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But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.
Christianity enters the chat…
This reply has only upvotes and I still think it’s underrated.
As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called “these stewarts”. If there’s no context added, it’s impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.
I think that’s how a large part of European languages still work.
yup, german for example (and i believe all languages that are closely connected to it) assigns gender per articles: der is the masculinum, die for the femininum and das for the neutrum nominative singular, and just “die” for all nominative plural forms. Since the biological and linguistic gender are conflated in ungendered language, it runs into the same issues as the stewards above: everyone except the males become invisible. Also, in spoken language there is the tendency to use just the singular m. form for many professions: “Ich ging zum Arzt” - “I went to the doctor(m)” is used even if the doctor is a woman (which would be “Ich ging zur Ärztin”)
The first form is to just adress both genders: “Die Ärzte und Ärztinnen” translates to “the doctors(m) and doctors(f)”. In this form you have still the issue that you name one gender first, which is always the male form - some say this is still discriminatory, and there is no way to adress any other gender.
The second form is the “Binnen-I” to mark that the word can mean both genders: instead of “die Ärzte”, “die ÄrztInnen” is used. Some say that it makes stuff harder to read and looks ugly, but in my experience you get used to it quickly. A derivative of this form which has become the defacto standard (and in my opinion, the most preferable one) is the “Gendersternchen” (“Gender Starlet”): “Ärzt*innen” is inclusive of all genders.
And then you can try to avoid gendered forms altogether: “Personen mit medizinischer Ausbildung” (People with medical training) avoids using any gendered words at all. As you can see, it can get quite a mouthful in spoken language, and it is very formal, but i quite like it in written language - it’s a bit more verbose, but flows nicely when reading.
In this form you have still the issue that you name one gender first, which is always the male form
Absolute bullshit, most of the time you see the feminine form first.
I stand corrected. The issue that one gender must be named first remains.
So…like English then?
In many aspects English doesn’t distinguish between genders at all.
I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I’m not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There’s maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.
English absolutely has grammatical gender, it just defaults to “male” so much people forget there’s other options. For example, “teacheress” is a real word, it’s just so archaic that the male word now means both, same with how “you” is both singular and plural.
I mean if you want to go that far, there’s an argument to be made that the gendered terms wifman, werman, man, woman, and men were all simplified, to the gender neutral term of man and the feminine specific term of woman. We seem to have gone back and forth linguistically.
Well, uh, yes. The thread OP notes greek (as in bible) uses generic masculine forms for plural. Modern English takes that tack much more broadly, using the theoretically masculine term for everything. And you can tell it’s masculine, not neuter, because, eg. a steward (of Gondor) is a steward, but a (-n air) stewardess is now a flight attendant.
Take “The <noun> has a yellow <noun>”. Which gender do these nouns have? In German, I could tell you. Both articles and the adjective have a gender.
Of course, you can use gendered nouns, but only a very small minority of nouns actually have female forms.
Being immediately identifiable isn’t the standard, for example in languages that don’t use the definite article (Slavic languages, for example) the first noun wouldn’t necessarily exhibit it’s grammatical gender, but it wouldn’t mean it doesn’t have one. Also, the brackets you used get parsed by boost as html tags.
The very existence of gendered nouns and pronouns means English has gender. It’s just less noticeable because unlike the German “-innen” approach, English typically shoves most things into neuter and mostly defaults to male for persons and then hides it behind “he or she” or a singular “they”. You can argue it’s archaic or vestigial, and I’d agree, but it is there. Same how nouns don’t exhibit cases, but pronouns do. Compare:
“The man stood there, the man’s hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming the man”.
“He stood there, his hand on the coffee cup, the cup warming him.”
Having some feminitives in lexicon is not the same as having grammatical gender. I mean, is having a word for werewolf the same as having a “wolf” gender?
“Some feminitives” is disingenuous. It’s an Indo-European language, it shares the structure of other IE languages, in some cases pared down and/or in disuse, but they’re still there, same as vestigial base-12 counting.
I don’t get why people are so upset about the concept of grammatical gender, though. It’s gramatical, it’s not actual gender - original division in PIE was “animate” and “inanimate”. Hell, I vaguely remember a conlang that had separate genders for terrestrial and aquatic animals, so you could absolutely make one that has a gender for “wolf”.
I’m not talking about that, frankly. Just that grammatical gender means usually its own inflections for cases, for adjectives, for verbs. At least some of those.
Fair point. My point would be that English doesn’t really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.
For comparison, in German, cases don’t change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn’t have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun “outliers”. Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.
Hunter, huntress, huntsman
Waiter, waitress, waitsman
Actor, actress, actsman
Nobody says waitman or actsman. I had to fight my phone’s autocorrect just to type those.
No one uses Wifman and Werman anymore either. Doesn’t make them any less some of the last gendered nouns for humans, in English, since if one goes back that far man is neutral gendered, and while woman exists, it’s for a woman that is a spinster.
Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.
Aviator, aviatrix, aviatman.
Director, directrix, directman.
Executor, executrix, executman.
Chairman, chairwoman, chair.
Interestingly, as the language has evolved, words like “actress” are falling out of favor. So there are times when non-gendered is preferred for the sake of equality.
