Date: Thursday, March 12

Time: 17:00

Format: online Zoom access code 655792

Speaker: Valentina Marta-Rodríguez

Summary:

Since the annals of history, misogynistic stereotypes have been present in our society influenced by religious, cultural, social and patriarchal perceptions, and in which the role of translation was capital for the dissemination of this knowledge. These stereotypes came to occupy a large part of the most famous treatises and scientific manuals, exercising total medical violence against women. This is how, traditionally, some ailments have been exclusively or predominantly associated with the female sex, often approached from an approach that subordinated women's bodies and minds to notions of fragility, emotional instability or irrationality. All this helped to implant in the social imaginary an endless number of prejudices and gender stereotypes that perpetuated the consideration of women as the weaker sex and where the practice of translation contributed to these perceptions. These notions are nothing more than the result of archaic social and cultural constructions that reflect a limited understanding of the female sex, which helped to perpetuate, also through translation as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge, all these stereotypes of weakness and irrationality.

Biographical note:

Valentina Marta-Rodríguez is an assistant professor at the University of Vigo and a sworn interpreter by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. His research profile revolves around medical-legal translation and he is currently a member of GALMA (Galician Observatory for Media Accessibility), a group that advises the European Parliament. She is the author of numerous articles and has given conferences, both nationally and internationally. Her current lines of research are medical textual genres, the use of graphic novels and comics as didactic and pedagogical material and the study of gender through the history of translation. For almost twenty years she worked as a freelance  translator for important pharmaceutical laboratories, both in an exclusively medical-pharmaceutical and medical-legal framework. She specialises in the field of rare diseases in order to make patients who suffer from them visible and thus try to improve their quality of life through translated medical literature. He translated the first work in Spanish on occupational therapy for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy; as well as an extensive manual of more than 500 pages on spinal amyotrophies. She also worked as an advisor in the translation and drafting of medical documents (in Galician and Spanish) to obtain texts that are governed by idiomaticity and are legible for lay people. With his work he aims to vindicate the use of Galician and Spanish as languages of science and contributes to their development. He holds several poetry prizes and a collection of poems (Takotsubo: morfopatoloxía dun corazón roto) published by the Medulia publishing house. His career led him to receive the decoration of excellence of the Alumni-UVigo community in the humanistic field in July 2024.