ABSTRACT
Given how profoundly interconnected gender is to both identity and power, it inevitably informs and is informed by acts of translation, whether textual or cultural. In the early 1950s, a young Inuit woman is asked by a newly arrived missionary to provide a word list to help him learn her language. Mitiarjuk instead takes up the valuable tool of writing that she has only just acquired and begins writing stories. Feminists have addressed what it means to be a woman translator, particularly in cases where the source author is male and his text explicitly or even implicitly misogynous, and also have highlighted the often parlous fate of women writers in translation. Further, they have helpfully criticised translation studies along with other disciplines for gender-biased language and constructions, uncovering engrained biases and proposing new paradigms and approaches. The journey of Sanaaq, originally composed in Inuktitut (Nappaaluk 1984), through translations into French and then indirectly into English (both of which were produced by male anthropologists: Saladin d’Anglure 2002; Frost 2014), will function in this chapter to help tease out the complex intersection of feminism and translation.
