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).

posted over 6 years ago

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Bas Stronks‭

15 reputation 0 1 2 0

Go with אתה.

While not natively Israeli, I am currently living in Israel. And from what I know, speaking the language and seeing what goes on here, when you don't know the gender, it's generally defaulted to male.

For instance, people will generally go "יש מישהו שיודע...", not "יש מישהי שיודעת...", unless the target audience is primarily female... such as in the documentation for sherut l'umi, which is written in the feminine.

People will default to male when it's not known... but also, among the younger generation (for reference, I'm a teenager, I interact with teens a lot), people are using male pronouns and stuff when talking face to face with a girl or woman. It's crazy, but in modern colloquial Hebrew among the younger population, the distinction is becoming obsolete. People are just using male more and more.

So in addition to the fact that male is the actual default, the male pronouns are also coming into a sort of accepted use even for when you know that you're talking to someone who would normally get feminine pronouns. Seems pretty clear to me that אתה is the sensible choice here.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mithical‭ staff

525 reputation 10 5 65 11

What is said in the English version is not actually "How are you", but "Polite conversation with a person who just arrived that doesn't reveal their gender". So that is what you translate. Anything that a polite person could say in Hebrew to a person that just arrived, without revealing their gender.

It is very common that sentences cannot be translated literally, and when that happens, you do your best to express the intent of the author. If there is a joke that cannot be translated then you create a different joke, trying to be as funny as the original. If a literally translated sentence reveals something that shouldn't be revealed, then you replace it with something else.

posted over 6 years ago

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gnasher729‭

25 reputation 0 3 4 0

Verify if you can use a non-gender-modifying word to reference to the person.

I don't know Hebrew but in Portuguese, for example, the word "pessoa" (person) is always used in the female, doesn't matter whether the person who it references is male or female.

posted over 6 years ago

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Jefrey Sobreira Santos‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

Often titles of respect are in the plural form, this works in Hebrew as well.

איך מרגיש כבודו הערב?‏

Variations on this theme are used regularly, and the male כבודו is used even when addressing a female.

posted over 6 years ago

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dotancohen‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

I don't know Hebrew or gendered languages, but if the character does know who is behind the door, then perhaps rephrase the line to not USE the pronoun:

"How is it going?"

"Everything alright?"

"Everything cool in there?"

"No problems in there?"

Or perhaps there is a similar Hebrew idiom to employ.

Many translated works require loose translations of American idioms that do not make sense in another language; you can treat this like one of them. "How are you" just inquires as to the comfort and mental state of the person in the closet. So do the above lines, so such rewording does not break the story.

I realize this is English and Hebrew may not allow that; it is just an idea I had.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

While my knowledge of hebrew is exactly zero, my native language is also gendered and also uses the male as the "fallback" option.

10+ years ago, using the male would have been the normal and accepted solution. Recently, with the introduction of heavily gender-normaled language constructs, this might not necessarily go well anymore, especially if the character is later revealed to be female.

However, I personally agree with you that gender-neutral constructions are generally unwieldy and seem artificial.

In my language, in many cases you can rephrase a sentence and grammatically eliminate the pronoun. e.g. instead of writing "how is he/she?"" you could write "how are they?" with a false plural. You could also use the formal version of "you", which is gender-neutral in my language.

By thinking laterally, you can avoid the gender-specific pronoun in many cases. Check if such an option is available here, even if it means changing the actual sentence a bit. Translations do not have to be literal.

If there is no such way, I would also go with your initial hunch and use the standard fallback.

posted over 6 years ago

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Tom‭

125 reputation 2 19 23 0

You do (often) have a fourth option: rephrase the problematic sentence to avoid gender-marked words.

For example, instead of translating "How are you?" literally into a language like Hebrew that has gendered second person pronouns, rephrase it as, say:

"How's it going?"

or:

"Is everything all right?"

or something else that doesn't make a direct reference to the listener, and translate that.

This trick works particularly well for dubbing or for translating written works, where someone watching or reading the translated version usually won't have the original available to compare it with. With subtitling, there's a risk that if the rephrased form is too different from the original, and not particularly idiomatic in the target language, some bilingual viewers may notice the discrepancy and either suspect that something odd is going on, or simply wonder what's wrong with the translation.

That said, in many cases you may be able to choose an idiom that sufficiently natural and concise in the target language that any differences compared to the original can pass off as just an attempt to keep the translated version short (important with subtitles!) and idiomatic.

posted over 6 years ago

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Ilmari Karonen‭

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