Role of Translation in Shaping Socio-political Awareness: A Historical Gender-based Perspective

The present paper is part of an ongoing research on Iranian women’s journals from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution up to 1953 coup d état which seeks to unveil the role of translation in these journals in improving social awareness among Iranian women. In order to discover the importance of translation as a vessel, the existing copies of all published issues of seven women’s journals were collected from the Iran Parliament Library (Majlis) and National Library. Yet, this paper elaborates on the data of two of the seven journals at socio-historical and thematic/textual levels and compares them considering the national and international socio-historical context of the time such as emerging events related to women population across the world from east to west. Studying the relationship between these translations and socio-historical conditions of the time revealed that the main themes of the translated materials in these regularly published journals were mostly politicized in favor of certain ideologies. Thus, the findings so far support our hypothesis that remarkably induced by the socio-political conditions of the then Iran, translation played a critical role in making Iranian women socially aware and re-defining female identity.