Whose feminism does the translation speak for? Gladys Yang’s translations of Zhang Jie

This paper examines Gladys Yang’s feminist-inflected English translations of Zhang Jie, one of the most widely translated contemporary Chinese women writers of the 1980s and a 1986 Nobel Prize nominee in Literature. A distinguished British translator best known for her collaboration with her husband Yang Xianyi, Gladys Yang was also a close friend of Zhang. With Zhang’s consent, she exercised considerable latitude in shaping the English versions and mobilized a feminist translation network to introduce them to Anglophone readers. Drawing on archival materials alongside textual and paratextual analysis, the study shows how Yang’s translations helped frame Zhang as an “angry feminist,” despite the author’s ambivalence toward the label. This tension prompts the central question: whose feminism is articulated in and through translation? The paper argues for a more nuanced, intersectional, and transnational framework for feminist translation studies, one attentive to the negotiated agency of author, translator, and publisher across cultural and ideological boundaries.