Manipulation of gender in the translations of I am Malala and things fall apart

Abstract

Translation studies in the 1960s have evolved due to the concept of culture turn which embodies gender translation problems. Gender is a culture-specific problem because languages have different peculiarities of natural gender, grammatical gender, and dual gender, which need a semantic cultural approach. This paper is a comparative qualitative study on translators’ manipulation of gender in translation. Being a product-oriented study, it examines and compares existing translations of the novels, “I am Malala” and “Things Fall Apart” from English into Malay, French and Spanish to construct a translation modelling. The source texts (STs) and target texts (TTs) are wholly read; data related to natural gender, grammatical gender, and dual gender are identified, collected, and analyzed. The analysis is done following Leech’s (1974/1981) theory on meaning. The research reveals that natural gender is translated literally from English into Malay, French, and Spanish; grammatical gender is also translated literally from English into French and Spanish, whereas in Malay a generalization is used for grammatical gender owing to the Malay language peculiarities. The research reveals also that there are meaning losses and malpresentation of women in dual gender nouns translation in French and Spanish due to biased orthodox patriarchal manipulation preference, which makes the masculine represent the feminine in dual gender nouns.