This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.
Translating the Cyberpunk Future
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#12Recently there was a huge backlash in Poland over the translation of the anime series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix [1]. There's a non-binary character named Double Trouble and the translators decided to change its gender to male and named it Kłopotowski (Mr Trouble).
All this despite the fact that we do have neutral pronouns in Polish. Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the use of neutral form because it was sometimes used as an insult. There are other options though, for example you can use the plural version (just like they/them in English) or Dukaj's pronoun (introduced in the hard science fiction novel Perfect Imperfection [2] by Jacek Dukaj, “a space opera to end all space operas”) which is similar to the neutral pronoun but replaces the “o” suffix with “u”: it was / ono było / onu byłu.
The discussion about the infelicitous translation started on social media [3][4] and eventually was covered by mainstream media. One of the translators gave an interview [5] and said that the reason for the unfortunate decision was organizational chaos and lack of information flow.
1. https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection
3. https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/246543...
4. https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517
5. https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-konco... (paywall)
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#13This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.
Which pronoun? “Tā”?
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#14This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.
Which pronoun? “Tā”?
Ya those two. Same pronunciation different characters.
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#15This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.
1. By "a little while ago", you mean 100 years ago--during the May Fourth Movement in 1919.
2. This change wasn't made for the sake of becoming more "progressive", it was to accomodate translations of Western literature into Mandarin.
More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#16The typeface they used and can be seen in the screenshot at the end of the article makes the schwa look almost like a regular a.
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#17I grew up in Germany and we suffered a lot from badly translated Games (and worse so in dubbed movies). Almost everyone of my generation ended up just learning English and played the original instead. Most of the time that was all that was available anyways.
Except of course for the games translated by Boris Schneider. They arguably were better in German because of his excellent (and hilarious) translations, most notably the Monkey Islands.
Apparently his efforts earned him a Wikipedia page: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne
Much of my early English vocabulary was attained by playing Leisure Suit Larry with a dictionary in my hand.
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#18Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario. Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your person", "la sua persona", which is fem…
Also Italian here. The other issue with using "Lei" is everyone would sound like some overly formal grand parent or maybe a government official... it would be like people suddenly breaking into the royal "we" in english.
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#19Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario. Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your person", "la sua persona", which is fem…
I know it would be unfair to ask you to defend the author's writing simply because you speak their language, but I would be grateful if you (or anybody else who speaks Italian) could explain this part of the article for me: > We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” > Siamo tutt* bellissim* . > Siamo tuttx bellissimx. > Siamo tuttu bellissimu. > I’d…
The "U" would be readable and pronounceable in Italian.
Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though... like your making a hooting sound or something.
Re: Translating the Cyberpunk Future
#20>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns, why not just use that?
It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some" activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.
X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.