Women Who Changed Translation History

A Women in Translation Month Tribute by Found in Translation Bookshop

Portrait sketch of (Yuki Tejima, Christina MacSweeney, Elvira Navarro, Ros Schwartz)

For much of literary history, translation has been the quiet art behind the louder world of authorship. It is an act of listening and re-speaking, of carrying meaning across the borders of language and culture. And while the names of male translators have often

been preserved in marble and ink, women have been at work here, too — sometimes celebrated, more often erased.

From the beginning, women’s translation work has been shaped by constraint. Many of the earliest female translators were aristocrats or intellectuals in private circles, educated enough to learn Latin, Greek, Arabic, or Sanskrit, but bound by the limits of what they were “supposed” to do with that learning. In some societies, translation became a rare loophole: women could engage with literature and scholarship without directly claiming the title of “author.” And yet, over centuries, they used that loophole to reshape the literary canon.

Before Europe Took the Stage

In the late 19th century Arab world, Fatima al-Sabunji worked quietly in Beirut and Damascus, translating French novels into Arabic for serialized publication. Her work came during the Nahda, the Arab renaissance, when translation was a revolutionary tool — a way to introduce new genres, new moral questions, and new visions of society. Many of her readers were women encountering European fiction for the first time, and al-Sabunji’s choices helped define what “foreign literature” would mean in Arabic.

Further east, in late Qing China, Wang Zhaoyuan translated reformist and educational texts from English into Chinese. Her work carried the spirit of an era when China was wrestling with modernity under immense external pressure. Translation was political here: not only about words, but about survival and adaptation.

In Bengal in the 1920s, Kumudini Basu translated Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry into English, bringing his Nobel Prize-winning verse to readers far beyond India. She also carried works from Sanskrit and Hindi into Bengali, ensuring that literature moved freely between India’s own linguistic communities.

Breaking the European Canon from Within

Centuries earlier, in Tudor England, Jane Lumley had already stepped into history as the first person — man or woman — to translate a classical play into English. Her Iphigenia at Aulis was not a commercial work but a private intellectual act, carried out in an era when women’s public writing was frowned upon. Yet it quietly placed a Greek heroine into an English idiom, shifting the literary possibilities of her time.

A generation later, Margaret Tyler would do something far more public — and provocative. Her 1578 translation of a Spanish chivalric romance came with a defiant preface, rejecting the idea that women should stick to pious or domestic subjects. She insisted that women had as much right to tales of knights, war, and politics as men did. Translation here was not just language work — it was feminist manifesto.

In 16th-century France, Hélisenne de Crenne chose to retell Virgil’s Aeneid in her own way, stopping after Dido’s abandonment by Aeneas. By refusing to follow the hero into further adventures, she shifted the story’s center of gravity from conquest to loss, giving us one of the earliest examples of translation as an act of literary reinterpretation.

Scholars, Rebels, and Modern Voices

The 17th century saw Anne Le Fèvre Dacier become one of France’s most celebrated classical scholars. Her translations of Homer into French prose were meticulous, learned, and — to some male critics — threatening. Dacier dismantled the assumption that “serious” texts belonged only to men, inserting herself into debates over how the classics should be read.

In England, Aphra Behn was earning her living as a writer — one of the first women to do so — and turning her sharp political mind to translation. Her work bridged literature and science, politics and philosophy, showing that translation could be as bold and inventive as original writing.

And in our own century, Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey became an international event. Wilson stripped away centuries of inherited English phrasing, crafting lines that were crisp, clear, and modern. She didn’t just offer a woman’s voice to Homer — she invited new readers into a text that had often been guarded by academic gatekeeping.

The Thread They Wove

Across continents and centuries, these women have one thing in common: they expanded the world’s vocabulary. They did so under wildly different conditions — from Ottoman Istanbul to Victorian London — but each used translation to challenge boundaries. Some quietly introduced radical ideas; others declared, in print, that women had the right to read and write whatever they pleased.

Translation is never a neutral act. Every choice — to omit a scene, to select one word over another — shapes how a work lives in its new language. When women entered this field, they didn’t just carry texts across borders; they altered the maps entirely.

This Women in Translation Month, we remember them not as footnotes, but as authors of the literary world we inherit today.