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@Linguist_CIOL AUGUST/SEPTEMBER The Linguist 9 FEATURES differentiate themselves according to their birth sex (they do not have different clothes and behaviours), and they refer to each other using the non-gendered singular 'they', even when the gender of the person is known, for example: "Carlyle here is a sensayer. They can help you think about those things." In the original, this device was enough to create a non-gendered language, but this is challenging to render in Italian, mainly due to the structural difference between the grammatically gendered and non-grammatically gendered languages. In Italian, all nouns are either feminine or masculine and, as in many other grammatically gendered languages, there is a substantial difference between grammatical gender and referential gender. Grammatical gender is arbitrarily assigned to objects, with no semantical reason to determine why some are masculine and others feminine (e.g. tavolo ('table') is masculine; sedia ('chair') is feminine). In my translation, I opted to follow the standard grammatical rules of Italian. Referential gender, however, was more problematic. Words such as 'reader', 'child', 'stranger', 'painter' refer to people, and in Italian their declension depends on the gender of these people. Moreover, gender is not only present in nouns; Italian also has gendered articles, verbs and adjectives. The conventional way of translating these words from English is to use the relevant gendered counterparts, with the male form as default when the person's gender is unknown. This convention is currently under discussion in Italian because it hides the feminine in the language. Translating the gender-neutral language of the English original with such 'masculine inclusive' terms would have betrayed the novel's view of the future – a future where "the progressive side of gender debates was victorious". 4 THE ART OF RESISTANCY The most appropriate translation method seemed to be pragmatic equivalence, which aims to create the same effect on the target reader that the author intended for the source reader. This approach "goes beyond To make the feminine visible in the language, feminist translators advocate an active approach to translation, employing a series of translation strategies including resistancy. The work of Lotbinière-Harwood and Barbara Godard is often cited as an example of how resistancy is used in practice. They invented new words, playing with the target language to convey the source text's nuances. When confronted with the new term auteure (used by Quebec feminists instead of the standard French auteur), Lotbinière-Harwood coined the English word auther in the translation to recreate the same focus on the author as a woman. She renders the title of Nicole Brossard's novel L'Amer, which contains three terms – mère ('mother'), mer ('sea'), amer ('sour') – as These Our Mothers, creating a similar combination of concepts: 'the sea our mother', 'the sea (s)mothers', 'the sour mothers'. For the feminist word amante ('lesbian lover/female lover', contrasting with the non-gender-specific standard amant), Lotbinière-Harwood offers 'shelove', while Godard translates the plural form (amantes) as 'lovhers'. AN EXPERIMENTAL TEXT I turned to resistancy during my Translation MA when faced with the challenge of translating an excerpt from the sci-fi novel Too Like the Lightning into Italian. In this novel, author Ada Palmer plays with language, experimenting with the gender of English pronouns. Her unconventional approach towards gender aims to create an uncomfortable effect on readers, encouraging them to think about their own approach to gender. With this novel, Palmer joins the many science fiction writers using language as a means of investigating gender and its impact on society. Prominent examples include Joanna Russ's assertive use of pronouns in The Female Man, Suzette Haden Elgin's invented language in Native Tongue and Margaret Atwood's use of names in The Handmaid's Tale. In the future society of Too Like the Lightning, any mention of gender is forbidden, people do not language forms as a feminist translation solution UNCOMFORTABLE READING In Too Like the Lightning (below), author Ada Palmer (bottom) uses language as a means of investigating gender and society ALEKSI STENBERG VIA WIKIPEDIA (CC BY-SA 4.0)