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Article published In: Target
Vol. 37:4 (2025) ► pp.513–538

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Navigating male-dominated spaces

Victorian-era Anglo–German women translators, gender, and authorised translations

ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with KU Leuven.

Published online: 18 August 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.23188.rei
Abstract
This article explores the phenomenon of authorised translations from the perspective of gender through archival studies of two understudied Victorian women translators from German into English, Fanny Elizabeth Bunnètt (1833–1875) and L. Dora Schmitz (1844–1926). While researchers have started to fill the gaps of a history of translators by focusing on translators of scientific genres, historical translators of humanities scholarship remain underresearched. Archival-based research on these translators may help shift our focus to hitherto little-explored aspects of the translation event, such as authorised translations. The two case studies discussed in this paper shed light on the logistics behind authorised translations, and on how some women translators navigated this mode of publication in order to consolidate their professional positions. The agency of Bunnètt and Schmitz was embedded in a gendered network of professional and personal contacts, which both enabled and restricted them in their translational pursuits. Archival materials on Bunnètt show how women translators strategically selected and cultivated contacts in order to navigate the decidedly male-dominated professional spaces of scholarship and publishing. Schmitz’s case proves that translating by no means had to be a female attempt to evade the public gaze.
Article outline
  • 1.Interventionist textual strategies and women translators’ active agency in translation history
  • 2.Authorised translations: Transferring the symbolic capital of original authorship
  • 3.Victorian-era Anglo–German women translators: Case studies from the archive
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Archival sources
  • References
References (69)
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