Translating Gender-Neutral Terms from English into Arabic: The Case of ‘Firefighter’

Abstract

The present paper carefully examines the translation of gender-neutral ‘firefighter’ into Arabic, as can be illustrated by the translations of 13 undergraduate students enrolled in an Advanced Translation course at Al-Quds University in the academic year 2023-2024. The approach we shall use is Majd Al-Najjar’s (1989) Arabicization techniques to render English signifiers into Arabic. The data of the study were extracted from the BBC in 2022 and alBosala News Agency in 2022. The aim is to draw a useful comparison between student translators and a full-fledged translator. The paper shows that the translation students fall prey to lexical and cultural incongruences existing between English and Arabic. The two languages are unrelated languages, so problems and difficulties in translation are expected to emerge. Both languages represent gender reality quite differently. The paper reveals that five procedures have been used to translate gender-neutral ‘firefighter’: (1) circumlocutionary verbal sentence whereby the English item is rendered in a roundabout way; (2) derivationality into noun of process, an active participle and passive participle; (3) a feminine term of address followed by firefighting verb conjugation; (4) feminine forms of active participle; (5) the addition of ‘woman’ to gender-neutral noun. The paper concludes that the translation of the gender-neutral noun ‘firefighter’ is possible despite the cultural and linguistic disparity between English and Arabic. Some implications have been made that would be conducive to better translator training.

Keywords

• firefighter
• gender-neutral language
• translation procedures
• translator training
• linguistic gender differences