How do I translate into a gendered language where the gender would be a spoiler?

Question

I'm (amateurly) writing the subtitles for an English TV show. I'll illustrate my question using a small example, but I'm hoping to receive answers as general as possible.

One episode has a sentence such as "How are you?", addressed to a person who is behind a sealed door. In English, one who watches the show will learn nothing about the questionee's gender.
Let's assume that the identity of this person is considered a major spoiler (it will only be revealed many episodes later), and that revealing the person's gender will give a big clue regarding the person's identity.

Now, in the target language (Hebrew), this sentence is written differently for male and female questionees.
Let's assume that in our case we have no different wording that can save us.

As I see it, the translator has three options:

1. Learn the spoiler (in the example above, the gender), and write the subtitles in the correct, yet revealing, manner.
2. "Play dumb" and write the subtitles as though you don't know the spoiler (in Hebrew and in the example above, in would probably mean to write the subtitles using the male gender, which is Hebrew's "fallback" gender.)
3. Write both male and female versions in the subtitle (for example write "את/ה", which is Hebrew for "you (female)/you (male)". I don't like this option as it implies that the gender is a vital clue for revealing the identity, and also it's not aesthetically pleasing.)

I think that the second option has the advantage of mimicking the situation where the translator really doesn't know the spoiler (perhaps because he didn't watch later episodes, or because those episodes aren't released yet), which in turn preserves the viewer's effect of surprise.

How is this usually handled with gendered languages where conveying the gender would be a spoiler?

Note about Hebrew:

For those unfamiliar with the language, Hebrew uses gendered verbs. That is to say, every verb has multiple forms - one for if the subject is male, one if the subject is female, and two more for plural subjects. Therefore, the translation problem is not simply a matter of obscuring pronouns but also every verb associated with the character.

Answer 1

The question is not whether the translator knows the true gender, the question is whether the character doing the speaking knows the gender of the person behind the door. If they don't, using the default seems plausible and probably be the best option. If he/she does, they would, in real life, use the correct form. Using the default male conjugations and pronouns would, come the reveal, be retroactively incorrect and can make viewers feel cheated.

A perfect solution would:

• be appropriate, every day language
• not give away the gender of the person
• be consistent with the in-world reality (people who know the gender generally wouldn't make grammatical errors relating to the gender)

None of the three solutions proposed satisfies all three requirements.

A potential solution that does satisfy all requirements, but is not necessarily practically possible regarding the number and type of interactions, would be to, yes, be more creative and explore other formulations or grammatical constructs. Think along the lines of an equivalent of "they" instead of "he" or "she", choice of words that obscure gender (example in spoken french: "mon ami(e)" instead of "ma copine/mon copain"), impersonal statement/questions ("How are things?"), or maybe using a descriptive noun instead of a pronoun (example in French would be to refer to the person behind the door as "the beast" (la bete) and use feminine constructs).

Answer 2

Go with אתה.

While not natively Israeli, I am currently living in Israel. And from what I know, speaking the language and seeing what goes on here, when you don't know the gender, it's generally defaulted to male.

For instance, people will generally go "יש מישהו שיודע...", not "יש מישהי שיודעת...", unless the target audience is primarily female... such as in the documentation for sherut l'umi, which is written in the feminine.

People will default to male when it's not known... but also, among the younger generation (for reference, I'm a teenager, I interact with teens a lot), people are using male pronouns and stuff when talking face to face with a girl or woman. It's crazy, but in modern colloquial Hebrew among the younger population, the distinction is becoming obsolete. People are just using male more and more.

So in addition to the fact that male is the actual default, the male pronouns are also coming into a sort of accepted use even for when you know that you're talking to someone who would normally get feminine pronouns. Seems pretty clear to me that אתה is the sensible choice here.

Answer 3

Instead of "How are you?", would it be possible to translate it to "Is everything OK?", "Is anything wrong?", "Is everything alright in there?" instead?

Or is that what you meant by "we have no different wording that can save us"?

Answer 4

The best translation is often not word-for-word, you need to get across the overall sense of what is being said. This may not always be feasible for instant translators, but you can do better when you're doing offline translation like you are.

So you should try to imagine what the original screenwriter would have done if they were working in Hebrew to begin with. If it's important for the plot to avoid hinting at the gender of the person behind the door, try to figure out how they would word the dialogue to achieve that goal.

I don't know Hebrew (except for a handful of words I still remember from Hebrew School), but as an analogy in English you could replace "How are you?" with "What's going on?"

