An introduction to non-binary Spanish and its use in audiovisual translation
What is it about?
The Spanish language has a grammatical gender agreement system that means almost everything, even objects and ideas, is assigned a binary gender. This paper reviews different approaches to non-binary Spanish and proposes two linguistic non-binary categories across languages: direct and indirect non-binary language. Also, it's common for translators who aren't familiar with the trans community to translate people's genders wrong, particularly when they are non-binary, so this article also takes the translations of two works as case studies of correct and incorrect approaches to translating non-binary characters.
Why is it important?
Non-binary and trans people face many hurdles in their (our) daily lives, and language is one of them. Non-binary users of languages with grammatical gender agreement are language innovators who may need to change the very grammar of their languages in order to express themselves. Beyond reviewing current non-binary Spanish strategies, this paper analyzes several translations of non-binary characters into Spanish for subtitling and dubbing in order to show why translators need to pay special attention to gender when translating so their translations erase neither people's genders nor any inclusion efforts in the original work.