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Gender: Translation Problems Due To Grammatical Gender

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Translation Problems Due to Grammatical Gender

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 (McConnell-Ginet, 2003: 89).

Nissen (2002: 27), for instance, presents an example in which source language (Spanish) shows grammatical gender syntactically in a way unavailable to target language (English), so that, difficulties arise for the translator as to how to convey the information about the sex of the person in question. He explains that in the first line of the following poem the first person reference ‘hago’ (‘I do’), in theory, could refer to both a male or female person, but in the second line this ambiguity is resolved, because the predicate construction reveals the sex of the referent: …show more content…

She states that in Spanish and many other European languages it is not possible to say something such as “you are tired” without indicating the sex of the person spoken to and the relationship the speaker has to the addressee. She explains that to say ‘estas cansada’ means not simply ‘you are tired’, but that the addressee is female (compare masculine ‘cansado’) and the speaker knows her well enough to address her in the intimate second person singular form (compare the polite form ‘esta’). The different male and female endings ‘-al, -o’ are gender displays or indexes (p.

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