Translation and women’s health in post-reform China

The post-1979 socio-economic reforms in People’s Republic China have created new opportunities for Chinese women’s self-mobilization and self-consciousness. After the 1995 Beijing U.N. Conference on women, Chinese scholars started to examine health through a gender lens. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo emphasized the significance of women’s sexual and reproductive health to social development. Unlike in Taiwan where many commercial health books for women had been translated into Chinese, women’s sexual and reproductive health in the 1980s and 1990s mainland China was viewed mostly through the lens of population control. However, the international conferences and the activities of foreign funding agencies in China have facilitated translation flows of texts on women’s health, gender, and social equity into China. This chapter presents a case study of the translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves, by a Chinese feminist NGO in the late 1990s. This case study reveals issues of domestication and culturally sensitive adaptation of women’s health communication texts. More importantly, it demonstrates the limitation of US health feminism when it travels to a new cultural context through translation, and calls for future attention on how to make translated feminist texts more distributable in the target society.