Gender Issues in Translation Studies: A Systematic Literature Review

This study aims to examine the prevalence and trend of research on gender issues in translation studies. Translation scholars have explored gender issues since the 1990s. However, a systematic literature review of the current trends and research foci in this field is lacking. Hence, the present paper is to fill in this gap based on the PRISMA framework.This study uses a systematic approach to review 73 articles on gender issues in recent translation studies. Web of Science and Scopus are the two databases used to retrieve data. All searches spanned from 2016 to 2020 and included journal articles published in English only. According to the publication year, the data are appraised and synthesized, research contexts, and research methods to suggest research trends. Research foci were also examined based on critical appraisal of the research objectives and categorized into five topics and seven sub-topics. Findings show that the number of articles on translation and mediation of gender portrayals in literary translation has significantly increased over the last five years, especially in translating gender-stereotypical portrayals. Nonetheless, there is still room for improvement in several aspects. For instance, to put gender stereotypes in a theoretical framework to explore the gender cultural differences in translation. The study findings provide significant implications and directions for translation researchers to conduct interdisciplinary studies on gender issues and translation studies. Additionally, the research in the translation of gender stereotypical portrayals in literary texts will provide implications for research on the translation of gender stereotypes in non-literary texts.


Introduction
Gender issues, which have been long and widely explored, can be examined in many disciplines.The interdisciplinary study of gender issues and translation is gaining momentum in translation studies after the second wave of feminism (the 1960s-1980s).Since the 1990s, the research on feminism, gender, and translation has gradually increased.Two influential scholars, Simon (1996); Flotow (1997)  issues in a broader context for discussion.It addresses the frequently mentioned gender issues globally.More recently, studies have been conducted on the review of gender and translation.For example, Flotow and Scott (2014); Flotow (2018) connected gender studies with translation studies.The focus of the former study was to highlight the historical development of the two disciplines.Whereas the later study discussed the effects of feminism and later the term 'gender' on translation from the Anglophone perspective.For that purpose, Flotow (2018) introduced several case studies such as feminist translation of the Bible, homosexual discourses, and non-fiction texts.Likewise, to illustrate early feminist intervention in translation, Castro and Ergun (2018) examined the translation of literary (or religious) texts explicitly feminist or openly misogynistic.
Scholars such as Hu and Meng (2017) discussed the interplay between gender and translation.They stated that this interaction has two aspects (1) the impact of gender/feminism on translation; (2) the influence of translation on the construction of gender identity or image.Hu and Li (2018) further illustrated how this interaction works.Regarding the impact of gender/feminism on translation, it mainly involves the gender of translators, with differences in the text features male/female translators translate and translation strategies they employ.
Besides, as for the influence of gender on translation, scholars should also consider cultural gender differences.It is because "gender as a cultural construct and in translation as cultural transfer" (p.1), as argued by Flotow (1997) when she investigated the relationship between gender and translation.In other words, translators should consider cultural gender differences when translating into other cultural contexts where different gender norms prevail.Translators may adopt gendering translation strategies to 'normalize' gender characters in texts inconsistent with the established notions of social construct.
Whereas, when it comes to the influence of translation on gender, it deals with the role of translation in representing and constructing gender roles.Notably, feminist translation studies deal with the construction of gender roles and identities through translation (Castro, 2013a).
In addition to research on the interplay between gender translation, the evolution of the concept of gender has also attracted scholars' attention.In the late 1980s, the traditional binary concept of male/female has been challenged by the idea of 'queer,' and the term 'gender' is often pluralized to 'genders' (Flotow, 2018).More attention has been given to the sexual and gender minority acronym GBLTQI (gay, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, queer, intersex).However, scholars such as Alak (2020) demonstrated that the binary concept of gender is still the dominant notion all over the (colonial) world.
Regarding text types of translation, materials can be divided into three genres or types: literary text, non-literary text, and medial text, according to (Newmark, 2004).The literary text refers to poetry, fiction, and drama.In contrast, the non-literary text covers "the topics of encyclopedias, encyclopedia dictionaries, names, titles, upper case words" (p.10), such as advertisements, films, and policy documents.The medial text refers to "a genre with a nonliterary subject and a literary form" (p.10), such as religion, history, and cultural studies.All these medial topics can be discussed under the category of non-literary text (Newmark, 2004).
It is noteworthy that the contexts of learning, teaching, researching, and even working are categorized into non-literary genres.Thus, the research contexts of all the articles reviewed in this paper were categorized into literary and non-literary ones.
Nonetheless, most previous studies traced the historical development of gender studies and translation studies and examined their interactions.However, it remains a neglected area of systematic literature review on the trends of growth in this field.For example, most studies examined the relationship between gender and translation.However, the research trends of this interaction are scantly studied.

