The Process of Translating Le Deuxième Sexe into European Spanish. Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

This chapter proposes to describe the characteristics of the European Spanish translation of The Second Sex in a contextualized manner. It firstly addresses the translation process of the latest version via an interview with the translator Alicia Martorell in order to identify the most significant translation challenges she faced as well as to know her research method to carry out this project. Secondly, it examines the rendering of the title “Formation” in L’expérience vécue based on a comparison of the 1954 and 1998 translations. This traductological study is approached in two ways—lexical-semantic and syntactic—and is applied to an assessment of the philosophical and gender language in the two translations in order to verify Martorell’s improvements compared to Palant’s. We chose these two aspects because, as proposed by Moi (2002) and Cagnolati et al. (2019), the theoretical-conceptual network in Beauvoirian philosophy is essential to understand the meticulousness of her work.