• leisesprecher@feddit.orgEnglish
    39·
    8 hours ago

    As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called “these stewarts”. If there’s no context added, it’s impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.

      • leisesprecher@feddit.orgEnglish
        16·
        7 hours ago

        In many aspects English doesn’t distinguish between genders at all.

        I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I’m not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There’s maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.

          • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            3 hours ago

            Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.

  • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    10 hours ago

    But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    8 hours ago

    For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.

    Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.