Free translations of genderless reference forms

Tue Mar 8 19:43:01 UTC 2011

I have no answer whether there is a standard way to handle the free translation of the gender-neutral 3 person pronouns.   But in the Mauwake reference grammar I  did like Elena Bashir suggests. In narrative texts it is usually possible to find out the gender of a referent, but I would claim that there are also genuine cases of text examples where the context does not provide a clue for the gender, e.g. If a person is hit by a car, (s)he needs to be taken to the hospital.  In cases like this I used (s)he - and I also explained this usage in the introduction where I discussed the data & examples. 

My mother tongue, Finnish, does not have a gender distinction in the 3 person pronouns, and sometimes it is hard to decide whether to use he, she or they in English for the Finnish gender-neutral 3s hän. There are lots of cases where the gender distinction just isn’t there at all (and there is no ‘informant’s gender assumption’),  but for the translation the distinction has to be forced, when the target language requires it.

Liisa Berghäll

From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Wolfgang Schulze
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 5:31 PM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Free translations of genderless reference forms

I think, Elena's way of handling the problem is rather straightforward. However, I would not only refer to (linguistic) co-text, but also to non-linguistic context. By this I mean, that examples stemming from informants also include the informant's hypothesis about the gender of the referential entity referred to by a (then) exophoric pronoun. Hence, the linguist should always try in such cases to elicit the informant's 'gender assumption' together with the phrase itself. In other words: The speaker's/informant's knowledge system ~ practice concerning gender reference is part of the documentation of an actual utterance. In' well aware of the fact that this is not always easy to do. But just as an informant cannot ignore a proposed gender when asked to translate a sentence from say English or Russian to their native tongue, we cannot and must not ignore the speaker's/informant's own tradition. Only in case examples are construed by ourselves, the s/he-option makes sense. It then simply indicates 'underspecification' (with respect to the source language) or 'overspecification' with respect to the metalanguage. 

As for interlinear glosses, things are more easy to handle. Here, we can simply put the corresponding etiquettes, such as ANAPH, or DX or so, in case the language at issue does not mark gender.     

Bes wishes,
Wolfgang

Am 08.03.2011 14:54, schrieb E. Bashir: 

The problem seems to exist only in grammatical examples involving humans which are presented without surrounding context.  If the examples are taken from context, whether the pronoun refers to 'he' or 'she' will be clear, and should be maintained in the glosses, in my opinion.  With contextless examples involving humans, one could either (i) have a general note in the introductory materials to the grammar saying that the language in question does not mark gender on pronouns, and that a default pronoun 'he', for example, is being used throughout, but should be understood as generic third-person singular.  (ii) use the s/he and him/her strategy.

eb

--- On Tue, 3/8/11, Paul Hopper  <mailto:hopper at CMU.EDU> <hopper at CMU.EDU> wrote:

From: Paul Hopper  <mailto:hopper at CMU.EDU> <hopper at CMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Free translations of genderless reference forms
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011, 7:07 AM
There are several solutions used by
writers and various journals,
including the one Mike refers to, but the Tom's particular
problem is how
to gloss example sentences without making a point of the
gender. 'She/he',
'him/her' seem to be unavoidable in this genre. Choosing
examples with
plural pronouns (they/them) obviates the problem, but isn't
always
possible. How do German linguists deal with this, when many
nouns are also
marked for gender?

Paul Hopper

On Tue, March 8, 2011 03:15, Mike Morgan wrote:

Well, I have seen a few attempts at finding a solution

(meaning of course

  there is no generally-agreed upon solution)...

one being using "he" in

all examples in even chapters and "she" in odd

ones...

mwm

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Thomas E. Payne  <mailto:tpayne at uoregon.edu> <tpayne at uoregon.edu>
wrote:

Hello. Those of us who write in English often run

into the problem that

  English forces one to make a gender

distinction in reference forms

(e.g.,
pronouns) where the languages we work with make no

such distinction. I'm

  wondering whether there is a "standard" way

of dealing with this by

now. Does anyone know?

I'm talking about a huge number of references,

e.g., the free

translations of example sentences in a reference

grammar. It can get

very tedious to have to constantly use forms like

'she/he', 'him/her'.

The free translations no
longer sound "free" at all.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Tom

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à®®à®¾à®‡à®• (aka Dr Michael W Morgan)

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Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze                                                                     

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