Translator’s Gender and Features of Women’s Language in Two Persian Translations of The Thief and The Dogs

Abstract

The intersection of translation and gender has been a topic of investigation in Translation Studies. This qualitative and descriptive-analytical study aims to examine the manifestation of the translator’s gender in the Persian translations of the Arabic novel The Thief and The Dogs. The theoretical framework is primarily based on the features enumerated by Lakoff for women's language along with Fotuhi's classification of these features. To conduct the study, the Persian translations of the novel by the female and male translators were analyzed and the linguistic features of women's language were extracted, categorized and coded. The results indicated that, in line with Lakoff's features, the use of adjectives, specific female vocabulary, sentence intensifiers, politeness strategies, colors, and the application of different rhetorical devices were more salient in the language of the female translator. However, frequent use of phonological features such as uptalks, hedges, tag questions, and collaborative discourse was not found in the female translator's work. Additionally, some characteristics did not align with Lakoff's features, including the increased use of diminutive words by the male translator and the use of colloquial expressions and complex sentence structures by the female translator. These findings were interpreted from a sociological perspective.