This book explores the ways in which translation deals with sexual and textual undecidability, adopting an interdisciplinary approach bridging translation, transgender studies, and queer studies in analyzing the translations of six texts in English, French, and Spanish labelled as ‘trans.’ Rose draws on experimental translation methods, such as the use of the palimpsest, and builds on theory from areas such as philosophy, linguistics, queer studies, and transgender studies and the work of such thinkers as Derrida and Deleuze to encourage critical thinking around how all texts and trans texts specifically work to be queer and how queerness in translation might be celebrated. These texts illustrate the ways in which their authors play language games and how these can be translated between languages that use gender in different ways and the subsequent implications for our understanding of the act of translation and how we present our gender identity or identities. In showing what translation and transgender identity can learn from one another, Rose lays the foundation for future directions for research into the translation of trans identity, making this book key reading for scholars in translation studies, transgender studies, and queer studies.

Gender in Translation is a broad-ranging, imaginative and lively look at feminist issues surrounding translation studies. Students and teachers of translation studies, linguistics, gender studies and women's studies will find this unprecedented work invaluable and thought-provoking reading. Sherry Simon argues that translation of feminist texts - with a view to promoting feminist perspectives - is a cultural intervention, seeking to create new cultural meanings and bring about social change. She takes a close look at specific issues which include: the history of feminist theories of language and translation studies; linguistic issues, including a critical examination of the work of Luce Irigaray; a look at women translators through history, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century; feminist translations of the Bible; an analysis of the ways in which French feminist texts such as De Beauvoir's The Second Sex have been translated into English.

This issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources.

Finalist for the 2020 Prose Awards (Language and Linguistics Category) The emergence of transgender communities into the public eye over the past few decades has brought some new understanding, but also renewed outbreaks of violent backlash. In Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address Douglas Robinson seeks to understand the “translational” or “translingual” dialogues between cisgendered and transgendered people. Drawing on a wide range of LGBT scholars, philosophers, sociologists, sexologists, and literary voices, Robinson sets up cis-trans dialogues on such issues as “being born in the wrong body,” binary vs. anti-binary sex/gender identities, and the nature of transition and transformation. Prominent voices in the book include Kate Bornstein, C. Jacob Hale, and Sassafras Lowrey. The theory of translation mobilized in the book is not the traditional equivalence-based one, but Callon and Latour's sociology of translation as “speaking for someone else,” which grounds the study of translation in social pressures to conform to group norms. In addition, however, Robinson translates a series of passages from Finnish trans novels into English, and explores the “translingual address” that emerges when those English translations are put into dialogue with cis and trans scholars.

Gendered and sexual identities are unstable constructions which reveal a great deal about the ideologies and power relatinships affecting individuals and societies. The interaction between gender/sex studies and translation studies points to a fascinating arena of discursive conflict in which our intimate desires and identities are established or rejected, (re)negotiated or censored, sanctioned or tabooed. This volume explores diverse and heterogeneous aspects of the manipulation of gendered and sexual identities. Contributors examine translation as a feminist practice and/or theory; the importance of gender-related context in translation; the creation of a female image of secondariness through dubbing and state censoriship; attempts to suppress the blantantly patriarchal and sexist references in the German dubbed versions of James Bond films; the construction of national heroism and national identity as male preserve; the enactment of Chamberlain's 'gender metaphorics' in Scliar and Calvino; the transformation of Japanese romance fiction through Harlequin translations; the translations of the erotic as site for testing the complex rewriting(s) of identity in sociohistorical term; and the emergence of NRTs (New Reproductive Technologies), which is causing fundamental changes in the perception of 'creativity' or 'procreation' as male domains.

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.