Men, Women and Progress. Literary Translation

This chapter analyses translations as cultural objects that circulate between languages and movement cultures. It takes the case of an English novel of the 1880s and its (partial) translation into German as a starting point to explore the milieus, dynamics, and practices of transcultural mediation between European women’s movements of the late nineteenth century. Tying in with the concept of ‘activist translation’, it compares translation as a form of political intervention with translating as a professional practice. It submits that to analyse the political and social contexts in which a text is translated as well as its relation to other, accompanying forms of transfer is a prerequisite to understanding the character and the rationale of a specific translation.