: 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 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).

Load Full (0)

: Most of the time you don't want to find the one word that describes this - because if it's so hard for you to come up with this one word, chances are it's hard for your audience to understand

@Sims2267584

Load Full 0 Comments

: How to make the murder's identity less obvious, or make the obviousness not matter? I'm writing a short story following the first person perspective of the MC, who is a young, male writer of

@Sims2267584

Load Full 5 Comments

: This tag should be used for questions about citing in the Vancouver system, which is also referred to as the Vancouver reference system or author-number system. According to Wikipedia the

@Sims2267584

Load Full 0 Comments

: This tag should be used for questions about the pages contained in a book, such as questions about the amount of pages needed for certain categories of books, the guidelines to creating and

: 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

More posts by @Sims2267584

: Most of the time you don't want to find the one word that describes this - because if it's so hard for you to come up with this one word, chances are it's hard for your audience to understand

: How to make the murder's identity less obvious, or make the obviousness not matter? I'm writing a short story following the first person perspective of the MC, who is a young, male writer of

: This tag should be used for questions about citing in the Vancouver system, which is also referred to as the Vancouver reference system or author-number system. According to Wikipedia the

: This tag should be used for questions about the pages contained in a book, such as questions about the amount of pages needed for certain categories of books, the guidelines to creating and

Login to post a comment!

0 Comments

Back to top