An interesting question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Claire asked Ann Leckie:
Hello. I wondered if you were aware of the fact that in the french translation of Ancillary, Breq is male ?

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Doesn't French require everything to have gender?

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Grammatical gender is different from actual gender. Nouns have to have gender, but their grammatical gender may not be the same as the gender of the thing described, if it has any. In French, some examples are (cribbed from the Web):
bébé "baby" is always masculine, even if the word is used to refer to a baby girl. Here is a list of words that behave in the same way:
Une vedette "a star" is always feminine.
Un guide "a guide" is always masculine.
Une personne "a person" is always feminine.
Une victime "a victim" is always feminine.

So saying "il est une victime" is perfectly grammatical and correct French.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

It's possible one could argue that the singular, subjective pronoun on is effectively not gendered, because it's explicitly a pronoun for indeterminate(ly gendered) subjects.

On the other hand, agreement with on accords with the masculine form, so one could argue that "it's just masculine by default".

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I realized in the shower that adjectives are actually the problem. You can't use any form of "I am tired" because "tired" would have to have the same gender as the subject. I don't know if you could write natural French using only "on" as the subject. In any case, "Breq was tired" has the same problem.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

on is tricky in French, and we don't really have an idiomaticly similar English pronoun. We say it's "one", and that gets close, but "on" is in much wider use than most English speakers would use "one".

To paraphrase from (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French/Grammar/Pronouns#The_pronoun_on), French uses it for:

- Generalities about behaviour or identity ("To be a writer, one must write")

- Implicit subject for infinitive verbs ("penser qu'on a raison" --> the behaviour of believing oneself to be correct)

- Empty subjects in passive construction where agency is unimportant ("on me l'a donné" --> "where did you get that towel?" "Oh, somebody gave it to me.")

- Informal substitute for inclusive plural addressing: ("on y vas?" --> "let's go, now?")

That said, it really doesn't mean "one" where we have that overloaded in English -- it fills this really handy niche of expression where the subject's identity or gender might be assumed, contextually known, but really is not important, whereas, in English, it feels like we use "one" for indeterminate subjects but precisely where the identity is important ... that is, we use it as a polite way of saying "you, yes you", or "me, yes me"... for example "One really should be careful where one puts one feet, shouldn't one?"

I'm not sure that French uses "on" idiomatically that way much at all. But it's been a looooong time, and I'm not a native speaker, so I could easily be wrong.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Quite a few other languages have that problem--Spanish and German, for instance. Slavic languages also gender verbs, I've learned, as do Semitic languages.

This causes problems for translators, and several have contacted me to ask me questions about my intentions, and I've generally said that if possible, when in doubt please default to feminine forms.

Sometimes translators do not contact me to ask, they just decide what they think will be best. I generally assume they know their business, but I must admit this is the second time I've heard about a particular translation choice that I found...questionable.

I suspect both Spanish and French translators faced very similar problems (both Romance languages after all) and yet the Spanish translator managed to use default feminine. (The less said about the Italian translation on that score, the better, or so I hear. I do not read Italian and do not have any members of my household who do, unlike Spanish.)

And it's out of my hands. [indiscreet, somewhat angry couple of sentences redacted]

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I'm really sorry. Bad translators are amazingly bad. Didn't somebody (Bujold???) discover that the French translator had chosen to interpolate text from another place?

Good translators add notes at the front. This may be only an academic thing, but I've seen books' "Translator's Note" say things like "You can't really represent the difference between tu/vous in English, so I've used first name / last name to try to convey the difference" and "There's no good way to render [x] important word, so I've used this phrase:"

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I have mostly had really positive experiences with translators. I didn't expect how much I would enjoy that, or that it would even be part of having a book published--the chance to talk to some of the translators has been awfully cool, and for the most part I trust they made the best choice for the language they're working in. Two out of two dozen isn't bad, considering.

Also, most of my contracts say specifically that text can't be interpolated from elsewhere! I wondered why that was ("really? why would anyone do that???") and I guess now I know!

[ian wright (from livejournal.com)]

I read a Tumblr exchange between Diane Duane and Peter Morwood where they were discussing a German (? I'm pretty sure it was a German publisher) who was earning a bit of extra money by inserting ads for canned soup into translated books. I would guess the No Interpolated Text clause is the result of that or similar incidents.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

It was Heyne, and the most famous example was in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett. And it wasn't just an advert on the page, it was sentences interpolated in several consecutive paragraphs about a character being hungry and making and eating the soup.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

I heard Terry tell that story.

