By Layla Taha
Translated from Arabic by Erin McConnell & Layla Taha
As an Arabic-English volunteer translator with Localization Lab, I often find myself addressing a “general” public; asking them to “download” this tool, or “open” that application. In doing so, the feminist in me and the woman whose mother tongue is Arabic are repeatedly interrogated.
In English, most technical communications, whether in an app’s interface or an organizational newsletter, address a given “you” in an attempt to sound personal. This creates a problem for English to Arabic translators because unlike English, Arabic has gender (masculine and feminine) incorporated into most aspects of its grammar — from nouns to adjectives to verbs. So, when using the imperative, such as “Open” or “Download” or “Install”, one must specify the recipient’s gender. Since it’s presumed you’re addressing a “person”, a masculine word in Arabic, most communications address a singular male.
To mitigate this, I started using the default masculine plural form to address “persons” of a mixed gender group, which is at least grammatically correct. But when I asked Rula Asad, the Executive Directorate of the Stichting “Syrian” Female Journalists Network, whether that’s a suitable solution, she casually responded: “Isn’t that a masculine plural?”
Rula was alluding here to another grammatical rule in the Arabic language which seemingly prioritizes male recipients of a message over their female counterparts. Much like French, there are masculine and feminine plural forms in Arabic. For example, in French you have the feminine singular madame (sayyidah in Arabic) and the feminine plural mesdames (or sayyidat in Arabic). The issue in Arabic however, is that when addressing a group of women and men, the masculine plural form, (al sadah) would suffice, grammatically-speaking. As for including the two plural forms, (similar to the French mesdames et messiuers or the Arabic al sayyidat wal sadah), that’s optional and left to the speaker’s discretion (or personal mannerisms).
In a long, virtual (and quite enjoyable) conversation with Rula, she said that the repeated use of the masculine form in public discourse in Arabic leaves women feeling excluded from the conversation. “There is an assumption that the language that is spoken and used is inclusive of women, despite the fact that it does not include women directly… In your mind’s eye, you still imagine a message intended for a group of men, rather than a group of women or a group of people with diverse gender identities.”
Rula believes that language is a tool and a medium that influences public opinion, shapes the discourse towards a given group or issue, and ultimately reflects itself in people’s daily lives, behaviors, and reactions.
When I asked her how the use of the masculine plural affects her personal reception of a given text, she replied: “I don’t feel involved in the subject and so I don’t get involved. I’m not exaggerating. It affects the extent of engagement or social responsibility that I feel. That’s why I am reticent to consume cultural production that doesn’t include me, or directly address me in its tools.”
It’s really not an exaggeration. In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado-Pérez provides numerous examples that the data we use to inform economic, health, or other public policies does not take women into account. This exclusion often causes women to pay an extremely high cost in terms of time, money, and sometimes even with their lives.
Caroline explains that heart attacks, for example, are often misdiagnosed in women (one out of two times in Britain according to The Guardian) because the symptoms of the illness that appear in women are completely different than those of men — whose data is primarily used to inform medical research. In men, chest pain is one of the most common symptoms of a heart attack, whereby this is only the case for 1 in 8 women who suffer from a heart attack. For women, stroke symptoms are more likely to take the form of fatigue or digestion issues.
In her book Caroline argues that this phenomenon is also pervasive in the technology sector, from hardware architecture (eg. mobile phone size) to algorithms. Google’s speech recognition software for example is 70% more likely to understand men. Most “fitness tracking” applications underestimate the number of steps taken while doing housework at an error rate of up to 74%.
In an interview with Wired, Caroline explained that this is “both a cause and a consequence of a kind of unthinking that envisions humans as exclusively male.”
So we return to how we envision our humanity as we narrate, describe, and express it in our public discourse in Arabic, what could the consequences of continuing to “unthink” of women in nearly everything we write be?
“In its current form, Arabic is unfair, not only to women, but also to non-gender conforming individuals…”
“In its current form, Arabic is unfair, not only to women, but also to non-gender conforming individuals. If we take baby steps, our public discourse doesn’t even begin to reflect what is acceptable to society… We also have to take into account unspoken signifiers, or what is implied when unsaid. The use of language must be inclusive and fair. It must respect peoples’ choices and be free from judgment or stereotyping of specific social groups. This is the sort of public discourse we aspire to create,” says Rula.
Towards Finding Local Solutions
On the sidelines of the Internet Freedom Festival of 2019, Erin McConnell of The Localization Lab organized a session on “Exploring Approaches to Gender Inclusive Language in Arabic”. Farah Barqawi, co-founder of the Wiki Gender project, a participatory platform that produces open feminist knowledge on gender issues and women in Arabic, moderated the session.
The session brought together a number of people interested in this localization dilemma including Ahmed Gharbia, the former artistic director of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF).
When I asked Ahmad why he participated in the session, he said that he is specifically interested in this issue and in contemporary Arabic linguistic phenomena in general. “This issue has many dimensions: linguistic, morphological, as well as semantic and rhetorical. It’s important for me professionally to take part in creating an environment where women and men can cooperate in different areas of their lives — one that is more reflective of womens’ visions of the world.”
In the session, Farah presented a background of local attempts to deal with the dilemma of inclusion in Arabic.
