Female Identity in Translation

The Linguistic Representation of Femininity in the American and French Editions of 1920s Vogue

Abstract

This essay aims to bridge the gap between gender, periodical, and translation studies by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that emphasises the role of language and translation in the discursive construction of female identity in women’s magazines when these texts are transferred into other languages and disseminated across different cultures. It also seeks to shed new light on the often-overlooked genre of the female fashion article as a mediator of gender ideologies in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Corpus methodology is employed to conduct a contrastive analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – of the linguistic representation of femininity in the American and French editions of 1920s Vogue, focusing primarily on the titles of the magazine’s extensive fashion features, which were originally written in English and subsequently translated or adapted into French. An examination of the meanings and associations underlying naming and referential strategies related to discourses of womanhood in Vogue US and Vogue France reveals that both editions consistently promoted the same elevated standard of femininity, linguistically construed in terms of fashionability, modernity, originality, and distinction. However, the widespread use of creative and culturally adaptive strategies, as well as rewriting in Vogue France, resulted in an overall loss of emphasis on the identification of womanliness with French fashion culture. Moreover, the rich connotations carried by recurrent lexical items in the English titles – including those evoking female agency – are frequently attenuated or lost in translation.