I have the Heyne translation of Guards, Guards, but don't read German well enough to see if they did it in that one, too.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I've heard about that happening with the German translation of John M. Ford's The Final Reflection. "Sometimes while rampaging around the galaxy, you just want to take a few minutes out to have a nice quiet cup of soup." Or words to that effect.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the German translator, who I met at Loncon, and got to talk to about the problems of translating AJ to German, did indeed include a forward talking about the problems and the choices he'd made. I am unsurprised, though, he struck me as a pretty smart and excellent person.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

There's a huge debate in manga translation about what to do with Japanese honorifics. The first name/last name thing doesn't work because that also conveys information. Translating them to Mr, Mrs. etc. works if all the characters are adults, but it comes across as weird in English if a teenager refers to a classmate as Miss Suzumiya. And leaving them out entirely erases nuance. The general consensus these days seems to be to leave honorifics untranslated as long as the story is set in Japan, but to translate or ignore them as seems appropriate when dealing with alternate and future settings or non-Japanese countries.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Happy fun extra stuff I've discovered the hard way (being monolingual):

* In Japanese, second person narrative is received as very rude/obnoxious/hectoring.

* German has real problems with some English conditional tense constructions: as you will have realized, English has got this tinker-toy toolkit for constructing tenses that simply don't exist in German.

* Gender issues (of course) -- many languages lack a neuter/gender-indeterminate

There are probably other gotchas; is it possible to write a story in English that is a universal pain in the ass to translate? ;-)

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

is it possible to write a story in English that is a universal pain in the ass to translate?

Don't tempt me! I've got too much on my schedule as it is. :D

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

The problem with Japanese is that they don't just have a formal and informal second person pronoun -- they have probably a dozen variations, each one indicating the social status of the speaker and listener, and using the wrong one sounds either condescending or mocking. The Japanese typically either leave "you" out of sentences, leaving it implied by context, or address the listener directly by name.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

They also seem to resort to using the third person a lot where most languages would use the first or second person. For instance, in the anime "Say I Love You," the male lead asks the girl he's interested in out on a date by saying the Japanese equivalent of "Would Mei Tachibana [her name] like to go out with me?" Apparently choosing among the several different Japanese equivalents of "you" (each of which has different social and hierarchical implications) can be really fraught with potential faux pas unless you're talking to someone you already know really well to begin with.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's why "Kimi," "Anata," is the classic husband-wife lovey-dovey exchange.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Write a story where the protagonist is an incompetent translator who starts a war by translating something wrong. Fill it with plot-significant loan words from other languages whose meaning has changed in English, and puns.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that a sub-plot in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy at some point?

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

"My hovercraft is full of eels!"

[jamoche]

I've heard James Joyce presents interesting challenges to translators.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

It's bad enough for native speakers.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

When I was in Vienna a few years ago, I found a German translation of Finnegans Wake but as I was about to embark on a long walk and it was a big book and as my hotel was close by, I thought I'd leave it for later. When I returned, they appeared to have sold out.

I do have a German translation of Ulysses.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Tangentially, Finnish has non-gendered pronouns ("hän" for persons, "se" for "it") only. Which, apparently, sometimes causes headaches to translators when dealing with stories that play tricks with obfuscating various characters' gender and so on.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I believe it is possible to get round specific gender in French--Anna Livia's monograph discusses several texts that do it--but in any case it's unfortunate that this translator didn't respect authorial wishes.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

And, on some more discussion of the specifics of what the translator did do, I'm actually intrigued by his choices and kind of like that he did what he did. My first reaction to "Breq as masculine" was negative, but actually I really think the translator did something kind of cool, and I'm good with it.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

That's very good to know--thank you!

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's anything that can be done about that? It seems to be taking a HUGE liberty with the source material.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

The perils of translation? I'm sure that French texts can do neat things with grammar that just don't work in translation to English, either. 8/

[(Anonymous)]

In Italian, there's a saying "Traduttore, traditore" - "To translate is to betray."

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I find that super ironic. For Reasons.

[jazzfish]

I had heard it as "Il traduttore, il traditore", that is, "The translator, a traitor." De gustibus, etc.

(Also, not related to much of anything except general translation coolness, a great interview with William Weaver, translator for Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among others.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"Il traduttore,
Don't spit on the stor-ay,
Use the feminina,
That'sa what it's for-ay."

[megazver.livejournal.com]

Jim Butcher's Russian translators have, for some reason, decided that the 'u' in his last name is supposed to be pronounced as 'ah'.

So Russian readers know him as Jim Buttchair.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

English short u is always rendered with A. This is because that's a good rendering of our short u sound.

