Gender, translation, and the Imperial Radch

[kaberett]

Just about all of you have pointed me at Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages, for which I am grateful! But having told jedusaur I'd liked it give or take disagreeing with a couple of the approaches taken, I completely failed to actually elaborate on what those points of disagreement were.

Some useful context is probably my general attitude to gendered pronouns: my ideal is to have distinct pronouns for [some n greater than 2 specific genders], gender unknown, and gender irrelevant. My reading of the Imperial Radch book (and Alex-the-author-article agrees) that the pronouns used are gender-irrelevant; and, if it's the case that you've read neither book nor article, now's the point at which I'm going to note that the pronoun used (in English) is "she".

The titles used, though, are neutral-to-masculine, in that while military ranks are technically gender neutral in English, in the context of space opera my primary association with them -- my implicit assumption -- is masculine; and in that the head of state (pronouns are "she", remember) is titled the Lord of the Radch. So there's a dissonance set up, in English, between pronouns and titles, and to my mind it's entirely deliberate.

Naturally the thing I actually found gently perplexing is decisions relating to the translation into German, that being my area of modest expertise. For starters it's obvious to me that non-specialist nouns -- "a friend" -- should be in the feminine; job titles I'd be inclined to translate in the masculine (or create neuter forms of!), so Medic would be rendered der Arzt (not die Ärtzin), following the English. It's true that this would create unaccustomed dissonance to German readers, but it creates that dissonance in English to and, again, I think is very much the point.

And I think he misses the point again when he goes on to say

As far as I know, my translation is the first German language novel written in the generic feminine – with a few exceptions when the characters don't speak Radchaai. In some of these cases I even had to be more specific than the author, using the 'right' gender forms for persons that weren't marked in the English text. Luckily I had e-mail contact with the author, so we could clarify some ambiguities.

It is my (not terribly apologetic) view that where genders weren't marked in the English text, the generic feminine should have been used in German. Asking Leckie what the "right" forms were is to my mind a limiting and regressive decision: firstly in that it loses ambiguity present in the English that could have been preserved, and secondly because it has as (and enforces) a core assumption that gender in societies in contact with (or subsumed by) the Radch of necessity matches exactly to gender as constructed in the modern West. This is an important point: at no stage in the source texts are we told that these cultures are all segregated into precisely two genders, nor are we definitively told what they segregate based on. The narrative point of view focuses mostly on proxies such as dress, and where anatomy is used as a distinguishing feature it's never specified which anatomical features are considered important.

And, yes, I think that matters.

So! Fascinating article; glad it exists; I find the decisions made by the Bulgarian and Hungarian and Japanese translators very soothing. Just -- perhaps unsurprisingly, when it comes to the German, Alex Has Opinions.

Comments

[silveradept]

That makes sense - preserve as much ambiguity as possible, then default, if need be, to the "non-default" genders.

[vass]

*nodnodnod* There's a reason it took me so long to read that article. I was expecting something like what the German translator said, and it just... burns. Not like touched a hot stove or got set on fire, just a bad sunburn, but still.

[kaberett]

On the one hand I feel slightly bad for going "welp if you're gonna get a dude to do the translation..." and on the other I really don't.

[vass]

I'd be more heavily in the really don't camp with you if it weren't for all the ciswomen I've seen railing against Seivarden's "male privilege".

*curls up protectively around Seivarden, hissing*

(I keep wondering if what they're saying is, they cannot imagine themselves as behaving the same way she does on any other axis)

[sashajwolf]

I had the same thoughts about the German translation (I grew up in Germany). I think I also disagree with the Bulgarian translator's choice to create gender-neutral job titles, given the use of "Lord" and the military titles in the English original - sod it not matching with the feminine pronouns, and there were a couple of points where I wanted more context before deciding whether I agreed or not.

[kaberett]

Ha, yes, this is definitely a topic that I at least am always interested in More Detailed Discussion Of!