A Summary of Current Approaches to Gender Inclusion:
The Backslash
Using the feminine suffix after a backslash (‘/’) may be one of the first attempts to address gender inclusion by some Arab media organizations. Farah advises against this approach as much as possible because the plethora of backslashes “break the flow of the text visually, linguistically and otherwise.”
The Masculine Plural
This approach, simply using the masculine plural instead of the masculine singular, is usually accompanied by using nouns as opposed to verbs when possible, in an attempt to avoid verb conjugation altogether.
In response to the use of the masculine plural, Farah says: “We settle for the plural because it addresses a group, however it is still the masculine plural. If there is a group of 9 women and a lone male suddenly joins, the feminine plural no longer applies. Even in our cultural heritage the masculine is given high status. It is not blatant discrimination, but that does not mean it is not descriminatory. In these situations, let’s just use both plurals (masculine and feminine).”
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I myself often use the masculine plural in my writing. I see this as an approach that addresses women and men (Admittedly I wrote “men and women” and then corrected myself!). I take this approach because it does not draw much attention to itself and away from the content (like replitive conjugations or backslashes do). It is also commonly used in colloquial language. When speaking to a group of women in colloquial Arabic you say: “Shall we (m.pl.) walk (m.pl.)? Do you want to drink (m. pl.) something?”, as opposed to using the feminine plural which would require more thoughtful deliberation.
To this Ahmad adds that colloquially, “Arabs use masculine and feminine forms without paying attention to the actual significance of gender, and they use other determinants when there is an actual desire to determine gender. These determinants are considered excessive or erroneous if we strictly apply the rules of morphology and grammar. For example, ؛Today I saw two women engineers (f. pl.).؛ This phenomenon exists in various forms in the Arab world. For example, most Egyptians have united around use of the masculine plural for demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, those) and most plurals. However, Levant dialects have standardized use of the feminine plural for demonstrative pronouns even when the aforementioned contain masculine nouns. In the dialects of the Maghreb we find variety in the use of some verbal tenses. This is all to say that maybe the solution is to ignore masculine and feminine markers all together and not count any customization of gender… In my opinion, the most important thing is the discourse, the ideas and the concepts, and how they are presented, treated and analyzed.”
Using both Genders
Using both the masculine and feminine plurals as it appears in the Quran:
“المُسْلِمِينَ وَالْمُسْلِمَاتِ وَالْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَالْمُؤْمِنَاتِ”
“Muslims (m. pl.) and Muslims (f. pl.), believers (m. pl.) and believers (f. pl.).” As for Wiki Gender, its editorial policy prefers giving precedence to the feminine plural over the masculine plural, or only using the feminine plural.
Alternation of Gender Within the Text
Farah, the co-founder of Wiki Gender and the moderator of the IFF session, stated that this problem of discourse originates from imagining that we are addressing a “person”, a masculine word. “Person” is a word that claims neutrality. It refers to an unknown person (sex, gender, etc.), which can be pluralized, such as “people” (m.pl.) and “persons” (m.pl.), but may not be feminized in the plural form. Hence the idea of diversification (which requires imagination) or switching gender signifiers throughout the same text and in the plural forms of speech (eg: journalists (f.pl.), researchers (m.pl.), students (f.pl.) and interested parties (m.pl.))
An Experimental Portmanteau
Farah says that some time ago, the members of Wiki Gender began experimenting with solutions to the problem of the backslash, which often separates the masculine and feminine suffixes when addressing a group of people (much like “s/he” in English). They played with removing the backslash and combining the two suffixes into one word. The result was a completely new word that signified both genders, rolled off the tongue, and was still declensional.
Ahmad says he discovered similar experimentation in the Maghreb, but he doesn’t know how it originated or who is behind it. .
For her part, Rula believes that this method is truly creative and adds to the language from within. She advocates for linguistic experimentation and sees that finding a solution will require patience: “For so long, people tolerated gender stereotyping and exclusion in most public discourse and knowledge production. So why can’t we be patient with these texts that are in an experimental stage? So long as there are no solutions, people can eventually get used to it.” She adds, “Alternative media outlets, who are advocating for gender equality or female empowerment, should understand the social and emancipatory aspects of such experiments, rather than simply treat media discourse as something to be sold and consumed.”
On Not Falling into the Translation Trap
Following the session, I followed up with Farah on what motivates her. In a Jitsi call she said, “Arabic has a rich vocabulary and a legacy of a popular imagination that was sexually abundant and had no problem in naming sexual acts or acknowledging diversity of gender and sexual orientations. But with the establishment of organized religion, states, and wars, and the spread of capitalism that engulfed the region as well as the rest of the world, entered a holy reverence for heterosexuality and stereotyped gender roles that consist of the productive family of children, the working father and the mother doing unpaid domestic work. So, to treat the subject of inclusion as a novelty, because it’s surfacing in a North American context is to fall into the trap of translation first. It’s also a trap of borrowing things that may not be essential in our contexts.”
She adds: “A common manifestation of this is the obsession with finding one word in Arabic, when Arabic is not a language of single words. How many words do we have in Arabic for “love” compared to in English? Why don’t we celebrate this diversity? I’m not saying we shouldn’t address the issue, I’m saying we must be careful to ask the questions that arise from these dilemmas, in our organizations, in writing, in discrimination against female writers, etc. Who are the editors and the publishers and how do they produce what is written or published in Arabic?”
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