The book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Hofstadter and Sanders devotes quite a bit of discussion to effective translation, especially subtleties like this. The authors themselves are American and French, respectively, and they had the additional challenge of figuring out how to translate the parts of their book that discuss words and translation itself.

Answer 5

While my knowledge of hebrew is exactly zero, my native language is also gendered and also uses the male as the "fallback" option.

10+ years ago, using the male would have been the normal and accepted solution. Recently, with the introduction of heavily gender-normaled language constructs, this might not necessarily go well anymore, especially if the character is later revealed to be female.

However, I personally agree with you that gender-neutral constructions are generally unwieldy and seem artificial.

In my language, in many cases you can rephrase a sentence and grammatically eliminate the pronoun. e.g. instead of writing "how is he/she?"" you could write "how are they?" with a false plural. You could also use the formal version of "you", which is gender-neutral in my language.

By thinking laterally, you can avoid the gender-specific pronoun in many cases. Check if such an option is available here, even if it means changing the actual sentence a bit. Translations do not have to be literal.

If there is no such way, I would also go with your initial hunch and use the standard fallback.

Answer 6

I don't know Hebrew or gendered languages, but if the character does know who is behind the door, then perhaps rephrase the line to not USE the pronoun:

"How is it going?"

"Everything alright?"

"Everything cool in there?"

"No problems in there?"

Or perhaps there is a similar Hebrew idiom to employ.

Many translated works require loose translations of American idioms that do not make sense in another language; you can treat this like one of them. "How are you" just inquires as to the comfort and mental state of the person in the closet. So do the above lines, so such rewording does not break the story.

I realize this is English and Hebrew may not allow that; it is just an idea I had.

Answer 7

Specifically with Hebrew you can take advantage of the fact that written text does not have vowels. We rely on context to know how it should be read. Combine that with the fact that Hebrew has many conjugations that are ambiguous without the vowels, and you can make a sentence look ambiguous. For example, the sentence "How are you" can be written on screen as

מה שלומך

Which will look the exact same in writing. (For non Hebrew speakers, when speaking to a man it's pronounced mah shlom'cha when speaking to a woman it's pronounced mah shlomech).

It's also common in casual conversation to drop the second person pronoun, so you can also use this ambiguity with verbs. For example you could translate "do you want something" as רוצה משהו?. (Pronounced rotzeh mashehu when speaking to a man and rotzah masehu when speaking to a woman).

Answer 8

You do (often) have a fourth option: rephrase the problematic sentence to avoid gender-marked words.

For example, instead of translating "How are you?" literally into a language like Hebrew that has gendered second person pronouns, rephrase it as, say:

"How's it going?"

or:

"Is everything all right?"

or something else that doesn't make a direct reference to the listener, and translate that.

This trick works particularly well for dubbing or for translating written works, where someone watching or reading the translated version usually won't have the original available to compare it with. With subtitling, there's a risk that if the rephrased form is too different from the original, and not particularly idiomatic in the target language, some bilingual viewers may notice the discrepancy and either suspect that something odd is going on, or simply wonder what's wrong with the translation.

That said, in many cases you may be able to choose an idiom that sufficiently natural and concise in the target language that any differences compared to the original can pass off as just an attempt to keep the translated version short (important with subtitles!) and idiomatic.

Answer 9

What is said in the English version is not actually "How are you", but "Polite conversation with a person who just arrived that doesn't reveal their gender". So that is what you translate. Anything that a polite person could say in Hebrew to a person that just arrived, without revealing their gender.

It is very common that sentences cannot be translated literally, and when that happens, you do your best to express the intent of the author. If there is a joke that cannot be translated then you create a different joke, trying to be as funny as the original. If a literally translated sentence reveals something that shouldn't be revealed, then you replace it with something else.

Answer 10

Verify if you can use a non-gender-modifying word to reference to the person.

I don't know Hebrew but in Portuguese, for example, the word "pessoa" (person) is always used in the female, doesn't matter whether the person who it references is male or female.

Answer 11

As with many solutions for dealing with the awkwardness of gender pronouns, you may find the simplest approach is to "react according to presentation"

Eg: if a person is secretly female and another character is interacting with them under the impression they're male, that other character will be reacting according to the idea that they are male and using male pronouns and corresponding gendered phrasing.

When the Reveal happens and the female character is no longer hiding it, then all characters who know about it can switch to appropriate pronouns and gendering immediately.

Simply, rather than try to be neutral, complete the illusion even through the 4th Wall.

Answer 12

Often titles of respect are in the plural form, this works in Hebrew as well.

איך מרגיש כבודו הערב?‏

Variations on this theme are used regularly, and the male כבודו is used even when addressing a female.