subject: Translation And Gender [print this page] In recent years, a considerable volume of academic literature and researches in the field of translation are being focused on the concept of gender in translation. According to Chamberlain (1998: 96), the issues relating to gender in the practice of translation are myriad, varying widely according to the type of text being translated, the language involved, cultural practices and countless other factors. Von Flotow (2001) offers a comprehensive overview of research areas in which the issue of gender and translation could be investigated:
Historical studies
Theoretical considerations
Issues of identity
Post-colonial questions
More general questions of cultural transfer
Whereas most of researches done regarding gender in translation have dealt specifically with the issue of the translators gender identity and its effect on their translations, the main focus of current article is on how gender itself is translated and produced. Following paragraphs will try to clarify what gender is, how gender manifest itself in grammatical and social systems of language, and what problems translators encounter when translating or producing gender-related materials.
Most linguists consider gender as a grouping of nouns into classes of masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter such that the choice of a noun of a given class syntactically has an effect on the form of some other word or element of the sentence or discourse, languages with a grammatical gender system categorize nouns into gender classes on the basis of morphological or phonological features. However, while many believe that a grammatical gender system does not have connection with extralinguistic category of sex, Corbett (1991), the author of Cambridge textbook of Gender, acknowledges that grammatical gender system is not merely a morphological system, but it has also a semantic basis which becomes obvious, particularly, in gender assignment to human (agent) nouns, where most nouns referring to women are feminine, and those referring to men are masculine).
Grammatical gender may cause translators some difficulties when they translate from source languages in which gender is differently grammaticalized compared with the target language. These difficulties may be particularly intensified when grammatical gender coincides with the sex of the referent; for example when the source language shows no gender distinction in the first-person pronoun but grammatical gender agreement patterns which may produce the effect of gendered self-reference through gender concord, and the target language shows not only no gender distinction in the first person pronoun, but also no grammatical gender agreement.
Where grammatical gender is a category with syntactic consequences throughout the grammar, English is said to show semantic gender, i.e. the nouns English speakers refer to as she are assumed to possess a biologically [or socially] feminine semantic property in the real world.
The distinction between social and biological gender (sex) as two different, but, however, interdependent, semantic levels is one of the most crucial factors in the discussion of gender. These two semantic levels of gender are often inaccurately conflated with each other. Where (social) gender usually refers to a socially constructed system of classification that, regardless of external genitalia, attributes qualities of masculinity and femininity to people, sex (natural/biological gender) refers to physical and biological characteristics of a person based on their anatomy.
Social gender and gender stereotypes
The assignment of social gender is chiefly on the basis of a stereotypical classification. Cameron (1988) defines stereotyping as an act which involves a reductive tendency: to stereotype someone is to interpret their behavior, personality and so on in terms of a set of common-sense attributions which are applied to whole groups.
The Effects of Societal, Chronological and Contextual Factors
According to Cameron (2003), ideologies of language and gender are specific to their time and place: they vary across cultures and historical periods, and they are inflected by representations of other social characteristics (p. 452). Under influence of these socio-historical characteristics, (social) gender is now viewed as a fluctuating variable over time which could be placed within or between societies and cultures.
Societal and cultural factors play an important role in understanding the fluid and dynamic nature of social gender. As Romaine (1999) maintains, different cultures vary in their expectations about what it means to be a man or woman; therefore, they may have different systems of stereotypical classification for gender. She refers to the handbooks traditionally written by both men and women in western societies in which expectations of what it means to be a man or woman are expressed, and argues that these expectations may vary across different societies and cultures: When used by different persons in different cultures, Romaine (1999) explains, the same linguistic features can, often mean very different things.
In languages that are said to have a pronominal gender system, gender is marked solely on personal pronouns. English has a pronominal gender system based on semantic criteria that is reflected only in personal possessive and reflexive third-person pronouns. The use of he, she and it is determined by simple principles: male humans are masculine (he), female humans are feminine (she) and anything else is neuter (it).
Translating pronouns between languages that encode gender differently in their pronoun systems has been always problematic: whereas some languages, like Persian, do not encode gender distinctions in their pronoun system at all.
As briefly depicted above, languages may differ greatly in the way they encode the category of gender in their lexical and grammatical systems. They may also differ in the expectations of their relevant cultures concerning what is meant by gender. We all know that every translation inevitably entails making a number of choices; moreover, there is a strategy behind every choice, and a reason behind every strategy. Little is known about possible choices, possible strategies, or possible reasons involving in the process of translation in situations in which there are linguistic or cultural gender discrepancies between the two languages involved; therefore, the study of gender translation seems to be an interesting area of research in Translation studies in the future.
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