Gender issues

This volume aims at bridging the gap existing between LSP translation and gender issues, offering a broad view of research on translation and gender/sexuality, LSP and the professional world. The purpose is to broaden the discussion on gender awareness in specialized language and translation, and to pinpoint gender issues in audiovisual translation, to analyse gendered language in the media and advertising, and last but not least, to consider gender differences reiterated through language in specific domains.

The volume is divided into five sections, all of them dealing with specific gender issues which characterize modern-day society: Gender issues in higher education; Gender issues in institutional documents; Gender issues in specialized translation; Gender issues in interpreting and audiovisual translation; and Gender issues in the press and advertising.

The first section of the volume, Gender issues in higher education, is introduced by Jose Santaemilia’s chapter which focuses on how specialized translation classrooms can be exploited to show the implications deriving from gender and sexual inequalities and, at the same time, to teach students how to reflect on a critical and gender-fair use of translation. Based on teaching experience at the University of Valencia, the chapter describes the pedagogical approaches adopted regarding specialized translation to reveal the way in which gender awareness can be constructed in students, who can then investigate the linguistic patterns of the source language, including the androcentric perspective, as well as the feminist translation strategies and pedagogies employed. This results in the understanding that a good translation is one that necessitates the translator’s ethos of personal responsibility, going beyond requirements of faithfulness and neutrality, to achieve gender equality.

An interesting viewpoint is offered by Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri who explain how L2 speakers acquire gender-awareness in language use when they are faced with differences in the way in which grammatical gender is realized across languages, especially when the texts under analysis belong to the political or institutional domains. Their investigation, based on interlinguistic translations of Italian university students with a C1 English level, demonstrates how speakers’ awareness of gender-related issues and their ideological load can be elicited when translating from one language to another, a process which requires the adoption of certain decisions, for instance the choice of professional vs. institutional roles.

Paolo Nitti’s research focuses on non-sexist uses in the Italian language and on the adoption of non-sexist teaching practices in the language by the teaching staff of schools of every academic level. More specifically, his investigation tries to detect what relationship exists between gender and concordance as described in Italian grammar from a prescriptive, pedagogical or descriptive perspective. The results suggest that in most cases the concordance choice depends on the speaker rather than on the norm, according to the socio-historical and cultural context. This study seems to be relevant particularly in the development of new teaching practices and lesson plans in secondary schools, where, in particular, non-sexist awareness should be taught.

When it comes to gender inequalities, Elena Castellano Ortolà wonders whether the fight for civil rights has truly achieved changes in society through legislation. With this question in mind, the author comments on this topic from a Canadian perspective. More precisely, she investigates on gender-inclusive writing in Quebec, by considering national and regional institutions, as well as the academic world, which in Quebec plays an institutional role. The analysis, carried out with an overview dating back to the 1900s, shows how the debate on feminism and language and the related fight for civil rights (both of women and Quebeckers) has been so relevant for this Province that the Bureau de la Traduction was created in 1934 (though fully regulated by the Translation Bureau Regulations only in 1985) to guarantee linguistic gender equality. However, both the Bureau de la Traduction and the Translation Bureau Regulations, despite working together to deal with various issues, gender equality and civil rights included, seem to be looking for their own voice and identity within intralingual translation.

A similar and yet different overview on the Canadian political integration policies is offered by Federico Pio Gentile’s contribution which focuses on women’s condition and equity over the last century. Basing his investigation on the Canadian Employment Equity Act (adopted in 1995 and last amended in 2014), the study describes the main features of the Act that entail the document to be classified within the field of legal discourse. It also takes into consideration issues enhancing neutrality of communication in relation to gender-neutral formulations in legal terms. These are then evaluated from a translation angle with an intra-linguistic approach, with a focus on the codification processes occurring within the same language for the purpose of analyzing the extent to which information is transmitted at different communicative levels without any connotative implicature.

The third part of this volume, Gender issues in specialized translation, opens with the contribution by Sonja Đurić and Radiša Pavlović who in their study investigate LSP translating traditions in the field of health research in Serbia. In particular, they focus on the documents accompanying medicines and drugs approved by the Medicine and Medical Devices Agency of Serbia (ALIMS) which are very often written in English. They note that if the word ‘patient’ appears in the Pharmacological properties the translation offered in Serbian tends to prefer the variant pacijent (a male patient) rather than pacijentkinja (a female patient), despite the fact that the medicine or medical device is registered for the treatment of the female population as well, confirming the trend in Serbian LSP translations of using male nouns at the expense of female nouns even though the (grammatical) context would require it.

