The Impact of the Translator’s Gender Ideology on Translating Virginia Woolf’s Novel Mrs. Dalloway Case study: French translation by Marie Claire Pasquier and Arabic translation by Atta Abdel Wahab

Abstract

The present study examines the impact of gender ideology on translating literary texts, with special reference to Virginia Woolf, who is commonly believed to be an iconic figure in Postmodernist literature. Woolf’s novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and two of its translations, one into Arabic by a male translator and another into French by a female translator, are chosen to serve as key tools for this study. The analytical and comparative methods are used in exploring the selected examples for discussion. The main findings reveal that although both translations succeeded to some extent to convey meaning from source intot arget text, the female-made translation is closer to the original text which is written by a female author. The male-made translation was full of additions, reductions and sometimes even omissions of some passages