Misgendering in translation: non-binary (in)visibility in animated series

Abstract

[eng] In recent years, an increasing awareness of the genderqueer community has been observed in audiovisual media and, consequently, some debates have emerged regarding the translation of inclusive language. As some languages are marked for gender, and lack a consolidated neutral pronoun, this may pose a problem to translators. This paper examines how is this process carried out in Spanish translations of English and Japanese texts considering that the former is a grammatical gender language, whereas the latter are notional gender languages. Therefore, three case studies will be analyzed, all of them featuring non-binary characters: The Owl House (Terrace, 2020), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Stevenson, 2018), and Komi-San Can’t Communicate (Kawagoe, 2021). This study aims at demonstrating how genderqueerness tends to be erased in Spanish translations – resulting in misgendering – as well as at proposing more inclusive alternatives. Nonetheless, as some Spanish translations do embrace inclusiveness and change by rendering non-binary gender; some of them will be also discussed so as to signal a possible course of action when dealing with this type of translations in the future.