6th-April-2008
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Curious case of the sex changes | |
Quote: Curious case of the sex changes
By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Last Updated: 1:52am BST 05/04/2008
A row has broken out over the translation of a best-selling novel by the British author Mark Haddon after a "feminist" attempted to make some of the characters female.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time tells the story of a 15-year-old autistic boy from Swindon. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2003 and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
But a Spanish translator has been sacked for allegedly refusing to stick to the genders chosen by the author. Maria Reimondez is taking the publishers to court over claims that her contract to translate the novel into Galician was cancelled because she refused to reinforce sexist stereotypes. "The translation strategies I use include not using the masculine form systematically," said Miss Reimondez in a statement.
"I haven't invented this; it's nothing new, and, linguistically, one cannot find fault with it."
However, the publisher Rinoceronte Editora claim that she was introducing a bias into the work by taking out references to male characters, even when the gender was clear.
"As we corrected her text, we realised that she was systematically translating neutral words into feminine ones, and masculine words into feminine or neutral forms," said Moisés Barcia, the editor at Rinoceronte. "She chose to make the narrator's pet rat a female, even though its name was Toby," he said. In another instance she changed "men" to "xente", meaning people.
The row highlights the problems with translating works from English into those that use feminine and masculine words. For example. the word "teacher" in English could be either sex but in Galician there is a masculine and feminine form of the word.
Miss Reimondez said there were cases where "it is impossible to know the gender of a word, and one must be selected".
"Her contract insists on fidelity to the original work; something she clearly breached," Mr Barcia said.
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~ A man needs a woman like a lion needs a stove. ~
~ Women deserve only equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. ~
~ Men are not collectively "guilty" of anything. ~
~ Never needing to be pregnant is a blessing. ~
~ Feminist ideology “men have to respect women, but women have no reason to respect men” ~
~ Everybody makes choices, and nobody should be entitled to special treatment because of those choices.
Equal results based on unequal treatment amounts to no kind of equality at all. ~
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