Expressive Grammatical Gender in Translation
A Contrastive Analysis of Russian, English, and Azerbaijani
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60055/phl.2026.49.85-104Keywords:
gender, personification, anaphoric reference, literary translation, linguoculturologyAbstract
Grammatical gender is conventionally treated as a morphosyntactic property whose relevance for translation reduces to agreement reconstruction. In literary and stylistically heightened discourse, however, gender morphology and pronominal selection frequently carry expressive functions like personification, evaluative stance, character identification, and symbolic alignment that prove fragile when texts move between languages structured very differently. This article examines how expressive grammatical gender is encoded and how it transfers in translation between Russian (a three-gender agreement system with gender-marked verb morphology), English (morphologically non-gendered nouns, but gender-distinguished third-person singular pronouns), and Azerbaijani (no grammatical gender, a single third-person pronoun form). The study uses a contrastive, example-driven qualitative analysis: a set of literary contexts drawn from Dostoevsky, Aitmatov, and Hemingway, alongside constructed minimal pairs, is classified by discourse function: personification, character-gender indexing, and gendered anaphoric cohesion, and then evaluated for translation strategies across each language direction. Drawing on classical scholarship (Yartseva 1981; Revzina 1973; Alekbarov 1988) and research published after 2010 (Segel, Boroditsky 2011; Samuel et al. 2019; Dubenko 2022; Abdel-Raheem et al. 2025), the analysis identifies three phenomena as most translation-sensitive: personification anchored through gendered anaphora, character gender conveyed through Russian past-tense verb morphology, and cohesion patterns that rely on pronoun gender to disambiguate reference. Translators manage these losses through explicitation, anaphora re-anchoring, compensation, and structural recasting. The article offers a practical decision framework for translators working across gender-asymmetric language pairs and proposes criteria for choosing between preservation and neutralisation strategies without sacrificing target-language naturalness.
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