Drag agrees. Drag is spreading knowledge of male gendered words in order to counteract the myth that the normal versions of the words are gendered. If someone tells drag that “actor” is for men, drag points out the existence of “actsman”. Actor is a gender neutral term and we need to use linguistics to make people realise it sooner.
Stewards he said, gently mansplaining.
Well it’s not like we use the words Wifman and Werman anymore.
Maybe you don’t.
When you’re used to seeing the word classist it takes a second to remember a classicist isn’t someone who is prejudiced against ancient Greeks and Romans.
They are prejudiced against the working class instead?
No, they despise classic literature.
Even if I don’t know what a “classicist”, I wouldn’t be injecting my two cents into a conversation like this.
Ah the agenda of checks notes not adding sexist remarks not included in the original text. What an awful agenda that is.
Classicist sounds hyper specific to classical Greece.
Classicism can be broadly applied to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, because of how often the sources intermingle (with many older Greek sources transmitted through Roman copies, and many Roman sources themselves written in Greek), but there’s usually an element of specialization in one or the other for any given classicist.
I like the way we handle it in German, where Klassische Altertumswissenschaft is the study of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome as pioneered by Friedrich August Wolf in the 1700s, and Altertumswissenschaft is used for the more broad study of antiquity.
The German impulse to just smoosh words together is perpetually amusing and awe inspiring
I can see why you like it, fassgealterte Langeweile
Können wir aus dem Namen ein langes zusammengesetztes Substantiv draus machen?
Natürlich ist daß ja doch verstatten!
Reminds me of a story an old friend of mine loved to tell.
In her undergrad, she majored in classics and archaeology. One summer she was working at a dig on the island of Cyprus. One day she needed to go into town for some supplies. She walks into the store, and suddenly she realizes. “Fuck. I don’t speak a word of modern Greek. How am I going to talk to the shopkeeper in this tiny town in rural Cyprus?”
She decides to just do the best she can, and she tries to talk to him in the only Greek she knows…Ancient Greek.
The shopkeeper gets befuddled, then looks her dead in the eye and says, in English, “lady, no one has talked like that here in 2000 years!”
yea basically everyone there can speak English
Where can I find a unbiased translation?
Thank you!
I would wager that will be possible about 5-6 years after the AI singularity. Currently all translations have some sort of bias and cannot grok both the source and destination languages natively.
Edit: I hope I used grok correctly. Someone older than I am that actually used that slang when it was popular please correct me. As I understand it Grok means: To intuitively know and understand the deeper meaning of a word, concept, meme, sociological nuance, or process.
AI likely has a more biased output than most humans as humans have a drive to hide bias and AI does not, plus AI is trained on internet data where people talk differently to how they do in real life, and even more differently than translating a 2000 year old poem.
“AI” is at our current point an attempt to make humans talk dumber. An attack on the language and on the reliability of interactions between humans not knowing each other all their life.
It’s somebody trying to make Orwell’s newspeak and Idiocracy the reality, both at the same time.
I’m become conspiracy-minded lately, sorry.
I just think this would make sense, that people possessing dumb material power in the real world have become desperate enough to try and poison the humanity so that it wouldn’t take that power from them.
“Grok” is from a book called Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s… interesting but not my favorite. You might read it though if for no other reason than to understand the word haha
Definitely do not watch The Man Who Fell to Earth which was supposed to be based on it.
Does anyone have a link to her actual findings? I tend to be skeptical of headlines like this.
Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that
Dunno if she ever published her findings as such, but here’s an interview where she talks about it:
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/16/how-emily-wilson-translated-the-odyssey/
Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that
Yeah, it’s indeed false. I didn’t even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.
(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)
(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)
Yes, which she translated into Italian… and the very first paragraph of the article linked in this thread indeed notes Wilson is the first woman to translate it into English, just as the Tweet indicates…
Are you a bot? Or just lazy?
Are you a bot? Or just lazy?
I am a bot. Beep boop.
The Italian woman translated it into English?
Not the first woman. The first woman to translate it into English, which is still surprising.
For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.
Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.
Obviously a classicist is someone who studies how the working class can overthrow their divinely mandated white men overlords.
Right? No other possible thing it could mean.
Nothing else. Nothing at all.
Shawn is a moron.
Cool seeing her agreeing with what the otaku community has been complaining for years already, when is she getting cancelled? You can’t criticize translators anymore.
First of all…“Sexist and misogynist” redundant…sort of…because women can be sexist too. Misandry is what that’s called.
And a lot of stuff that’s called “misogynist” today isn’t actually misogynist. Some misandrists out there think any scene in a movie or book depicting a brothel with any kinds of events that follow afterward or before to be misogynistic
The same goes for any scene where a man rescues a woman from anything. I’m not kidding. some women out there literally think that old as dirt trope that’s been in every story ever written is somehow sexist.
I judge people only by the content of their character and then by their qualifications
First of all…“Sexist and misogynist” redundant…sort of…because women can be sexist too. Misandry is what that’s called.
Women can be misogynist too, misogyny/misandry describes the target of hate, not the hater.
I like how you started your comment by dunking on yourself
the rest of your points are not only irrelevant to this post but also to each other.