Methodology
The systematic literature review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses(PRISMA, hereafter referred to PRISMA framework) (Liberati et al., 2009).In what follows, we would describe the four phases of collecting data and analyzing data, which covers search strategy, selection criteria, quality assessment, and data extraction.

Search Strategy
We devised a search strategy to identify literature on gender issues in recent translation studies.This search strategy was customized to two databases: Web of Science and Scopus.
As the present paper's title suggests, the search terms used were 'translation' AND 'gender.'All searches spanned from 2016 to 2020 and included journal articles, review papers published in English only.The time span is limited because from 2016 to 2020, the interaction between gender and translation began to increase (Zhu et al., 2023).
Figure 1 and 2 shows the Boolean search terms used to retrieve potentially relevant articles in Web of Science and Scopus, respectively.For instance, the data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection on March 28, 2021.The search terms were 'gender,' and 'translation,' combined with the Boolean Operator 'AND.'The 'Topic' searched includes title, abstract, author keywords, and keywords plus.The search timespan was last five years, from 2016 to 2020.Moreover, chemical indexes were excluded from the search, as it was irrelevant to the language and gender studies.Additionally, 11 research areas were included.The document types are research articles and review papers.The papers selected were written in English only.We extracted 260 records from the Web of science.

Selection Criteria
The selection criteria were based on the scope and research questions mentioned above.All articles should meet the inclusion/exclusion criteria.
The inclusion criteria are a) Articles on translation in the field of social sciences, with translation as a rendering practice from one language to another (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).b) Articles on gender referring to a binary concept of male and female, or as an umbrella term including LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer).c) Articles on gender and translation being central to the research.It was not enough for an article to just mention gender and translation to be selected.
The exclusion criteria are a) Articles on translation in medicine, healthcare, and biology were excluded because the medical definition of translation refers to a complex biology change or transfer from one form to another (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).b) Articles on translation as a learning skill in classroom teaching were excluded.c) Articles on the grammatical gender of lexical items (e.g., noun, pronoun, or adjective) were excluded.

Quality Assessment
This review is based on original journal articles only, though review papers were retrieved first and then excluded as they are not appropriate to answer the research questions.All Timespan: 2016-2020.
Two independent reviewers checked the articles' titles and abstracts to ensure the relevance of records included in the review process.A careful assessment was made to ensure the papers were published from 2016 to 2020.There were two articles published in 2015 and were excluded from the study.Then, the full-length texts were assessed based on the selection and exclusion criteria.The reviewers' disagreements were settled by consensus.Then follows the eligibility phase, a total of 158 full texts were extracted.We excluded 84 records in total with reasons.Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 59 articles were firstly excluded after assessing each publication.These articles included 'gender' and 'translation,' but these two words may not relate to each other.Or these two words may not relate to the research objectives of the papers but served as background information.

Data Extraction
Additionally, 2 papers were excluded as they are not published within the period from 2016 to 2020.These two papers were indicated by databases as published in 2016, but they were published in 2015 according to the article information page attached to the full-length texts.
The publication dates of some papers (e.g., Hu & Meng, 2017;Liang & Xu, 2019) mistaken by databases have been redressed.Additionally, we found 18 records of book chapters and 6 review papers and excluded them as they are not appropriate to answer the formulated research questions.Finally, a total of 73 original journal articles were included for further qualitative synthesis and analysis.

Results and Interpretations
Following the procedures described above, a total of 73 publications on gender issues in translation studies during 2016-2020 (accounting for 17.59% of the data retrieved from databases) were included for further analysis.Figure 4 shows how the distribution of studies on gender issues in translation studies between 2016 and 2020.The number of papers grows throughout the period, though the number of articles dropped dramatically in 2017.The 2018 witnesses a significant increase in publications because more articles on the translation of gender portrayals were published.Additionally, studies on collaboration translation also contributes to the rise.   1 shows the six journal names with more than one article published.The journal Perspectives published the most papers (N=10).According to the journal homepage, it "explores issues concerning all kinds of language and cultural mediation, including but not limited to literary translation, technical and scientific translation, interpreting, audiovisual translation, intralingual mediation and so on" (Perspectives, n.d.).The journal TSQ deals with interdisciplinary work by feminist and queer scholarship (TSQ, n.d.), while Textual Practice is a journal of radical literary studies (Textual Practice, n.d.).Except the journal TSQ and Textual Practice, all the other four journals are top journals that published articles on translation and interpreting after browsing their journal homepages.Moreover, the journal Perspective, Translator, and Target published only peer-reviewed journal articles.

