“Then if it’s not him you mean, it must be her”: Gender determinacy and indeterminacy in Chinese-Spanish literary translation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/trt.27.2023.16208Keywords:
translation, gender, Chinese, SpanishAbstract
Unlike Spanish nouns, Chinese nouns show no grammatical gender. Spanish and Chinese use sign and function in different ways, and this creates difficulties for translators working with these languages. This becomes clear when translating nouns referring to people, and when the original text in Chinese does not describe gender information that the Spanish translation must specify. This paper seeks to shed light on the formulas used in Chinese to determine gender information that in Spanish is expressed through morphology. We identify the gaps that occur when gender determination is not available, and the translator needs to add new information that was not in the original text. Through the analysis of a corpus of seven Chinese short stories translated into Spanish, we confirm a tendency to resolve indeterminacy in an imbalanced way that prioritize masculine forms, as well as translational decisions that promote or consolidate stereotypes from the target culture.
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