[Ads-l] “Neutrality”

[Amy West]

On 7/20/19 00:00, ADS-L automatic digest system wrote:
>   -----------------------------
> [Middle English*journeiman*  :*journei*, a day's work; see JOURNEY


Ooo. That's really interesting. I barely did Middle English in grad 
school; I did mostly Old stuff. But for a proofreading job I proofread a 
translation of a ME midwifery manual where "travail" or "travel" was 
used for "labor."

---Amy West

Related to the "neutrality" topic:

There's a series of SF books by Ada Palmer where the author plays around 
with gender pronouns intentionally to convey ideas about the narrator 
and the society (I haven't read these, my husband has) is conveying 
particular attitudes/notions about other characters when using gendered 
ones. At a panel on translation at Readercon, one of the panelists 
talked about how for the Polish translation of these books, because 
Polish defaults to gender-neutral (and Palmer was making heavy use of 
the singular-they), the translator had to explicitly use structures like 
"chairman and chairwoman" to try to express the notions underlying 
Palmer's stylistic choice.

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