Research Trends
The research trends of gender issues in recent translation studies were examined from three aspects: research context, the interaction between gender and translation, and research method, as follows: of literary texts (N=46, 63.01%) were far more than that of non-literary texts (N=27, 36.99%).

Trend of the research context
The trend is consistent with Flotow (2018)'s finding that a small but growing number of studies have been conducted on gender and translation in non-literary texts.Table 2 shows the subject areas of gender issues in the translation of non-literary texts from 2016 to 2020.We can see audiovisual materials are mainly researched from the table, followed by policy documents and theology.Notably, by reading the articles thoroughly, we found that both audiovisual translation and translation of policy documents deal with gender mainstreaming, an approach to promote gender equality.Mass media is the least researched which should be given more attention.For example, gender issues in advertising translation may exert a broader and more profound influence on the audience because of their daily exposure.Figure 6 shows that publications on the relationship between gender and translation were in the majority (N=55, 75.34%).Additionally, the number of both directions of influences is almost equal.Among the articles examining the relationship between gender and translation, 28(50.90%)studied the impact of gender on translation, while 27(49.10%)examined the influence of translation on gender.Most importantly, studies on the effects of translation on gender showed a growing trend, whereas publications on the impact of gender on translation

Trend of Research Method
Figure 8 presents the categories of methodology employed in studies on gender issues in recent translation studies (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020).In what follows, some scholars will be highlighted by using each method.The research methods used in these studies include case study Wolfe (2017), contrastive and comparative approach Barrett (2018)

Research Foci
The research foci of gender issues in recent translation studies (2016-2020) were developed based on the thorough reading and analysis of the full-length collected articles.It covers five topics: gender image/identity in translation, gender of translators/interpreters, gender equality through translation, ideological differences underlying gender transfer, and collaborative translation.Additionally, the specific topic is determined with a view to the keywords of each article.Gender image/identity in translation.Gender image/identity in translation (N=31, 42.47%) is the main focus of gender issues in translation, including three sub-topics: gender representation(N=29), gender stereotypes(N=9) and sexuality(N=3).Gender stereotypes can be differed from gender representation, as the former indicates gender inequality while the latter refers to the visibility and function of gender (Kimani & Yeboah, 2011).Additionally, gender was examined from two aspects: a binary concept of male and female(N=12) and sexual and gender minority(N=16).

Research
Gender of translators and/or interpreters.The gender of translators and/or interpreters (N=15, 20.55%) ranked second in the list of research foci of gender issues in recent translation studies.Several sub-topics have been discussed concerning the following aspects.For instance, the 'double filter' (i.e., in the phases of publication and translation) for female translators in translating literary texts Baxter (2020), different translation/interpretation strategies used by male and female translators/interpreters Al-Sharafi & Khader (2019); Hu & Meng (2017), and even the gender distribution of the academic background of T& I scholars (Liang & Xu, 2019).

