Why do research on the translations of imagined gender?
In my research, I concentrate on three things: science fiction, gender and translation. I look at Finnish translations of English science fiction stories that include depictions of gender that go against what is thought to be ‘normal’. I study how these depictions are translated, how they affect the wider representation of gender in the stories, and how the stories are received in Finland. Let’s unpack what that means.
In my 2022 article, the first in my dissertation, I studied three Finnish translations of Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction texts, ‘Winter’s King’, The Left Hand of Darkness and ‘Coming of Age in Karhide’. The stories take place on an alien planet, where people are mostly androgynous, but develop female or male sexual characteristics once a month. I argued that domesticizing, that is, making the translation more palatable and familiar to the reader, made representations of alien gender in the stories less explicit and less impactful. My next study on Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts and its Finnish translation will take a look at how gender metaphors and neologisms have been translated. So why would translations of some made-up alien stories matter?
The Swedish speculative fiction writer Karin Tidbeck wrote last year in their opinion piece about why reading science fiction matters. Tidbeck says that science fiction comes up with new ideas on how we should live. It’s a genre of visionaries, where our world can be reimagined in different and perhaps better ways. In science fiction research, the genre is identified as one that discusses the Other, the foreign, the unfamiliar, and forces us to recognise it and try to understand it. It also makes us reconsider what we know and are familiar with. In the current global political climate that leans more and more to radical conservatism, with backlash against gender and sexual minorities and people of colour, empathy towards the Other should be a welcomed counterforce.
How does translation play into all this? One of the subjects of translations studies is to examine how ideas move from one linguistic and cultural region to another. In a relatively peripheral cultural sphere such as Finland, cultural influences often flow from more central cultural spheres, such as the Anglo-American sphere. Literature written in English contains new ideas on topics such as gender that enter the Finnish cultural sphere via translations. If those translations omit, gloss over or dilute the way gender is depicted in the texts, the new ideas about how to think about gender might become, inadvertently or on purpose, omitted, glossed over or diluted.
Translations may also be studied from another perspective: by looking at how they are received, accepted or rejected in the target culture. The final study of my PhD thesis will explore how the Finnish translations of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts have been received. This can tell us how widely they are read and what critics and other readers have thought of them. It will also offer a glimpse into the Finnish society in the 1980s and the 2010s: how the relatively radical ideas of gender fluidity and sexuality in the novels have been accepted or rejected. It may even be compared with the current situation in Finland, where leaps in LGBT+ rights clash with the rise of right-wing politics.
By doing research on gender that goes against the norm, I aim to promote knowledge on gender diversity. Even if the subject matter in my research is fantastical, the fresh perspectives science fiction offers can make people more accepting and understanding of difference. This way, my research is also a form of activism.
Anna Merikallio
The writer is a doctoral researcher at the School of Languages and Translation Studies at the University of Turku. Their research interests include representations of non-normative gender, literary translation, science fiction, and the cultural impacts of translation.