Author-Translator Gender Correlation in Works Translated into English
By Jessica Benkert, Douglas Griffin and Jameson Rivera
Often, the translation of a book into a language other than its original form requires as much work as the initial publication. Translating materials into English necessitates a special effort on the part of the publishing industry: from deciding which materials to select and brokering deals, to finding a translator and generating marketing materials.
The selection of a translator is arguably the most crucial step in this process. Any translation will impart a new tone and new perspective to a work, and an effective translator needs to understand not only the language from which they are translating, but also the experiences and historical/cultural perspective of the original author in order to minimize the biases they bring to the work. One critical area where these biases may creep in is through gender bias, especially for works where gender identity and gender-keyed experiences feature highly in the narrative structure. Using a dataset from Publisher’s Weekly (which contains information on every translated work published in the United States from 2008 onward) we have analyzed how frequently the translator’s gender corresponds to the gender of the original author: how many works have matching author-translator gender pairs and why might this be important?
About Our Data:
Publisher’s Weekly (PW) is one of the main sources of trade publication data on the US market. It publishes key statistics about the publishing industry, including the data-set we are using about translations (which can be found here). PW is seen as a reputable source in the writing/publishing community, renowned for the comprehensive nature of their reports. An in-house editing team curates the magazine, but they receive information from journalists and publishing house employees.
Despite the wealth of (arguably essential) industry material PW produces, it is worth noting that the company has come under fire repeatedly from marginalized authors for making certain information relatively inaccessible. A lot of content is only accessible behind a paywall, which has led to hashtags like “PublishingPaidMe” that try to create a more open environment when it comes to book sales.
When considering this data, it’s clear that while PW curates a massive amount of US-based information, they don’t publish data on UK and Canadian translations to English. They also would not consider fan translations or indie/self-published material, such as a bilingual author translating their own work to be self-published in English.
We have also tried to regard each book in the data set not merely as a data point, but as tangible work that the author and translator have poured their lives into. Despite the massive quantity, each of these books was written by a person over a significant period of time; they sank their precious life-minutes into it, painstakingly queried it, found an agent, went through never-ending submissions, and their dedication is worth more than the number assigned to “price in USD.”
Additionally, it’s essential to acknowledge that English is the dominant world market for publishing. Like most industries that pull from the global South, it creates a vacuum. English-speakers get books from other languages, but the countries being drawn from very rarely get translations geared towards them unless it’s an incredibly popular book.
About Our Question:
We were interested in investigating whether there would be more same gendered author and translator pairs than co-ed pairs — gender massively impacts storytelling and language, moreso in languages with grammatical gender. Stories imbued with the struggles of a certain gender might benefit from a translator who understands the nuance of those experiences, adapting the text to reflect that in English.
One novel in our data set which critically represents how gender may impact translation is Laundry by Suzane Adams and translated by Beka Mckay. It is a psychological thriller where a woman recounts her traumatizing childhood to her husband. The novel is from the perspective of both a scared young girl and mature woman looking back on her fears. These perspectives and roles would be difficult for a man to accurately portray, as they focus on the dark underbelly of femininity and female relationships.
Another example would be Stay With Me by Jenney Anastan and translated by Elena Manici. This is a love story very clearly written for a female audience, and it is important for the translator to be able to understand what a female audience may be looking for in a romance novel.
From these two examples, we were pleased to see that publishers seemed to be attuned to gender issues in choosing translators. In both examples, women were both the authors and the translators. However, to be certain that this was the case moreover, we needed to turn to our principal analysis.
Our Analysis:
For the data provided by our data set, approximately 90% indicate an original author gender and a translator gender: c. 7600 data-points out of the 8565 total. We judged this to be a sufficiently high percentage to continue with the analysis.
We began by examining the raw breakdown of author and translator genders, to establish a baseline with which to compare our later analyses. Recorded author and translator gender can fall into three major values: male, female, and both. “Both” here represents books written or translated by a group of authors which includes members who are both female and male. There appears to be no appreciable category for gender non-binary people, although they may be included in “undisclosed.”
For books where this value is recorded, we found that men were most likely to be both authors and translators, with 66% and 49% of books respectively. Women were more likely to be translators than primary authors, with 30% of books written exclusively by women, but a much larger 43% of books translated by women. It is also more likely for a book to be translated by a group of multiple authors of different genders than for one to be written by such a group (6% vs. 2% respectively). These results can be seen in our pie charts.
With this baseline established, we looked to see if these patterns changed significantly when we broke the data down by the original author. (It is worth noting that in this case, since we have been provided with complete population data for translations published within the United States, we do not have to worry about statistical sampling errors.)
For books written primarily by men, we found that men were the most common translators, authoring 58% of translations. This is significantly higher (+9%) than the baseline percent of male translators, meaning that for male authors, there appears to be a positive correlation between the two values, and publishers seem to seek out translators of the same gender. For women authors, this trend is even more pronounced, with 61% of books authored by women translated by women, a full 18% above the baseline. For books authored by writers of both genders, the translators also seemed to match, with 49% of books written by multi-gender groups translated by the same, a whopping +33% change from the baseline. These results can be seen in our pie charts.
Quite honestly, these results surprised our group, but in a good way. It appears that publishers do, in fact, pay attention to gender when matching an author and a translator. Throughout our data, the percentage of translators who share the gender characteristic of the books’ authors are consistently higher than the baseline percentage. For both men and women, more than half of translators shared the gender of the author they translated.
Future Research Topics:
Further research on this topic could be on the specific reasonings for matching-gender or co-ed author-translator pairings. Do the main characters of a novel reflect the people writing the novel — are there certain topics and genres that certain genders, or mixes of genders, tend to write about? Another direction for research would be to examine the linguistic aspects of translations; are more gendered languages, like Russian and romance languages, more often translated by people the same gender of the author? There naturally could be profit-based, linguistic, or emotional reasons that underlay the reasoning for matching-gender pairings — these findings could shed more light on writing across cultures and the publishing industry as a whole.