Cultural transfer of gender.
A review of the collected publications found that studies on the influence of ideological and cultural differences of gender and sexuality on translation are far from enough (N=12, 16.44%).For instance, Troy (2016) investigated gender and sexuality from Swedish film and/or novel into English.As America is ideologically conservative compared with Sweden, certain sexual ambiguities were omitted or toned down.Another example is the influence of the sexuality of characters in novels on the language used in translated texts (Furukawa, 2018).Similarly, based on the patriarchy framework, Mojola (2018) examined how modern and contemporary culture influence gender issues in Bible translation.
Gender equality through translation.A total of 12 publications examines gender equality through translation.Four specific approaches, such as gender mainstreaming, feminist translation, raising gender awareness, and gender-neutral translation, have been discussed to achieve gender equality through translation.Gender mainstreaming is an approach to promote gender equality.It ensures all activities such as policymaking, research, and legislation make gender equality a high priority (OSAGI Gender Mainstreaming, n.d.).In the present review, gender mainstreaming(N=4) is mainly discussed in the translation of policy documents(e.g., Acosta et al., 2019;Madsen, 2019) to promote women's rights and gender equality.
Feminist translation(N=4) refers to the intervention made by female translators to represent females in the texts Flotow (1997), aiming to promote women's rights and gender equality.
One of the most remarkable findings is put forward by Muñiz (2018) who examined feminist translation strategies by looking at intervention in theater translation.
Raising gender awareness(N=3) is also a meaningful way to promote gender equality.In addition to De Marco's (2016) discussion about the 'engendering' approach in audiovisual translation, Montse Corrius et al (2016aCorrius et al ( , 2016b) ) published two papers on raising gender awareness of students when dealing with gender issues in the translation of audiovisual advertising.The focus of the former study is to, whereas the emphasise of the latter is on raising students' gender awareness in the classrooms or training programs.
Gender-neutral translation has been examined by Rauer (2017), who looked at the translation of Old English 'Mann' in either gender-neutral ('human beings' or 'mankind') or genderspecific contexts ('man' or 'women').'Gender-inclusive translation' or non-sexist language in (literary) translation has been argued to serve as an approach to promote gender equality (Castro, 2010(Castro, , 2013b;;Castro & Ergun, 2018).By now, numerous initiatives have been undertaken in many countries resulting in more regular use of gender-inclusive language, according to Castro (2013b).These achievements are attributed to several decades of feminist linguistic activism and higher recognition of the critical role of non-sexist language in attaining social equality.
Collaborative translation.Collaborative translation has been defined by O'Brien (2011) as "when two or more agents cooperate in some way to produce a translation" (p.11) in a broad sense.In a narrower sense, it refers to "the situation where two or more translators work together to produce one translated product" (p.11).Only two articles have contributed to this topic.For instance, Kang and Kim (2020) looked at collaborative translation in a broader sense by discussing the distributor and viewers' role in the collaborative audiovisual translation.Whereas Brown (2018) examined collaborative translation in a narrower sense by tracing its development and collaborative partnership between male and female translators, emphasizing women's involvement.

Research Gaps
Gaps in "How."Informed by the interaction between gender and translation, it is not new to examine the relationship between gender stereotypes and translation.However, previous studies did not put gender stereotypes in a theoretical framework, making gender stereotypes quite challenging to identify.In other words, few studies have examined an instrument to specify gender stereotypes when dealing with the relationship between gender stereotypes and translation.Researchers should understand the components of gender stereotypes before jumping into comparing the gender stereotypes in the source text and target text.For example, the instruments to identify gender stereotypes have been developed in psychology by scholars such as (Hentschel et al., 2019).They developed dimensions of gender stereotypes, including agency dimensions for men and communality dimensions for women.
Gaps in Research Contexts.Another notable gap is the uneven distribution of research contexts.As previously stated, gender in translation is mainly discussed in literary texts.Though gender issues have been examined in various research contexts, few studies have been done on gender issues in the translation of non-literary texts.The usually market-led non-literary translation may have a significant impact on people's lives.For instance, the mass media have usually targeted as "being careers of (gender) stereotypes in Western countries" (De Marco, 2016, p.319).Based on the review of previous studies, scholars have looked at gender issues in the translation of materials in mass media, specifically audiovisual materials such as film subtitling (Kang & Kim, 2020) and audiovisual advertising (Gimbert et al., 2016).
As one of the most popular mass media, advertising has been frequently discussed in terms of gender portrayals (Eisend, 2019).However, gender-stereotypical portrayals in the translation of advertisements, online labels for example, have been ignored in translation studies.
Gaps in Gender Concerns.The third gap lies in that few studies have touched upon the contrast and comparison of male and female stereotypical portrayals in texts.The image and identity of women and GBLTQI have attracted the attention of most scholars.Among the collected data, only one study examines male representation.Miletich (2016) mainly deals with masculinity in the translation of literary texts, with female representation, sexuality, and gender relations, used to accentuate the notion of hegemonic masculinity.As stated by De Marco (2016), gender in translations is still analyzed mainly from males dominating over women deep-rooted in a patriarchal system.However, men can also be disadvantaged in the research context other than the literary world, for example, the commodified world.For instance, men are also objectified in adverts as women do in the commodified context, "men too are often depicted as eroticized, fetishized, and vulnerable objects of desire" (Savira & Suharsono, 2013), rather than being identified as only breadwinners (Pompper, 2010).Thus, gender analysis in translation needs to be done with men and women compared.Analyzing male and female stereotypical portrayals in texts using the contrast and comparison approach will give an enlightened perspective of gender (in)equality.

