Translating feminist discourse in China

Abstract While much scholarship explores how translation reinforces feminist ideas, this study examines its attenuation in the Chinese writer Zhang Jie’s story “The Ark,” which portrays three divorced/separated heroines struggling against pervasive oppression while seeking gender equality. Employing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and translation techniques, it investigates how the original feminist and reverse discourses are strategically reframed by the Chinese state-sponsored Panda Books and the attributive factors behind these reframings. It reveals discursive double standards in representing the original female and male identities: reducing female subjective voices and transformative agency while generalizing male patriarchal and self-centered dispositions. Asymmetrical female-male relations are also adapted, and traditional social norms victimizing women are overshadowed. Such discursive mediation downplays both female subjectivity and suffering while reinforcing androcentric discourses and state-sanctioned narratives. This suggests the publisher’s ambivalent stance toward feminist work: while engaging with feminist thought, it simultaneously adapts and neutralizes it to align with domestic narratives. Beyond translation agents’ mediation, other potential attributive elements involve deep-seated Confucian patriarchal traditions and Communist feminism’s subordination of women’s issues to national development. This research moves translation beyond mere linguistic transference to the intersection of gender, power, and discourse, where Chinese feminist discourse engages global feminist values while remaining grounded in local sociocultural contexts.