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#I feel I was unnecesairly angry in this post
tafeja · 2 years
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It's so annoying when people complain that nonbinary characters get she/her pronouns in russian/polish/spanish/what ever translation. If you complain about translation it's because you probably speak the language, right? Then you should understand that not every language is English, and there are no gender neutral pronouns for people in that language. Like, how do you expect they/them to be translated?
Take for example Russian. There is a gender neutral pronoun "оно" /ono/. However to refer like this to people would be exremely rude, dehumanazing and cofusing for the audience. This pronoun usually refers to inanimate objects. The only example of it refering to an animate object that I can think of is "monster" (чудовище). Unless it is a horror and the character is an entity beyond human comprehension you probably wouldn't want to refer to it with "оно".
Ok, so what about a calque from English? Just refer to a character in third person plural, right? If it works for English language it means it works in every other language equally well, right? No. Stop being so online and go talk with your friends and family in your native language for a change. Or at least go to your local sites. Even if we gloss over the fact that if you'll refer to a character in plural viewers will think either that there are several characters or that this character has some sort of multi-personality disorder. "They" (third person plural) doesn't have a grammatical gender, the same way "I" doesn't either. However adjectives, participles, verbs in past tense all have grammatical gender in singular form. And most nouns have it in both plural and singular. So how would this character talk about themselves? For example the character wants to say something like this:" I (no gender) was (what gender?) young (what gender?)" So the character would also need to talk in plural, refering to themselves as "we". Which, again, would make audience think there are more people than there really are. Or, they might think that the character is royal or at least very arrogant. Because there are circumstances when a single person can talk about themselves "we", and it is when they are royal. It is called "royal we". And if it is not the characterization you are going for it probably would be inappropriate. And remember that nouns have gender even in plural, so you probably would have to use male as a default in this instance (many words for proffesions do not have a feminine gender anyway, and when you talk about men and women you would use masculine words).
So now you'll probably want some sort of neopronouns? If English-speakers can make them up as much as they want then other language can too? No. It is dumb. No one will understand you. And have you forgotten that other words, that are not pronouns, have grammatical gender too? You will need to creat whole new declinations and conjugations for it to work.
And at this point you are left only with "he" and "she". Are you suggesting that you using male as a default is somehow more progressive?
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