Dante’s ‘Shameless Whore’: Sexual Imagery in Anglo-American Translations of the Comedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the strategies pursued by Anglo-American translators in dealing with Dante’s sexual imagery in the Comedy. The author attempts to explain why the original imagery — which condemns a corrupt Roman Catholic Church — has sexist connotations, and why it is reproduced in most translations in the corpus. “Fidelity” or adequacy with respect to sexual/sexist images seems striking in view of the fact that certa..n translators bowdlerize the source text or tone down the boldness of its vernacular style. It is suggested that the patriarchal nature of both the Italian and English languages explains why the use of sexist imagery is tolerated (or perhaps even encouraged) in literary texts. The findings of the analysis are then brought to bear on one important question: should the translation scholar aim to bring about “politically correct” changes in translation practice, that is, changes attenuating the offensiveness of the original language? The author advocates a descriptive approach, even though “gender and translation” seems more politicized than other areas of research within Translation Studies. The paper concludes that Translation Studies may benefit from the findings of gender studies, provided scholars in this area do not attempt to change actual translation practice and focus on the hermeneutics of translation. In fact, gender scholars can make an important contribution to Translation Studies by focusing on the ideological nature of the gendered construction of meaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".