The parameter
Gender is not a property of nouns. It is a property of the rest of the sentence. Corbett's criterion, now standard, is that a language has gender only where nouns divide into classes reflected in the behavior of associated words: articles, adjectives, verbs, pronouns. A noun ending is not evidence of gender; agreement is. On that test English has a gender system, but a minimal one, visible only in the third-person singular pronouns.
Assignment to a class may be semantic, formal or both. In German and Russian it follows a mixture of the two, which is why das Mädchen is neuter and why no reliable rule predicts the gender of an inanimate noun.
One caution on the labels. Dutch is usually described as having two genders, but the merger of masculine and feminine is incomplete: the articles show a two-way contrast while pronoun use retains traces of three, and speakers differ. "Gender" and "noun class" name the same phenomenon, the second reserved by convention for large systems that are not sex-based.
How languages vary
- No gender: Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Persian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin. The third-person pronoun does not distinguish sex.
- Two genders: French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Standard Arabic, Hindi-Urdu; Dutch and Swedish with a common and a neuter gender.
- Three genders: German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek, Icelandic.
- Large noun class systems: Swahili and the Bantu languages generally, where the classes run to fifteen or more depending on how singular and plural forms are counted.
Corbett's WALS chapter 30 samples 257 languages: 145 have no gender, 50 have two, 26 have three, 12 have four and 24 have five or more. Gender is a minority feature globally, and the largest group among gendered languages is the two-gender type, not the three-gender type familiar from German and Slavic.
Consequences for translation
Two consequences dominate, and they run in opposite directions.
Translating into a gendered language forces an assignment the source did not make. Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish and Persian have one third-person pronoun covering all sexes, and many of their kinship and occupational terms are neutral. German, Russian, Polish and the Romance languages offer no neutral option in ordinary official register, so the translator commits, and in a birth certificate, a medical report or a witness deposition that commitment is a statement of fact about a person. Russian sharpens the point: the past tense agrees in gender with its subject, so even a first-person sentence in a signed statement declares the speaker's sex. Where the file does not establish it, the professional response is a query or a note, not the likelier guess.
Translating out of a gendered language loses a reference-tracking device. In a German or Russian sentence with two possible antecedents, the pronoun, the adjective ending or the participle says which one is meant. English pronouns cannot carry that load for inanimates, so the information has to be rebuilt by repeating the noun, which is a cohesion change, or by restructuring the sentence.
Two practical notes. Occupational titles are a document-level decision, not a sentence-level one: German, Polish and Spanish offer paired forms, and a document that alternates between them reads as careless, so term base entries for a gendered target carry two forms per concept. And gender errors are invisible to a reviser working from the target alone: the text is fluent, and only the source shows that the sex was never stated.
Examples
TR>DE
- Source: Kardeşim doktor.
- Target: Mein Bruder ist Arzt. / Meine Schwester ist Ärztin.
- Comment: Turkish leaves sex unspecified. German commits three times over, in the possessive, the noun and the predicate. Where the document does not establish sex, both renderings assert what the source did not.
EN>RU
- Source: I arrived on 3 March.
- Target: Я приехал 3 марта. / Я приехала 3 марта.
- Comment: The Russian past tense agrees in gender with its subject, so the first-person form declares the speaker's sex. In a declaration whose deponent is identified only by initials, the translator cannot write the sentence without deciding.
EN>DE
- Source: The applicant is a teacher.
- Target: Der Antragsteller ist Lehrer. / Die Antragstellerin ist Lehrerin.
- Comment: Two nouns and an article all commit. The decision belongs to the document as a whole, taken from the file and applied consistently.
SW>EN
- Source: Kisu hiki kirefu kinatoka Kenya.
- Target: This long knife comes from Kenya.
- Comment: The class prefix ki- recurs on the noun, the demonstrative, the adjective and the verb. English marks none of it, so a chain of agreement that told the reader exactly which noun was under discussion has to be replaced by repetition or by word order.
References
- Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Corbett, G. G. (2013). "Number of Genders." In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 30. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2000). Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.