Gender Stereotypes as a Manifestation of Culture in the Original and Translation (Based on the Dystopian Novel “The Testaments” by M. Atwood)

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of gender stereotypes whose presence in a literary text constitutes a powerful factor in the translator’s activity and enables the target reader to learn more about the source culture as well as about their own. While analyzing the original, the translator must look into each literary image as the characters’ personality traits, their actions and their speech reveal the gender stereotypes of the society they belong to. The research was based on a dystopian novel by M. Atwood, “The Testaments”. The study was targeted at the image of one of the protagonists on whose behalf the story is being told – Agnes. The girl becomes a vivid embodiment of the distorted worldview imposed by Gilead. In Gilead, women are prohibited to have any feelings except for those that are regarded socially acceptable. She considers a woman’s body a trap, a source of danger, while relationships between a man and a woman provoke nothing but fear and disgust. The image of Agnes is constructed on the basis of a wide range of artistic devices rather masterfully recreated by the translator. However, depicting the dystopian reality which is aimed at warning against expansion of gender discrimination, the author recurs to informal, sometimes even vulgar language means aimed at underlining misrepresentation of the way Agnes perceived her own femininity and marriage. Nevertheless, in the Ukrainian culture where it is not so natural to openly speak about gender-related problems, where a woman’s speech cannot be rude or inappropriate, the translator, a woman herself, feels the need to euphemize such elements replacing them with more stylistically neutral ones or even completely omitting them. Thus, the degree of gender awareness, stereotypical views of what is acceptable or unacceptable in a woman’s speech determines perception of a literary text intended to draw increased attention to gender problems within a different cultural environment