HOW IS THE RISE IN GENDER

EQUALITY AFFECTING LANGUAGE?

Here at Language Insight, we value equality and diversity, and so gender equality
is an issue that we take seriously as the battle for equal rights continues across
the world. Gender stereotyping is a hot topic in politics today as attitudes towards
gender in the West are undergoing change. Today issues like the pay gap
between male and female employees doing the same job, and misconduct
towards women in the workplace, are starting to be taken more seriously.
For years, retailers have used different terminology and colour schemes
depending on the gender they are targeting. Products that were aimed at little
girls would be packaged in bright pink boxes, and for boys it would be vibrant
greens and blues. However, in recent years conversations questioning gender
stereotyping have become more common and retailers have been called out if
their products involve stereotyping. Morrison’s are just one of several UK brands
that have been accused of this when customers were disappointed to find that a
T-shirt for little boys said ‘Little man, big ideas’ whereas the female equivalent of
the T-shirt read ‘Little girl, big smiles’ implying males were more likely to be
intelligent than females. Since then, retailers like John Lewis have started working
towards becoming more gender neutral by removing gendered children’s
sections from their stores altogether.
Using Gender Neutral Language
The movement towards more gender neutral terminology is something that has
been discussed at national and international level as the European
Parliament has been working since the 1980s to ensure that it uses language
that is gender neutral and non-discriminatory. This has led to some countries
like Norway to completely reform its language in order to make it more gender
inclusive.
The official languages of the European Union have been split into three
categories to make it easier to put strategies in place for each language:

 Natural Gender Languages

These include languages such as English, Danish and Swedish where there are
personal pronouns for each gender (He or She). With natural gender languages,
the aim is to reduce the use of gender-specific terms. Therefore, English terms
such as ‘chairman’ ‘policeman/women’ ‘stewardess’ ‘headmaster/mistress’ have
been officially changed to ‘chairperson’ ‘police officer’ ‘flight attendant’ and
‘headteacher’. This change has led to the disappearance of the older female
forms, by making the previous male form unisex for example ‘actor’ is now used
to refer to either a male or female rather than just a male actor. Also, more
gender-inclusive is used, replacing ‘he’ which was previously used to refer to both
genders with ‘he or she’.

 Grammatical Gender Languages

German, Italian, French and Slavic languages are all examples of grammatical
gender languages. This means that every noun has a grammatical gender, and
the gender of personal pronouns usually matches the reference noun. With these
languages, it would be nearly impossible to create new gender-neutral terms for
all of these phrases as it would completely disrupt the grammatical structure of
these languages therefore feminisation is an increasingly popular alternative
approach that has been taken in these languages to make them more gender
inclusive. Feminisation is the use of feminine versions of masculine terms for
example, many professional terms such as ‘doctor’ and ‘surgeon’ are masculine
terms but ’midwife’ and ‘nurse’ are both feminine, this has unsurprisingly led to
feelings of discrimination, therefore, feminine correspondents have now been
created for these masculine terms which can used interchangeably.

 Genderless Languages
Genderless languages include Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. These
languages have no grammatical gender and no pronominal gender. These
languages are therefore pretty gender inclusive compared to other languages
and don’t need as much attention in trying to make the language more gender
neutral.

What does the rise in Gender Neutral Language mean for Translation?
Working in the translation industry means there’s a whole new layer of mystique
to this issue of gender, particularly when many translators are working between
English and a language that’s very liberal in its use of gendered words. The
French language has words that are either masculine or feminine, for example a
book is masculine and a table is feminine, but at least when they are translated
into English they both become ‘the’. French and some other languages also have
words that, regardless of who they’re referring to, are always masculine or
feminine which can be problematic for translators when trying to be as gender
neutral as possible.

Machine Translation Accused of Sexism

Gender bias in some languages has caused some issues for machine translation
tools especially now that gender is such a sensitive topic. In previous years,
Google Translate had only offered users one translation per query, even if the
query could have either more than one form and more often than not the
masculine version was the only option given to users. This meant that terms such
as ‘strong’ or ‘doctor’ were only given masculine pronouns, whereas ‘beautiful’
and ‘nurse’ were given only feminine pronouns.

In order to make sure their translation tool was more gender inclusive, Google
announced that from November 2018 their tool will suggest more than one
translation including both masculine and feminine options. At the moment this is
only available in certain, key languages (for example English into French,
German, Italian and Turkish), but Google claim they are planning to extend
gender-specific translations to more languages in the future.
As attitudes towards gender continue to change, there is no doubt that languages
worldwide will continue to be affected. Therefore, making sure languages are
politically and socially correct will be an ongoing task, not only for translators but
for all languages speakers.