ABSTRACT
“Language [consists] of socially and politically situated practices that are differentially distributed on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity and other phenomena” (Briggs 1996:4). Discursive features can index, at times simultaneously, a number of social and political positions and identities. One such position/identity is gender. As a salient social category, gender is discursively foregrounded through a variety of utterances and silences and, in certain languages, through mandatory grammatical markers. This paper presents the results of a study aimed at assessing the reactions of Francophone nurses in Ontario (a Canadian English-speaking province) to translated documents produced by their regulatory college. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to determine the impact of the feminization of texts directed to a predominantly female readership. This qualitative analysis focused on respondents’ attitudes toward the feminization strategies used by translators, but also produced surprising data regarding reactions to gender neutral texts in either English or French. The study demonstrates that certain discursive/translation strategies aimed at redressing inequalities may be perceived by some readers as detrimental. In fact, results show that gender cannot be separated from other salient social, political and economic factors.
