Examining Themes of Gender in the Short Fiction of Carme Riera through Translation

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of gender in three versions of Carme Riera’s short story “Te entrego, amor, la mar como una ofrenda” [I Leave You, My Love, the Sea as an Offering] – the Spanish-language source text, and my own translations into English and French. As romance languages such as Spanish and French exhibit grammatical gender in ways that English does not, texts written in these languages are able to play on the interaction between the gender of the words themselves and the themes of social gender in a way that an English-language text ostensibly cannot. This project explores the effect of the linguistic category of grammatical gender on the themes of social gender through the process of translation, with special attention paid to the ways in which this interaction can present obstacles in the transfer and adaptation of the text across languages.