She/he/they/we: gender-inclusive language when translating
This is perhaps a slightly unusual TOLEDO Dispatch: somewhat to my embarrassment, I realised when reflecting on what to write about that the most intriguing and generative discussion about translation that I’ve been privy to in the last few months wasn’t part of any of the translation exchanges I’ve participated in here in the UK, but was a conversation I got to eavesdrop on abroad.
In May, I was in Prague the weekend of Svět knihy Praha, a book festival which, this year, had a focus on German-language literature. I’ll confess, I spent most of my time at the festival looking for (and eventually finding) an ice cream stall, but I also went along to a panel discussion on translating inclusive language. I’d expected a broad-ranging conversation on a topic translators often land on: how to translate a text with political sensitivity when the source text doesn’t demonstrate that sensitivity itself. Instead, I found myself listening to a discussion about an issue which, as a translator into English, I’m rarely confronted with: how to translate gender-inclusive language into languages which are inherently gendered.
On stage were Lucie Bregantová and Jana van Luxemburg, who had translated into Czech the US sci-fi author Becky Chambers, who is well-known for her inclusive, queer world building, and Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch, a German Book Prize winner with an unnamed non-binary protagonist. Both translators encountered a number of challenges with these texts; while most languages are more gendered than English—with its mercifully ungendered adjectives and nouns—Slavic languages also gender verbs in the past tense.
I stood at the back of the crowded tent, live texting the discussion to a friend, Nimmo. There were some fascinating solutions; Bregantová had ended up using collective nouns for both plural and singular so as to avoid gender, and now uses this approach in her everyday language as well. She also, with Becky Chambers’ agreement, switched the entire narrative of A Psalm for the Wild-Built (the protagonists of which are a non-binary human with they/them pronouns and a robot which uses the pronoun it) into the present tense, to avoid the problem of gendered verbs.
Nimmo, half an hour later: So I still don’t get the tense thing
Me: Oh, there are two important things to know here. Firstly, in Slavic languages you don’t always need to include the subject of the verb
Nimmo: So what my question is. Surely there must be a better solution cause non-binary folk living there must use the past tense
Me: Ah. Yeah. It’s basically a solution for novels, not for real life
It was a point I kept coming back to. So often as translators we reach for the solutions which are least jarring, which won’t bemuse or irritate readers, which won’t stand out. And yet language is fluid, it changes, and at first those changes are jarring. (This doesn’t have to be political: the word ‘jeggings’ still makes me shudder.) But when it comes to the topic of inclusivity, we can and should help to push language forward, even if it’s at the risk of our finished translations reading—on first publication—as that bit less smooth.
This doesn’t mean that translators need to be at the forefront of finding solutions ‘for real life’. The queer community have already developed innovative and creative approaches to gendered language, but these often haven’t yet filtered into mainstream use. This was brought home to me the week after my trip to Prague; I was visiting German friends and found myself having to hold a short seminar on gendered language and neo-pronouns every time I wanted to mention my (non-binary) flatmate. It wasn’t that I had to convince my friends of the necessity of gender-inclusive language; they had simply rarely encountered it, and so weren’t sure how to use it. Between us, we muddled through, using names instead of pronouns where we could, trying out neo-pronouns, re-working sentences to avoid gendered nouns. I couldn’t help but wonder whether these conversations would have felt that bit less jarring, that bit more familiar, if more authors and translators were in conversation with the queer community and were brave enough to help to normalise the innovative and inclusive language that this community has pioneered.
Two months later, that event in Prague is one I’m still thinking about. Translators are often considered as working in isolation. This has never been my experience, but I wonder what it would mean to work more consciously in and with community: what that might look like and what it could mean for the texts we translate and the readers that find them.
