ttant wrote:Another part, too much time forgotten is the text.
English is really poor for differentiate male and female action.
You can easily wrote : Dominique was born in 1958.
How can you tell if Dominique is male or female ?
In french, the differentiation exists:
Dominique est né en 1958 <- male version
Dominique est née en 1958 <- female version.
To sum up,in english one sentence might be enough, but in french (and other languages), two are required if you want to do it properly. I mean without using stuff like né.e or né(e)...
English gender neutrality is a real pain in you-know-where for many of us, translators. I still feel sorry for changing Tora's gender in Dreaming with Elsa. It's also a potential gag-killer: think about the MC starting a new job and being called to his boss office, he assumes his boss would be a man but it's actually a woman. In many languages you'll have two different words for that role (as in Spanish 'jefe'/'jefa') that would expose her gender from the start, not to mention the whole constellation of adjectives and pronouns with gender inflexion that might also appear in the text before the MC actually sees who his boss is.