Gender Ideology of Translators Implicated in Feminist Novels

Abstract

This study compares two Persian translations of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925); one done by a male (Darush) and one by a female translator (Taheri). Regarding Farzaneh Farahzad's translation criticism based on CDA and Farzan Sojoodi's stratificational semiotics, this study analyzed the effect of gender ideology on lexical choices by the two translators. The manipulated words and phrases were analyzed as the reflection of fundamental theories based on the cognitive and personality psychology. It was revealed that translators are definitely affected by their cognitive and mental psychological areas in making gendered lexical choices. Furthermore, almost all the manipulated selected words were done by the male translator. Statistical data, on the other hand, revealed a difference between positive and negative gender values in which the negative choices were used more by the male and the positive ones more by the female translator.