Session

Japanese has a wide variety of first-person pronouns that convey a rich depth of information about a speaker's gender presentation, social positioning and character archetype, among other things. This can create challenges when translating dialogue in entertainment media into English, particularly in scenarios where gender is in question or in flux—how do we ensure that the characterisation provided by first-person pronouns is retained and conveyed to the audience in a legible and natural way? Meanwhile, although Japanese does have binary-gendered third-person pronouns, they're used less frequently than their English counterparts due to the relative ease of repeating or eliding names, sometimes requiring Japanese-English translators to make our own judgments about how characters are gendering (or specifically not gendering) each other at any given moment. Regardless of language, gender isn't simply a static trait each of us has—it's a process that we continually apply to ourselves and one another in shifting, socially contingent ways. Different languages provide speakers with different sets of tools for expressing and applying gender, and our objective is to work within the affordances of our target language to manifest whatever gender dynamics are at play in a given story. How best to achieve this is highly dependent on the exact context of a particular scene or line of dialogue, but in this talk, I'll showcase a variety of examples from my own and others' work and discuss the different approaches they illustrate. Specific works I'll examine include the manga Love Me For Who I Am, Land of the Lustrous, and Welcome Back, Alice; the light novels The Hero-Killing Bride and The Despicable Duke Settles His Affairs; and the anime Your Name, Hunter x Hunter, and My Dress-Up Darling.