New Words #15: It’s a Dude Group!

Navigating gender in translation

Years ago, while teaching Spanish to beginners, I overheard the following exchange between two seventh-grade boys.

A. I think I’m supposed to write “Somos altos,” but it doesn’t seem right. I have four sisters. Isn’t it better to write “Somos altas,” since there are more girls than boys in the family?

B. Dude, if there’s even one dude in the group, that’s it, it’s a dude group.

I have had the phrase dude group stuck in my head ever since. As a translator, I am regularly faced with a quandary: How can I communicate in English that a French or Spanish text is referring to a dude group?

In this excerpt from his recent translation diary, Catching Fire, Daniel Hahn explains how the use of gendered adjectives in Romance languages creates challenges for translators working between those languages and English. He gives the example of a first-person narrator in Spanish beginning a story with the words “Estoy cansado.” This brief sentence might be translated simply as “I’m tired,” but it contains information about the narrator’s gender that English is incapable of encoding within an adjective. As Hahn notes, “I’m tired (and btw male)” would convey the same information, but it’s hardly a graceful solution. (I hereby propose “I’m tired, and any group I belong to is automatically a dude group” as an alternative.)

Dude groups may not be the norm forever, though. Many speakers of Romance languages are proposing gender-neutral variations to commonly used nouns and adjectives. For example, alumne could be used as a Spanish word for student (traditionally alumno in the masculine singular and alumna in the feminine singular). Such a solution can both accommodate the needs of nonbinary individuals and provide a plural form (alumnes) that does not inherently privilege dudes over non-dudes.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time around, a pair of resources that aim to demystify the translation process by welcoming readers to view multiple drafts and the translators’ reflections on their progress.

The book I mentioned above, Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, is a compilation of Daniel Hahn’s blog posts from the four-month period during which he translated Never Did the Fire by the Chilean author Diamela Eltit into English for Charco Press. The book feels like an invitation to look over Hahn’s shoulder as he contends with the challenges of a dense text and candidly acknowledges the self-doubt and practical pressures that enter into the process. And who can resist a book with such delightful index entries?

In a similar vein, the New York Times recently published an interactive piece (gift link) in which Sophie Hughes walks readers through her thought process as she translates two sentences from Spanish novels into English, moving from the literal to the idiomatic and demonstrating how the context of each narrative must be taken into consideration.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

BELLIES.

David and Alexis are, grammatically speaking, a dude group in French and Spanish. I suspect that’s why Alexis listens to me only when I speak English or Irish.

Laura