Translation and Gender places recent work in translation against the background of the women's movement and its critique of "patriarchal" language. It explains translation practices derived from experimental feminist writing, the development of openly interventionist translation practices, the initiative to retranslate fundamental texts such as the Bible, translating as a way of recuperating writings "lost" in patriarchy, and translation history as a means of focusing on women translators of the past.

Luise von Flotow has published literary translations from German and French since the 1980s. Her interest in Christa Wolf and the re-translation of Der geteilte Himmel stems from her family background (origins in the northeast of Germany), extensive research and travel in East Germany (1986-1990), and the discovery and study of the existing translation (Divided Heaven 1965, Seven Seas Verlag, East Berlin.)

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Von Flotow's translation strategy addresses a number of the stylistic inaccuracies of the Becker translation, for example in the maintenance of a fluid, shifting narrative voice much more similar to that of Wolf's German text… She returns for the variation of tenses and pronouns used by Wolf, upholding the shifting temporality of the narration that helps to keep the continuing feeling of anxiety and lack of closure in the text. Her translation also more successfully maintains the variety of voices and registers that creates the text’s heteroglossia and destabilizes the narrator's authority... Where Becker's translation omits or weakens comments that are troubling or ambivalent, von Flotow seeks to maintain these and uses language that reflects the problematic nature of the vocabulary in the German text. Caroline Summers, University of Leeds, “World Authorship as a Struggle for Consecration: Christa Wolf and Der geteilte Himmel in the English-Speaking World”, Seminar, vol. 51, no 2, p. 148-169.