NON-BINARY LANGUAGE: STRATEGIES AND RESOURCES FOR INCLUSIVE SPANISH TRANSLATION
Sheila Gill, Project Manager at Rosario Traducciones y Servicios S.A., describes her first inclusive translation experience.
Gender identity has become a hot social topic for debate. As awareness of different realities takes shape, such as the feminist movement and non-binary genders, language becomes more evident in conversation.
The localization industry is no stranger to this topic; linguists need to use different strategies to translate without excluding genders. In this regard, Sheila Gill describes her first experience of inclusive translation, which was a client requirement.
- Can you describe your first translation experience using non-binary language?
Society changes over time, and so do languages, in constant evolution. Linguists must be aware of such changes and apply them as effectively as possible.
Change involves great expectations and huge controversies. As a translation team, we had been implementing different strategies for gender inclusion. This time around, we jumped right in to meet the specific requirements of a client. These requests are becoming more frequent and offer an exciting range of job opportunities.
- Can you describe the client’s requirements?
The material already published by the client did not address gender issues, which was a completely new approach for them. We had to minimize or eliminate, if possible, words that implied masculine gender or just one gender, which is typical of Spanish.
- Was the binary or non-binary language used?
In this project, we used the most frequent techniques and strategies that are grammatically correct to eliminate the masculine gender. In addition to “desdoblamiento” (duplication technique), the client suggested other alternatives that helped us avoid the systematic use of the masculine gender in Spanish. They helped by providing additional guidelines, best practices, and suggestions.
Several techniques can be used in Spanish: collective nouns, “epicene," abstract nouns, paraphrasing, subject and noun omissions, reformulation, appositions, non-binary determiners and pronouns, imperatives, passive voice, impersonal structures or reflexive passive, impersonal verbs, duplication of genders and relative pronouns, to mention a few.
It was recommended to avoid slash, and the “@” sign and the letter “x” to replace the masculine gender.
- Based on this experience, what suggestions would you give to linguists?
While non-binary language use dates back to the 70s and the feminist movement, it is in recent years that its use has expanded. It may have originated with socio-political movements, yet today, it provides an opportunity to work in different linguistic areas.
Original texts that are not written in a non-binary language or whose language is not binary, updating existing materials that don’t contemplate the rule of non-binary language, and documents that have been published or translated before this trend gained momentum.
Translators’ prior knowledge of this topic affected their decisions and the target language of their translations. Our value proposition for clients should consider these techniques and strategies in the Spanish language. As Alicia Zorrilla states, “We should not break languages to defend human causes...Words are just victims.”
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