Do you know your le from your la, or your der from your das?
The idea of grammatical gender has proved something of a curse for foreign language learners in the UK for many generations. From an English perspective, the idea of referring to a chair as male or female seems pretty ludicrous. Surely it’s just a chair? Well, yes, the tired French teacher explains, after many decades of having to answer this question, but if you want to learn French you’ll just have to accept that it’s female.
But perhaps even more bizarre is how controversial these conventions have become in the languages themselves. As feminism and gender politics have rewritten the way we view gender roles, we are now also calling into question the way gender governs language.
Clearly, this matters to the French audience – so it should matter to anyone translating their company’s assets into that language or any language with gender-based nouns!
Le président or la présidente?
By and large, gender in foreign languages is just a way of sorting nouns into arbitrary categories. That chair is not going to actually become female however much you call it la. But certain examples are a little bit more complex.
In the example linked above, le président is considered by default a masculine noun. The German Der Kanzler is the same and most gendered languages default to masculine nouns for names of leaders, ranking officials or professions. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why.
This is precisely the basis for the controversy. In a modern world striving to offer equal opportunities, should these titles still be considered masculine by default? The trouble is there are multiple opinions on the subject, all with a good case.
The first states that gendered nouns have nothing to do with actual gender and therefore the case is closed. A woman can just as well be le president as a man can.
Another states that the noun defaults to the masculine gender because society does, and this should therefore change.
The truth is, neither is intrinsically right, and the debate is likely to continue raging in France for some time.
What does this mean for your business and our translation services?
The average monolingual English speaker is likely on the verge of tearing their hair out at this point and screaming ‘What on earth is all the fuss about?’. It seems rather absurd to us that the one letter’s difference between le and la can cause that much contention among people.
But it’s difficult for us to interpret how important gender is to a language that has no neutral default setting.
When translating into foreign markets however, it is important to pay as much attention to these difficulties as possible. If a translation of your marketing material inadvertently takes one side of a vociferous linguistic debate like this, you might find it doing you a lot more harm than good to your brand.