Feministische strategien zur übersetzung des generischen maskulinums vom deutschen ins spanische

Abstract

The use of the generic masculine is a controversial point in feminist language criticism in both German (Bußmann & Hellinger 2003) and Spanish (Nissen 2002). In Transla-tion Studies, the critique of the generic masculine is uttered by means of strategies that can be subsumed under the term feminisation (Bengoechea 2015).In this article, I explore the issue of how far feminist strategies are applied in the trans-lation of the generic masculine and whether further feminisations would be possible. To this end, I examine the translations of two literary texts by a Swiss-German author, Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Muerte en Persia, El valle feliz), where I analyse the occurrence of two types of generic masculine: occupational and social roles, on the one hand, and partitive constructions, on the other.The study shows that both, the masculine and the feminine translation of the generic masculine occur in the target texts. The possibility of using the feminine in a generic sense whenever the generalising statement assumes a female person reference in the singular is under discussion. This is even possible with the partitive type, although in Spanish both elements are congruent and the feminine plural thereby refers to a mixed group of persons