I'm a bit conflicted about the gender-neutral titles, though -- where gender neutrality is possible, I think that's broadly in keeping with the spirit of the English (Captain, Medic, Lieutenant, etc) in treating gender-as-irrelevant even if it's not in keeping with the practice of how it was done in the original? So *handwobble*, by which I mean "I do take your point and remain kind of indecisive on the topic, not least because I do keep sort of aggressively cobbling together neuter nouns to refer to myself in German so I find someone else doing that work a massive relief"...

[sashajwolf]

People creating gender-neutral nouns is in general a very good and useful thing, I agree, whether or not it's the best choice for conveying what this specific book does in English. I do think that in the English version of the novel, the use of "Lord" and the general military atmosphere that most people probably still parse as masculine despite knowing that female soldiers exist contribute to making the reader parse "she" as gender-neutral rather than feminine, so I worry that if you change the job titles to gender-neutral, many people will end up reading all the characters as female. Which is better, at our current stage of cultural development, than reading them all as male - but I don't think it's what the original was trying to do.

[davidgillon]

I pretty much am reading them all as female. I do know that intellectually some significant proportion of the characters are likely to be genetically male, but I'm damned if I can tell which ones they are. OTOH I'm not sure we have the clear distinction of genders we have currently. If Breq can't reliably tell gender, in cultures where gender still exists, then I think gender within the Radch has become something far more subtle than we're used to.

[sashajwolf]

I don't think you're supposed to be able to work out which characters are male or female; I certainly have no idea. I started out thinking of them as female by default, but by the end of the third book I was reading them as non-binary, which seems to be the closest Earth/English category to their experience.

[davidgillon]

That sounds about right to me. If your language doesn't cover gender roles/gender preconceptions, then can you actually be anything but non-binary?

[sashajwolf]

Probably, because strong Sapir-Whorf is false, but non-non-binary people would seem as strange to the mainstream as trans and non-binary people do to our mainstream. The Radch probably has people who have a strong sense that their identity is linked to their genitals, who have to make up their own words to describe that and are constantly having to hide from the authorities, who view them as dangerous deviants in need of re-education.

Darn, and now I want sequels about that, or failing that, some good fanfic.

[jedusaur]

Thanks for this post! Fascinating stuff to think about.

WRT being more specific than the original: bearing in mind that I don't speak German and don't really know what I'm talking about (and haven't read Mercy yet, so may not have all relevant information)... if the translator was referring to situations where gender is specified in dialogue, I think it does make sense to be specific about gender where the speakers are likely to be specific. It seems to me that preserving ambiguity doesn't make sense where the characters wouldn't be ambiguous--the rigidity of some non-Radchaai cultures with regards to gender is a fairly important element of the original.

[davidgillon]

Those seem like reasonable points, just not ones I entirely agree with.

Oddly I think I disagree most clearly with you on rank being predominantly male (the oddly for being male, plus probably the most militant person here, hell I almost was an officer cadet at one point). Maybe it's too much Honor Harrington and knowing women who've been officers/were going off to be officers, but I do read rank as gender neutral.

WRT titles, I think I'd follow the language in use. With the doctor in the first book, the one with the Presger gun, they're outside the Radch and using local language, I'd be inclined to gender it if that's the way local language would do it - which would be a valid [consult Leckie] question. For Mercy of Kalr's medic in the second two books, they're using Radch, I'd go with the closest we can get, which for English is the gender neutral 'doctor', but for German, I'd argue the closest to Radchaai conventions is die Ärtzin.

I think I do agree with you on the generic feminine, near universal gender ambiguity makes the few instances in which people are gendered all the more shocking. I was deeply thrown when Breq gendered Uran as 'he', a single line of Delsig in a conversation where Uran is otherwise referred to as she, my conception of them was completely female until that point (which may of course have been premeditated authorial intent).

[kaberett]

Interesting tumblr follow-up from people who know Hungarian!