Translating Transgender Identity: Rewriting Undecidable Texts and Bodies

This book explores the ways in which translation deals with sexual and textual undecidability, adopting an interdisciplinary approach bridging translation, transgender studies, and queer studies in analyzing the translations of six texts in English, French, and Spanish labelled as ‘trans.’

Rose draws on experimental translation methods, such as the use of the palimpsest, and builds on theory from areas such as philosophy, linguistics, queer studies, and transgender studies and the work of such thinkers as Derrida and Deleuze to encourage critical thinking around how all texts and trans texts specifically work to be queer and how queerness in translation might be celebrated. These texts illustrate the ways in which their authors play language games and how these can be translated between languages that use gender in different ways and the subsequent implications for our understanding of the act of translation and how we present our gender identity or identities.

In showing what translation and transgender identity can learn from one another, Rose lays the foundation for future directions for research into the translation of trans identity, making this book key reading for scholars in translation studies, transgender studies, and queer studies.

For a video recording of the book's BCLT launch, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-KVzQ8I2PI

Emily Rose finished her PhD on Translating Trans Identity at the University of East Anglia in 2018. Her work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly (volume 3 (3-4) and volume 6 (3)), Queer in Translatio and Untranslatability: an Interdisciplinary Perspective, a volume she also co-edited. She currently teaches MFL at a preparatory school in Norfolk.