Mapping Existing Literature
The findings illustrate that the cultural and ideological underpinnings of gender transfer are relatively ignored.Many articles reviewed (N=31, 42.47%) provide information about the translators' intervention, namely how translators manipulate gender image or identity during the translation process.Yet, only a minority of the studies (N=12, 16.44%) examines the underlying cultural factors of gender transfer involved in the translation.In other words, most of the studies do not emphasize the importance of cultural and ideological differences of gender across cultures to understand how mediation is processed.Indeed, only in rare cases, the cultural gender differences underlying the transfer of gender stereotypes are reported.
Likewise, the analysis of collaborative translation is ignored by 71 of the 73 papers.Moreover, in the articles dealing with collaborative translation, there is no mention of transcreation, a hotly discussed concept in advertising translation in the recent years.Various agents participate in the creation stage of transcreation in advertising, which resulted in a collective authorship (Nardi, 2012).
A review of previous studies suggested that most studies investigated two specific topics.One is the gender image/identity in translation, either a binary concept of gender or sexual and gender minorities.Another is the gender of translators and/or interpreters.These two topics fall under the categories of relationship between gender and translation.To be specific, studies on gender image/identity in the translation are related to the impact of translation on gender.In comparison, research on the gender of translators and/or interpreters is related to the influence of gender on translation.Notably, studies on cultural gender differences in translation deal with the impact of gender on translation, though the number is smaller.
Limited studies have provided a comprehensive review of gender issues in recent translation studies (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020).Therefore, this review contributes to gender issues in translation studies by summarizing the research trends and research foci during 2016 to 2020 and identifying gaps for future improvement.These aspects have not been explored before.The research trends and research foci outlined provide several research ideas for academics.Finally, an instrument to identify gender-stereotypical portrayals is advocated for future studies.

Highlight limitations
Like other studies, the study also has several limitations.For instance, the present paper concerns focusing on journals to represent the scholarly publications on gender issues in recent translation studies.It needs attention also to other platforms such as books, book chapters, conference papers, and proceeding.Additionally, this study only looked at the recent five years from 2016 to 2020 to see the current research trends and foci, which is not enough for a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the issue.It needs to be remembered that studies on gender issues in translation studies have been developed after the second wave of feminism.Also, this study only focuses on articles published in English.
Though English is the world's lingua franca, it needs attention that research on gender issues in recent translation studies can also be published in other languages, such as France, Italy, and Chinese.Moreover, it needs remembered that review papers can be also an important source.

Future Agenda
After reviewing 73 empirical journal articles, this study identified several aspects which could be improved regarding research on gender issues in recent translation studies (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020).
The study found that in terms of topics about translation of gender stereotypical portrayals in texts, it lacked a theoretical foundation to identify gender stereotypes.Therefore, future studies can consider adding an instrument to identify gender stereotypes.Gender issues in recent translation of literary texts have been broadly investigated.However, only 36.99% of the publications examined gender issues in the translation of non-literary texts.Therefore, future studies can also consider the non-literary texts.Considering the fact that men can also be objectified, gender analysis in translation studies can include men and women using the contrast and comparison approach.Furthermore, the results revealed a variety of data analysis approaches that academic researchers may consider adopting.

Figure 1 :Figure 2 :
Figure 1: Boolean search terms used to retrieve potentially relevant articles in Web of Science(Web of Science, n.d.)

Figure 3
presents the flow chart of the study selection process adapted from the PRISMA diagram.When entering the keyword 'gender' AND 'translation' as the search criterion, a total of 415 records were retrieved with 260 records from Web of Science and 155 records from Scopus in the identification phase.A total of 380 records remained after duplicates were filtered and removed in the screening process.Titles, keywords, and abstracts were checked and analyzed based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria defined earlier.A total of 222 records were excluded as they unrelated to translation research, based on the exclusion criteria mentioned above.

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Yearly distribution of articles from 2016 to 2020

Figure 5 :
Figure 5: Distribution of text type from 2016 to 2020

Figure 6 :
Figure 6: Yearly distribution of relationship between gender and translation year 2018.It is because more articles on the translation of gender portrayals were published, as explained in the publications' yearly distribution.It thus provides implications for the correlation between research topic and interaction of gender and translation.

Figure 9 :
Figure 9: Research foci of gender issues in recent translation studies (2016-2020) have published seminal monographs on the relationship between gender and translation.Combining these two disciplines put gender Vol 14, Issue 2, (2024) E-ISSN: 2222-6990 Moreover, itremains unclear what research topics concerning gender issues in translation studies has been studied, which topic is the most studied and to what extent it has been explored.For example, gender portrayals in the literary translation are often the hotly researched topic.However, what kind of portrayals have been studied, i.e., stereotypical portrayals or visibility of gender?Or what gender(s) have been viewed, i.e., male, female, or GBLTQI?

Table 1
Journal names and the number of articles published (N>1)