[megazver.livejournal.com]

That's not how his name, or the word it's derived from, is pronounced, though.

[boxofdelights]

Well, the other possibility is Bootchair. Less silly-sounding to English speakers, but not closer in sound to his actual name.

[butsuri.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, [u] is much closer to [ʊ] than [a] is. [ʊ] is even an allophone of /u/ in Russian (if Wikipedia is to be believed, at any rate: I don't speak Russian).

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

The only available options are бут, бот, бат—boot, bot, butt, sort of, but really the vowel sounds aren't quite the same. Buttchair is probably as close to a Russian pronunciation as Botcher, which I realize isn't an improvement on the funny-homonym front.

[eub.livejournal.com]

In my mind's ear, I'm pretty confident a speaker with a Russian accent, who hears the English word and repeats it, is accenting it towards бу. So I'd use that.

(boot, baut, bot, I'd approximate them.)

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

and joy and horror of the English language is that is very fluid and we can make up stuff if we need too, words and genders included.

French (and I have discovered that I dislike books translated from French to English) is so "protect the linga franca" that it it doesnt evolve as fast to compensate in translations.

They should have put in disclaimers on Leckie's book.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

This makes me curious how genderqueer folks in other countries are managing the issue of gender in their mother tongues. Some English speakers get so bent out of shape re: singular "they/them" etc. but I bet that's nothing on how difficult it might be in [insert language here].

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I was wondering the same thing. There is a new reality show... on E! I think that is going from country to country to see how the genderqueer are treated. I meant to record it when I saw it, but was forgetful.

[rosefox]

The short version is that it's really complicated and annoying. The most common workaround I've seen in French is to alternate between masculine and feminine forms ("My teacher[masc] Miss[fem] Smith is nice[masc] and pretty[fem], but sometimes too strict[masc]"), but it's clearly a workaround and not very satisfying. In Spanish the use of -x instead of gendered endings -a/-o is gaining currency, e.g., "an anthology of Latinx poets", "a collective of Chicanx artists".

It gets more complicated in languages like Japanese, where the whole way you construct a sentence and speak your words changes depending on your gender. A white male friend of mine is often asked why he speaks Japanese like a woman; it's because his teacher was a woman, and she taught him the language the way she speaks it. After a certain point you have to create an entire new way of linguistically existing. It's a challenge.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

How do they pronounce those X endings in Spanish?

[rosefox]

/lah-TEEN-ex/

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I've also seen the @ symbol used to neutralize gendered vowels.

[rosefox]

As I understand it (I am not a Spanish-speaker), -x is preferred over -@ because @ is intended to be a combined a and o, and -x makes more space for non-binary identities.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. Thanks.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

My impression is that Japanese is easier than Indo-European languages. The grammar isn't gendered, and you've got ungendered honorifics like -san. Pronoun and sentence-suffix choice *can* be gendered, like boku vs. atashi for "I", but you can speak 'standard' like watashi without causing problems.

(And females can crossover into male language too: using male pronouns, or being addressed as -kun in the workplace.)

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

So, some folks over on Tumblr have looked at a few pages of the translation, and just on the strength of that, it seems that the translator has actually done something kind of interesting, though I might for various reasons quibble with it. He appears to use masculine forms for ships--because ship in French is masculine, apparently? I know not. But.

Breq refers to people in the feminine unless she's speaking a non-Radchaai language. But ships appear to be referred to in the masculine, and she refers to herself this way, which, if the translator is using the masculine to stand in for the English "it" would make a good deal of sense.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

So Breq is translated as ship-masculine but not necessarily person-masculine? Does Breq ever refer to herself as anything other than a ship?

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough French to read much, and don't have the patience to wander through my hard copy and try to puzzle out the pronouns (the folks who looked at pages were looking at a very short sample) so I don't know for certain how she refers to herself all the way through. I'd guess she doesn't ever refer to herself as anything else, pronoun-wise, if my impression of what the translator is doing is correct.

I kind of regret not knowing more French, because it seems like the translator is doing something really interesting here and I'm curious about it and wish I could see more of it.

And I think the ambiguity about "object masculine" vs "person masculine" embedded in the French language is exactly what the translator is playing with, here--but more than that, I couldn't say.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

It does sound like they are trying something interesting--translating the spirit of the original gender ambiguity because French doesn't allow a good translation of the letter.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Yes, it does. I wholeheartedly approve of that, actually.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

The choice of word used for "ship" in French would depend on context -- the ones that would seem to be common choices (bateau, navire, vaisseau) are all masculine.