Reconstructing colonial femininities in the English translations of Bumi Manusia

As one of Indonesia's canonical novels, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Bumi Manusia takes part in world literature through translation, carrying literary representations of colonial society and gender power dynamics. Among these representations, women hold unequal positions in the colonial hierarchy, ranging from the idealized image of European femininity to the oppressed image of Indigenous women. Moreover, when the novel is translated into English, these literary constructions are unavoidably reconstructed, raising questions about how colonial femininities are mediated for global readers. This study hence aims to examine how the English translations of Bumi Manusia reconstruct the colonial femininities through imagined colonial feminine ideal such as Queen Wilhelmina and the socially marginalized native woman such as Nyai Ontosoroh. With reference to Postcolonial Feminist theory, this qualitative study adopts comparative textual analysis through which selected passages from the Indonesian text and their English translations are analyzed. This includes the published translation by Max Lane, This Earth of Mankind, and AI-assisted translations generated by Google Translate, DeepL, and ChatGPT prompted with literary contextual guidance. The analysis examines the representation of femininity, colonial hierarchy, and female agency in each text. The findings indicate that the English translations produce different forms of colonial femininity through different lexical and stylistic means, varying representations of women’s symbolic position within the colonial structure. While colonial feminine ideal largely preserves her image of perfection and authority throughout the translations, Nyai Ontosoroh’s portrayal varies especially in the sense of dignity, agency, and social position. These differences demonstrate that translation is not only a means of linguistic transfer but rather a form of literary production that influences how colonial femininity in Indonesia is perceived by the global readers. The study emphasizes the significance of maintaining literary and ideological nuances as Indonesian literature circulates beyond its national context.