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Translating Identities.Navigating Gender Neutrality and Resistance in the Italian Translation of Pageboy

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The representation of non-binary identities in languages with grammatical gender poses specific linguistic and cultural challenges. Pageboy, Elliot Page’s 2023 memoir, was translated into Italian with explicit attention paid to gender-neutral and identity-affirming language, when not overtly indicated by the author. Unlike English, which largely relies on lexical solutions and pronominal adjustment, Italian encodes gender across articles, adjectives, pronouns, and past participles, often rendering direct lexical equivalence unattainable. This study investigates the translation strategies adopted in the Italian edition of Pageboy, combining corpus linguistics and qualitative textual analysis, complemented by interviews with the translation team. The aim is to describe how gender markers are reduced, neutralised, or reframed in the target text while maintaining narrative cohesion and emotional tone. Using quantitative analysis to identify patterns in pronominal choices, adjective variation, and past participle agreement, the study highlights a systematic tendency towards gender-invariant forms and syntactic restructuring. Qualitative examination reveals that neutralisation is primarily achieved through rephrasing, the selection of epicene lexical items, and the reorganisation of verbal constructions that avoid obligatory gender agreement. The findings show that the Italian translation does not create new inclusive forms (such as schwa or asterisk-based endings) but works within the structural affordances of Italian to reduce gender marking. This approach suggests a model of translation-driven linguistic accommodation that prioritises intelligibility, accessibility, and identity representation, without departing from standard Italian norms.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7119460120
FWCI:
Cites: 28
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Related to: 10