Javier Arroyo Bertaño
This article is part of the NOTCHES series on The Languages of Queer History.
In 2020 the Real Academia de la Lengua Española introduced “elle” in its word observatory as a gender-neutral pronoun seeking to make non-binary people visible. This move was particularly symbolic because the Real Academia, although technically a descriptivist—non-prescriptivist—entity, tends to be conservative with respect to implementing linguistic changes motivated by social movements. It implied, then, that the Academia recognized a linguistic phenomenon that sought to make visible a previously invisible identity. This, potentially, could open doors to other institutional recognitions: if the United Nations recognized nonbinary identities and the Real Academia recognized the spelling with which they were represented in Spanish, little by little the Spanish State could also come to recognize them.
However, this possibility was cut short when, a few weeks later, the Real Academia itself eliminated the pronoun from its observatory without further explanation, thus closing the doors to any queer linguistic debate from the academy. Similarly, three years later, former minister Irene Montero, who enacted the groundbreaking Spanish Trans Law, left out of its draft the possibility of legally identifying oneself as a non-binary person.
All this has contributed to the marginalization of genderqueer realities in Spain while, paradoxically, the visibility of such identities blooms thanks to cultural representation. And, going further, it has generated a problem for people working as translators and interpreters: if a non-binary person appears in an original text, how do I translate it if neither the State nor the Real Academia de la Lengua Española acknowledges them?
While English does not generally have an explicit morphological marker for gender in nouns or adjectives, Spanish does. This means that whereas the first language only needs to generate and establish neopronouns to make gender-dissident people visible, the second language needs to remodel its entire structure in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners. And the way in which this is done has generated no little debate inside and outside the LGTBIQ+ community. Particularly outside.
Leaving aside some exceptions, in Spanish the general rule is the following: feminine words end in -a; masculine words end in -o. And, basically, to designate any group in a generic way, the masculine gender is used by default.
Nevertheless, one of many neutral linguistic alternatives began to gain strength among speakers somewhen between 2010 and 2015. The main purpose was to include nonbinary people in discourse. Thus, a third possibility was implemented: as opposed to -a (fem.) and -o (masc.), -e began gaining momentum as a neutral marker.
This inflectional morpheme (a linguistic gender mark) prevailed over other alternatives such as -i, -x or -@, which were discarded or relegated to other uses. This option became, as we mentioned before, popular enough as to be temporarily considered by the Spanish Real Academia de la Lengua. But when shortly after it was dismissed, Spanish translators found themselves at a crossroads again.
In this regard, I was able to talk to Esther Villardón, writer, editor and one of the first Spanish translators to translate a text from English into Spanish using the gender-neutral mark -e. She told me that when a publishing house commissioned her to translate Connection, the autobiography of the nonbinary artist Kae Tempest, what caused her the most doubts about whether or not to accept the assignment was how to represent the author’s identity grammatically. There was no precedent, no consensus, no guidance from the highest linguistic authority in Spanish and, to make things even worse, the editors were uncertain about how to proceed with regard to Tempest’s queer identity.
Translatology underwent a small revolution in the eighties of the last century, when we started paying attention to the confluence between language and culture that take place when translating. This gave rise to the so-called Translation Studies, which began to promulgate theoretical turns in the field of translation. One of these turns was the so-called power turn.
The ‘power turn’, carried out by authors such as África Vidal, Edwin Gentzler or Maria Tymoczko, promulgates that translation, far from being an innocent and aseptic transfer of meanings, far from being that much quoted “bridge between cultures”, is a practice in which the flows of power are revealed and can be twisted. In other words: through translation, power flows have been altered and socio-cultural changes have been generated, both for better and for worse.
And so, what we propose here is precisely that translation can be used as a tool to empower nonbinary people through the cultural transfer between English and Spanish.
Inevitably (and unfortunately), the identitarian recognition of genderqueer people depends on institutions that, due to their specific ideological itineraries, may hinder it. However, whether we like it or not, it is also inevitable that globalized cultural dynamics, strongly linked to neoliberal imperialist interests, make it easier for cultural products in English to cross borders internationally as texts of great significance. The Spanish State and the Real Academia may avoid taking a position on nonbinary people, but trans-national cultural trends will continue to favour the arrival of nonbinary representation in Spain. And when it arrives it will need to be translated.
This is precisely the position where Esther Villardón found herself, going back to her. According to what she told me, it took her a lot of discussions with the editors to explain that the -e should be implemented in her translation to be respectful of the original author. She explained how she tried to be didactic (even if she didn’t feel like it) because the occasion deserved it. And so, her translation, Conexión, is one of the first works published in Spain in which the -e identifying non-binary people appears as something more than an anecdote. And, although it may not seem so, the fact that such an example of sociolinguistic progress appears in a text with an ISBN changes it all.
Similarly, in the absence of institutional positioning, several literary, audiovisual or videogame translators are implementing this linguistic gender mark when they encounter nonbinary characters in their translations, and so this option is no longer a marginal discussion of the LGTBIQ+ collective and is beginning to become a popular linguistic phenomenon.
Thus, as suggested by the authors who subscribe the power turn, the more texts there are in which this subversion is promoted, the more visibility the collective it identifies will achieve. The more visibility the collective achieves, the more social passing it will have. And, consequently, the more accepted genderqueer identities and their linguistic realities are in society, the more the Real Academia de la Lengua and the Spanish State will be forced to recognize them.
Historically, translation has been instrumentalized to sustain or subvert ideological itineraries. Therefore, at a time like this, when the marginalization and stigmatization of queer identities may be at stake, translation (as proven by Villardón) can be useful to us as an ally that parasites the capitalist system in favour—if only once—of the margins.
Javier Arroyo Bretaño holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting from the Complutense University of Madrid, a Masters degree in Linguistics and Language Science, specializing in Poetics, from the UNED, and a PhD cum laude in Translation and Intercultural Mediation from the University of Salamanca. They currently teach Literary Translation at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Their research explores the liminal spaces between society, culture and translation. They also write poetry and work actively as a musician.
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