Humbly dissenting. Revisiting Italian translation of eighteenth-century vindications for the rights of women in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The translator, in her/his activity, has always resembled Janus Bifrons, the god of transitions, passages and endings looking, simultaneously, to the past and the future . This is particularly the case of the translation of texts produced by women in the past centuries. In translating women’s writing other competences and skills are, in fact, necessary in order to better (re)present the revolutionary ideas concealed behind an apparently conventional use of language in their own time. In this contribution, the authoress illustrates the difficulties in translating, from English to Italian, the vindications for the right to education produced by some British women writers of the eighteenth century.