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

[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.