NINETEENTH CENTURY WOMEN TRANSLATORS IN BRAZIL: FROM THE NOVEL TO HISTORIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

Abstract

Within Translation Studies, there is a lack of works devoted to women translators in Brazil, and the role women played in Translation history has even been ruled out in Translation Historiography. This paper is a study of the imaginaries looming over nineteenth-century women translators in Brazil, and has two main goals. First, to explore these imaginaries in three nineteenth-century novels: Senhora, Luciola, and Flesh. Second, to compare such imaginaries to the women translators found in a corpus of nineteenth-century news pieces. The corpus was built and mined with a language processing software. The main findings were that contrary to the imaginaries fostered by the novels, women in the news had more agency and were more diverse than in the novels. Moreover, the news corpus revealed there were many women involved in a large variety of translation acts in Brazil in the nineteenth-century, and that their translations were purposeful and meaningful, in addition to intersecting not only with their domestic (wife, mother) role, but also with an array of other professional activities (actress, director, educator, writer).