A change in social attitude can be expected when gender awareness enters the realms that have traditionally been based on male culture for centuries. This seems the case of the armed forces as shown by Carmen Fiano and Agnese Grimaldi who explore the role of the gender advisor to ensure gender equality within NATO. More precisely, they analyze how the term gender advisor as employed in the English version of NATO documents is rendered in the official documents of the Italian armed forces. While the English term has entered the Italian language as a loanword, the authors reveal that the Italian use of the word shows some variation, as, for instance, a tendency to add an explanatory phrase or a translation in non-official documents: the different roles played by women inside the military field seem to be responsible for the addition of lexicon to an already varied linguistic vocabulary.

Deborah Giustini’s contribution opens the fourth section of the volume with contributions concerning Gender issues in interpreting and audiovisual translation. This sociological investigation offers a comparison between conference interpreting in the UK and in Japan from the gender viewpoint. If conference interpreting is in general seen as a female profession because of women’s supposed higher mastery and neuro-cognitive abilities involved in interpreting tasks, in Japan, in particular, conference interpreting is a profession perceived for women, both in terms of expertise and of a (servile) attitude towards customers. Indeed, the educational, social, and cultural constraints embracing internalized gender stereotypes seem responsible for pushing women into the profession. If so, conference interpreting seems to accomplish the discriminatory dynamics against women in the labour market as well as reinforce societal gender norms.

Francesco Vitucci’s study, too, is centred around Japanese society. In this case, however, attention is paid to onē kotoba, a transgender/transex/crossdresser idiolect and how this register is translated in audiovisual realizations from Japanese into Italian. Given that onē kotoba is marked by diageneric variation in Japanese, the subtitler faces grammatical and lexical clashes in the Italian version to such an extent that the target language must be significantly implemented with compensation strategies or omissions. As a consequence, any male-female dichotomy must be substituted with a gender identity culturally constructed, in which onē kotoba may emerge as a lexical, morpho-syntactical and prosodic granularity.

The debate over the translator’s (in)visibility is the focus of Flavia Cavaliere’s contribution, which is centred around the role Anne Goldstein has in translating Elena Ferrante’s novels. Not only have Ann Goldstein’s translations of Elena Ferrante’s novels granted Ferrante huge success on the English market, but they have also allowed Goldstein herself to acquire a celebrity status as a translator, facilitated by Ferrante’s decision to remain anonymous and by Goldstein’s presence at the numerous press conferences organized for Ferrante, which Ferrante herself has not attended. Goldstein is indeed regarded as one of the preeminent Italian translators to such an extent that some critics consider her translations as better than the original text in Italian. This seems to be confirmed by the ability with which Goldstein overcomes some translation challenges, testified to in this investigation.

A different viewpoint is proposed by Maria Iasenza who investigates Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) with particular regard to Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and the subsequent global economic crisis. The perspective offered is gender-based: the narrative of this financial crisis is analyzed from a socio-linguistic angle on the basis of male and female journalists’ reports of the global crises collected from an Italian corpus of newspapers and British ones: a contrastive examination of lexical, morpho-syntactical and semantical differences is carried out in both lay and specialized news, showing interesting results in terms of generic idiolects.

The contribution by Maria Mucia Carrillo Exposito, too, hinges on newspaper corpora. Basing her study on an Italian and a Spanish corpus of newspaper articles, the author analyzes the term transfobia and its variants repeatedly appearing in the media and in political discourse. The study reveals that -fobia can be defined as an internationalized word for its semantic conciseness and for its reader-friendly comprehensibility. Similarly, the neologisms formed with the suffix -fobia found in the investigated texts testify to a global society and at the same time display lexical tendencies and attitudes in the two languages. This calls for carefulness in usage preferences when these terms are employed in news texts.

An interesting perspective is offered by Saida Afef Gardabbou’s study, a preliminary survey of gendered narratives in a selection of advertisements from a feminist and activist perspective on cross cultural ad transformations as a form of translation, presenting how women are represented in such countries as Qatar, Tunisia, Sweden, and the U.S. It reveals some findings about the differences between the portrayals of women in different countries and how these were reshaped to fit within a new cultural milieu. It also refers to the various constraints encountered by feminist translators and discusses the extent to which involvement in a feminist translation activity through parody ads can overcome these constraints.

Last, but not least, Eleonora Federici offers an interesting perspective about the presence of transgender people in advertising campaigns worldwide. While advertising is one of most interesting domains where gender roles assume a meaning resulting from the networked relations of images and words legitimizing gendered social relations and identities, the question is how transgender people are represented, made visible and thus considered in commercial ads. The analysis, carried out from diachronic and Anglo-Saxon perspectives and with a multimodal approach, shows how the representation of transgender people has changed according to social and political contexts.