Book Chapter


Le président est une femme : the challenges of translating gender in UN texts

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the case of the translation of ‘gender’ in texts produced by the United Nations. Due to its global nature – with almost every country in the world involved – the organization’s linguistic and translational choices have a particularly far-reaching influence, and even though translations come second chronologically, the translational process must be borne in mind at every stage of text production. The chapter tackles the question of gender translation from a diachronic perspective, with a focus on texts related to UN World Conferences on Women between 1975 and 2015 in their English, French and Spanish versions. First, an overview is given of the different forms of sexist and anti-sexist language and the role of language planning in these three languages. A quantitative study is then carried out on the English source and on the target texts to determine the extent to which both sexist and gender-inclusive language were used. The analysis focuses on the use of sixty key words and expressions chosen on the basis of the UNESCO guidelines, such as personal pronouns, occupational terms, and terms such as “human rights” or “gender” itself.

Attached files

Authors

Lessinger, Enora

Oxford Brookes departments

School of Education, Humanities and Languages

Dates

Year of publication: 2020
Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-06-03


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of Le président est une femme: The challenges of translating gender in UN texts
This RADAR resource is Part of The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender [ISBN: 9780367502478] / edited by Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal (Routledge, 2020).

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