The Case of the Singular They : Queer representation in the translation of pronouns in And Just Like That...

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to study the translation strategies used in translation of the singular they in Finnish. The singular they is a personal pronoun especially relevant today in its usage by people in the queer community who identify as non-binary. As data, I am employing the subtitles from the HBO Max series, And Just Like that where I examine the translation of the singular they. In the analysis of the translations Démont’s three modes on translating queer literary texts are used. The translation of the singular they is a rather complex task due to the differences between languages regarding marking gender in pronouns and as well the fact that the queer community is a multilingual network that creates their own vocabulary to form their identity. In this thesis, I examine how the translations of the singular they maintain the queer content in the target language. The theoretical framework used in this thesis discusses the gender marking in pronouns, usage of the singular they, gender self-determination in the queer community, community informed translation and as well the possible issues in translating the singular they as hän. I examined the translations of the singular they from the series And Just Like That. The series has characters that identify outside the gender dichotomy, and they utilize the singular they as their chosen pronouns. There are in total 27 instances of the singular they or its other forms in the first season of the series which was chosen as the material. I transcribed both the English and Finnish subtitles and analyzed them, using Demont’s modes to determine how well the translations maintain the queer content. The results exhibit that a majority of the instances of they were translated according to Demont’s misrecognizing mode since the queer content was concealed and hän was chosen as the translation. Demont’s two other modes: minoritizing and queering were equally frequent in the analysis. The translations in the former mainly translated the denotative equivalence while simultaneously reducing the queer content and the ones in the latter exhibited successful presentation of the queer content. There were, as well, a notable number of translations where the pronoun was completely omitted, reflecting the difficulty of this translation. Since this thesis only examined the translations from the first season of the series, and only one series in altogether, the results of this study are not highly generalizable. Though, the results, even from this small amount of data, exhibited a varied usage of translation strategies meaning that the translation of the singular they to Finnish would benefit from more research to determine translation strategies which represent the Finnish non-normative gender identities.