A little step for the womankind

[OnTheRoll]

I am a translator and recently worked on a large brochure for neonatal services.

The Personal Details section contained the Pronouns question. I translated it but left a comment for the client that this might be confusing for the target audience in the country of the translated language (absolutely the case).

And after that - here we come. "Of all pregnant people, %%% would have a natural birth", "it is up to the person where they want to give birth", etc. etc. etc. So what I did was consistently put "woman" each time instead of "person" and "people". And I didn't tell the client - because in the past, another client asked me to be "inclusive" in my translation.

And then reviser didn't change it either.

Girls power.

well done

it strikes me that all the pronoun nonsense is very, I don't know, eurocentric? as far as I know pronouns relating to people are gendered in most european languages, but I suspect this may not be the case in other languages?

also, I have been told and I'm not sure if it's right, that in Arabic there is one word that covers gay/homosexual AND transgender, which will realy make any discussion even more confusing

Brilliant. Thank you, OP.

Excellent work there

There are certainly languages that don't have gendered personal pronouns - I'm told Turkish doesn't and I'm sure Tagalog (Philippines) doesn't, as I've been referred to as 'he' by Tagalog-speaking friends. And no, I didn't hit the roof - we all just laughed and they corrected themselves.

Imposing this stuff on others seems a bit ... colonial, maybe?😉

Finnish, I think.

yes!!! colonial!!!
white supremacist even

I love the assumption that the use of pronouns in English is universal. It isn't. The use of pronouns and gender in the English language is unique.

Colonialism in action.

Is it actually unique?

As in no other languages do it? Didn't know that.

I see the meme about Spanish for non-binary quite often which makes me laugh.

Yeah. As far as I can see, English is the only language where the possessive pronoun refers to the possessor rather than the possessee.

It's certainly true that the gender of a possessive pronoun is determined by the gender of the noun it describes in many European languages, but this doesn't resolve all pronoun dilemmas. You still have to deal with "She/he/hers/his etc,

You also have to allow for the attention-seeking bloody-mindedness of the neo-pronoun brigade. They are not interested in making it easy: it's all about forcing the norms to jump through hoops to placate the queer. For example, in French, it would have been quite easy to make grammar more gender neutral using some existing constructs, such as the fact that mixed sex groups are always masculine and the very common use of 'On' - actually a third person singular pronoun - to replace 'We' and "They', (and anything else the French feel like using it for!). But, of course, that would have been too easy, so instead there is a whole set of confusing neopronouns.

I think that we are saying the same thing. It is piss easy to have preferred pronouns in English (you just have to pretend a little). It is much more of a challenge to do it in any other language but English language TRA colonialism just demands that they turn their entire grammar and syntax on their heads to conform.

Oh well done OnTheRoll. I’m a translator too, and i just translated something about transgender people in antiquity (trawling the dead for new recruits, pretty much like another religious movement I won’t name). It was quite easy to substitute sex for gender, refer to the correct sex of the individual in question and use appropriate pronouns thanks to the language combination 🤣🤣. I shall just plead ignorance of ideological issues if there’s any comeback. It was a rubbish text, with all the intellectual rigour we’ve come to expect (none).

Generally women on here tend not to share information like that with random Internet posters Liza. For obvious reasons.

Why do you ask?

Anybody else get a sense that Liza was hoping to be able to get the day off to a good start by dobbing a woman in to her employer?

Time was you had a better class of womanscold on here. They at least put some effort into pretending they didn’t hate all of us at least at first….back in the day when this was all fields <stares into distance>

anyway Lizza you’ve charged around this board for the last week making ludicrous claims & insulting people left, right & centre. Do you really honestly think any woman would tell you where they work just so you can contact their workplace & demand they be educated/fired in the usual TRA manner?

It would be fair to say that Liza has really not read the room.

I do think while the misogyny is strong in this one, the thinking skills and grasp of reality are not.

I get nostalgic about the old MRAs sometimes, eyeballs. Do you remember they used to come on and tell us we were misandrsts?

Hardly ever even hear that word anymore.