Aspects of translating gender

By U. Nissen. 2002

40 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grammatical gender and the related concept, 'social gender', are important linguistic categories which, in this article, are used to illustrate that the translation process is not only a 'cross-cultural transfer' but also a cross-ideological transfer. By departing from the view that different languages reflect different ways of perceiving reality, it is argued here that the linguistic structure of languages with regard to gender (i.e. grammatical vs. pronominal gender), as well as different connotations of gender, have a considerable influence upon the translation process and, hence, on how the reader of the target language is meant to perceive reality. The article emphasizes the importance of the translator's role in analyzing gender aspects in the source text and determining the ideological impact gender connotations may have in both the source and the target text.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Language and Linguistics, Machine Translation, Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Hal Daumé Iii
2. Yang Trista Cao

In Language and Linguistics

1. Marco Turchi
2. Hal Daumé Iii
3. Matteo Negri
4. Yang Trista Cao

In Machine Translation

1. Matteo Negri
2. Marco Turchi
3. Hal Daumé Iii
4. Yang Trista Cao
5. Juan Pino
6. Changhan Wang
7. Yun Tang
8. Anne Wu

In Linguistics

1. Hal Daumé Iii
2. Yang Trista Cao

Citations in the corpus

• Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution (2019, methodology): “This can lead to significant biases in coreference resolution systems: cases where systems “systematically and unfairly discriminate against certain individuals or groups of individuals in favor of others” [Friedman and Nissenbaum 1996, p. 332]. Gender bias in coreference resolution can manifest in ”
• Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle* (2021, background): “Some languages have no grammatical gender at all; English is generally seen as one (viewing that referential agreement of personal pronouns does not count as a form of grammatical agreement, a view which we follow, but one that is contested (Nissen 2002; Baron 1971; Bjorkman 2017)).”
• Gender Bias in Machine Translation (2021, background): “In the lack of any available information, translators of five grammatical gender languages represented the character as either a man or a woman (Wandruszka, 1969; Nissen, 2002).”