Approaching Androcentrism in Galician Translation: Trends and Patterns

This paper explores to what extent androcentrism is present in translation into Galician by examining this issue from two distinct analytic perspectives. Firstly, I conduct two cursory quantitative macro-studies concerning the number of female writers translated on the one hand and the ratio of male to female translators on the other. Secondly, I outline a gender-based micro-study of translation strategies implemented in a sample of literary texts. The findings of these three preliminary studies indicate that androcentrism still remains the predominant norm throughout translation practice in Galician, although by dint of its status as the dominant discourse, androcentrism is able to masquerade as neutral, enabling it to discredit any counter-discourses and practices which challenge the essentially sexist status quo. As an integral part of its applied, hands-on approach to research, this paper concludes by suggesting several measures which could be implemented in order to offset sexist bias in translation as and where necessary in the Galician context.