In this essay Chamberlain focuses on the gender metaphors that have recurred in leading translation theorists since the seventeenth century, demonstrating the enormous extent to which a patriarchal model of authorship has underwritten the subordinate status of translation. Chamberlain suggests how a feminist concern with gender identities might be productive for translation studies, particularly in historical research that recovers forgotten translating women, but also in translation projects that are sensitive to ideologically coded foreign writing, whether feminist or masculinist.