Markering af gender på tyrkisk

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of gender in the Turkish language in relation to gender roles and normativity of the male gender in translation of Turkish text. Since Turkish has no grammatical gender it is interesting to investigate what other ways gender is detected and understood in Turkish.

The method used is an online questionnaire with two different assignments: one assignment is a translation assignment where the informants were to translate a Turkish text into English. The sentences used were originally gender neutral, but in the translation into English it was necessary to choose between ‘he’ or ‘she’ or alternatively a gender-neutral term such as ‘they’ for the third person singular in Turkish. The other assignment was an addressing assignment where the informants had to decide how to address different people in occupations or other more neutral functions such as “How would you address ‘a person’?”.

The results are that there is a ‘male-as-norm’-principle that was evident in the translations of the Turkish text into English and that certain characteristics are attributed to being either male or female characteristics. This relates to the gender belief system that was evident in the addressing assignment that shows that certain occupations were assumed to be occupied by either males or females.