, Salle Athéna)and aims to welcome a wide range of presentations and speakers. We accept 20-minute research papers (in English or French), as well as less traditional forms of contributions such as practitioner testimonies, performative readings, roundtables, workshops, etc.

Abstracts (300 words) and short bios should be submitted before 20 March 2026, preferrably on the present website and in case of difficulty by email to colloquegenretraduction@gmail.com, in English or in French.

Organising Committee:

Pauline Jaccon (MCF, IMAGER, Université Paris-Est Créteil)

Enora Lessinger (Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University)

Amanda Murphy (MCF, PRISMES, TRACT, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Scientific Committee:

Charles Bonnot, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Olga Castro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & University of Warwick

Audrey Coussy, McGill University

Amélie Florenchie, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

Anne-Isabelle François, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Hepzibah Israel, University of Edinburgh

Julie Loison-Charles, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Jean-Charles Meunier, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Lily Robert-Foley, Université de Montpellier

Sara Ramos Pinto, University of Leeds

Sara Salmi, ESIT Paris

María Laura Spoturno, Universidad Nacional de La Plata & Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas - Visiting scholar at Oxford Brookes University

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