Three Keys to Equitable Translations

You may have filled out a form online recently in which you were asked which pronouns you preferred. This may come as quite a shock to some cis males or females who feel and look congruent with traditional American gender roles. Apart from that one drunk guy at the New Years' party that one time, everyone has always called you he, or she - as the case may be. But the times they are a-changin'. Now you must decide which pronouns you wish others to use, to stick with him, or her - as the case may be - or to prefer Zer, or their, or our if one is the Queen.?

?

Pronouns

In this climate, when you hear about gender issues in translation, the first thing that probably comes to mind are pronouns. You may be forgiven if you think Latinxs or Latin@s refer to nightclubs - or you may already know that pronouns in Spanish default to the male (Latinos) even if the group contains a thousand females and one male or unknown. There is a move to change this, which is stronger in some Spanish-speaking contexts than in others. There is another level of gender concern beyond pronouns and that is one of formality. For example, romance languages have two forms of the second person 'you'. In French, the you 'vous' from "repondez s'il vous plait" (RSVP) is as formal as it sounds, whereas the you 'tu' (same in Spanish with an accent) is informal. To use tu with a married female supervisor of a certain age would be like calling her girl instead of ma'am. Other languages make extensive use of honorifics (the -san in "yes, sir, Director Gatessan") and diminutives. If you've ever been frustrated by the hundreds of characters in classic Russian novels, know that half of them are diminutive forms of the main characters' names. Are males the recipients of all the honorifics and females of all the diminutives in the translation?

?

Register

The register of speech is related to the issue of formality. A classic example is the children's game, "we're going on a trip and we're taking an apple, a banana, a cucumber..." Since English has Germanic roots (you might take a trek) and Latin routes (you would take a journey) we have at least two registers to choose from for whatever we want to say. The Latin register has higher status because the Normans (French) were the lords of the manor in England post-1066. If I translated the game above as,?"we're going on a voyage and we're taking..." it would ring false (old-fashioned in this case) because a child would not use that register of speech in that context. Are males speaking in the higher registers and females in the lower registers more often in the translation?

?

Subjectivity

In this context, we do not mean subjective as the opposite of objective in the sense of bias, but rather in the sense of agency. The passive voice is, of course, one obvious way that the person doing the action can be obscured. But issues of agency, just like of register, can propagate throughout the syntax of a translation. Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of one's Own, "But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money." (emphasis ours) Federici & Leonardi show that translations that deemphasize the fault in 'amends' and emphasize the agency of 'can' promote a strong narrator and authorial voice. (2012) Is the translation attentive to the amount of agency allowed any given gender by the source text (ST)??

?

Gender issues in translation may seem a vexatious topic at present and a bit of a moving target, but it is important enough to warrant the effort. Luckily, there are translation services, even in the technological sector, who are attentive to equity concerns such as gender. Contact us if you are interested in learning more about these and other paratextual elements of translation.?

?

Reference

Federici & Leonari (2012). "Using and Abusing Gender in Translation. The Case of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own Translated into Italian1". Quaderns. Revista de Traducció (19). Pp. 183-198

?

?