A call for community-informed translation

Abstract

This article considers the Spanish and French translations of nonbinary pronouns in Netflix’s One Day at a Time, a social-justice-oriented sitcom. The article compares the source text with six parallel translations taken from one episode and isolates two main translation strategies. In the first strategy, translators rely on calque translations from English that demonstrate a misunderstanding of the source text. The second strategy shows an active engagement on the part of translators with Hispanic and Francophone Queer communities, replicating authentic Queer language practices. The article goes on to describe the implications of both strategies on reception and outlines several reasons why community-informed translation should be established as a best practice for Queer-oriented texts.

Gender‐justice beyond inclusion: How trans knowledges and linguistic practices can and should be re‐shaping language education

“…These and related gender‐just pedagogies are distinct from, but build on and coexist with, those articulated by colleagues in queer applied linguistics (Paiz, 2020; Paiz & Coda, 2021), crip linguistics (Namboodiripad & Henner, 2022), and many others who take up traditions of culturally relevant, critical pedagogies (Hooks, 2014; Ladson–Billings & Dixson, 2021), principally because—although they center gender and its modalities—“there can be no gender‐just pedagogy that is not also always concerned with equity and justice as it relates to race, class, sexuality, disability, and all other aspects of identity through which we are positioned in society” (Knisely, 2022a, p. 150). Their applications and manifestations equally span the breadth of language and linguistic subfields, including not only applied linguistics but also cultural, literary, and translation studies, for example (Attig, 2022; Conrod, 2022a; Disbro, 2022; Konnelly et al., 2022; Kosnick, 2019; Provitola, 2022).…”

Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8

“…Additionally, some nonbinary people use she/her/hers, or he/him/his, sometimes or exclusively, whilst in some regions in the world descriptive language for nonbinary people does not (yet) exist. In contexts outside of English, a wide range of culturally specific linguistic adaptations and evolutions can be observed (Attig, 2022;Kirey-Sitnikova, 2021;Zimman, 2020). Also of note, some languages use one pronoun that is not associated with sex or gender while others gender all nouns.…”