This paper focuses on analyzing aspects of the collective and voluntary translation and adaptation of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves (The Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 2011) to Brazilian Portuguese, Nossos corpos por nós mesmas. The widely known book about women's health and sexuality, which discusses sensitive topics, such as abortion, violence against women, sexual health, reproductive rights, and social activism, has been adapted and translated into several languages for 50 years. The book offers practical and empowering information that goes beyond simply understanding how our bodies work, with great inclusiveness. Through a partnership with two Brazilian universities and an NGO, the project establishes a dialogue with recent research on feminist translation theories (Castro and Ergun, 2017) and studies about inclusive language (Schwindt, 2020).
We will contextualize the book and present the theoretical decisions that guided our collaborative project, such as the use of markedly non-sexist and inclusive language combined with the inclusion of paratexts, supplementation and intervention techniques. We will also present the translation project objectives, especially the translator's activism (Baker, 2013), and the methodology, focusing on the division of teams, the adoption of translation software, and the review process. Two points were discussed more thoroughly: first, the importance of inclusive language use, considering that the masculine form is the standard in Portuguese, while the translation project concerns a feminist book. Second, the analysis of authentic narratives provided by the students involved in the project about the emotions they experienced translating the texts ((Rojo López 2017; Hubscher-Davidson 2018; Lehr, 2021).
We will present a few translation examples to illustrate a more inclusive language and a few translation narratives to illustrate the emotional impact on the translator's academic and personal lives. We conclude that our translation reflects the perspective and voices of a wide range of women, and our unique cultural needs, including information about our public medical system and Brazilian abortion laws. The project also enabled the interaction of teaching, research, and community outreach, helping students reflect on the power of language and translation in society, and point out some challenges and discussions still ongoing in Brazil.
Baker, Mona. 2013. Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 12:1, 23-47
Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Castro, Olga; Ergun, Emek. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies. Local and Transnational Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge.
Hubscher-Davidson, Severine. 2018. Translation and Emotion. A Psychological Perspective. New York: Routledge.
Lehr, C. Translation, emotion and cognition. 2021. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. ed. Fabio Alves; A. L. Jakobsen, 294-309. New York and London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Rojo, Ana. 2017. The Role of Emotions. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, First Edition. ed J. W. Schwieter and A. Ferreira. 369-385, John Wiley & Sons.
Schwindt, Luiz Carlos Sobre gênero neutro em português brasileiro e os limites do sistema linguístico. Revista da ABRALIN, vol. 19, n. 1, 2020, p. 1-23.
