3 ms·
Given that the act of reading is lossy, I don't think this matters too much.
by dazzawazza 6y ago
Given that the act of reading is lossy, I don't think this matters too much.
- dmitriid 6y agoIt matters a great deal. For example, Bagheera is female in Russian translations. This breaks the entire notion of Bagheera being an older male friend to Mowgly. This also makes some parts of the books nonsensical. All the characters in Winnie the Pooh represent a group of school boys. When Kanga shows up, it upends their world. In the canonical Russian translation and animation Owl is a fussy old lady. Which reduces all shades of meaning. These are simple works of fiction, and already they are greatly reduced just by the singular gender choices made by translators. And there are dozens to hundreds of such choices per book. Complex books like Too Like Lightning may be even untranslatable entirely because TLL rests on gender ambiguity. Russian has gender even in verbs, so you can see a character's gender even in simple phrases like "I did" which are ambiguous in English. etc. etc. etc.