Gender-inclusive translation for a gender-inclusive sport: strategies and translator perceptions at the International Quadball Association (2023)

Abstract: Gender-inclusive language is of key importance to the IQA, the international governing body for quadball, a mixed-gender contact sport that explicitly welcomes players of all genders. While relatively straightforward for English, the picture becomes more complicated for most of the other IQA working languages. This paper provides an overview of the strategies currently chosen by translation team leaders for different IQA languages, the factors that influenced this decision and their connection with existing research on inclusive language strategies. It further explores the awareness and attitudes of IQA translators towards those strategies and factors.

## introduction quadball is a mixed-gender, full-contact sport played around the world. a quadball team consists of up to 21 athletes with seven players per team on the field at any one time. the iqa is the international governing body for quadball, representing 19 national governing bodies (ngbs) with full member status and 19 ngbs with associate member status at the time of writing. the iqa organizes international events, offers support to its members, and promotes the sport and its values of gender equity and inclusivity. the sport's rulebook explicitly acknowledges players of all genders: "all quadball athletes have the right to define how they identify and it is this stated gender that is recognized on pitch" (6) and enforces the presence of multiple genders on pitch via the so called 'gender maximum rule': "a team may not have more than four players who identify as the same gender in play at the same time" @xcite . because of the importance of gender inclusivity, all iqa publications (e.g., the rulebook, policies, and reports) are written using gender-inclusive language. as iqa documents are drafted in english, a natural gender language, this is achieved relatively straightforwardly by avoiding gender-specific nouns and using the pronouns 'they/them' when referring to a person of unknown gender. increasingly, however, the iqa translation team is trying to provide core content (i.e., the rulebook and referee tests) in languages other than english. at the time of writing, there are translators working into 8 languages: catalan, dutch, french, german, italian, portuguese, spanish, and turkish. given the unique nature of each language and the fact that the translation teams consist of (an often limited number of) volunteers, gender-inclusive language is implemented to different degrees for each target language. this paper provides an overview of the different strategies currently in use at the iqa, the factors that influenced those strategies, and a discussion of the strategy compared to existing research on gender-inclusive writing for that language (if available). this is followed by a report on a survey conducted among the iqa translators, exploring their awareness of inclusive language strategies, their attitudes towards them and the factors that influence the choice of strategy. the paper concludes with some key findings and plans for future work. ## related work quite a large body of work has indicated that the use of certain linguistic forms leads to certain mental representations with, for example, the supposedly 'generic' masculine evoking a male bias in readers' minds @xcite . a possible way of countering these biases is by using gender-fair language, which has "the potential to make significant contributions to the reduction of gender stereotyping and discrimination" @xcite . however, while women were found to use more gender-fair language after being exposed to a text containing such language, men needed to be made explicitly aware of this language use before using it themselves @xcite . until relatively recently, most of the work on gender-fair language focused on masculine and feminine genders only, but society and research now increasingly acknowledge the importance of non-binary gender identities. as " @xcite epresentation in language can be very important to one's ability to have their identity understood by others and recognized in everyday speech interactions" @xcite , the use of genderinclusive or gender neutral language is on the rise. there are a variety of strategies to include non-binary identities in language. lópez (2022) divides them into two main groups: indirect non-binary language (inl), where gender markers are avoided altogether, and direct non-binary language (dnl), where linguistic innovation takes place to make non-binary identities explicitly visible. often, a combination of those strategies is suggested, with @xcite acknowledging that "[l]everaging non-binary language […] in ways that do not deviate from current linguistic norms is one productive strategy" and that it can be combined with neologisms or neopronouns to allow for "linguistic possibilities through which nonbinary speakers/writers can more authentically articulate their experiences and, thereby, come to exist in language" (152). however, the use and acceptance of such language greatly depends on the language itself, with natural gender languages being more open to linguistic changes than grammatical gender languages @xcite . this imbalance between languages when it comes to gender-inclusivity potentially creates challenges in translation, particularly when translating from a natural gender language like english into heavily grammatically gendered languages like french or spanish. in a paper discussing audiovisual translation and representation of non-binary characters, @xcite shows how characters' gender identity can get lost in translation and argues that it is a translator's "responsibility to keep non-binary people visible" (232). according to @xcite , working on similar data, translators need to have "an awareness of and engagement with the ever-evolving culture of the community one is translating" (14). in the most comprehensive survey on gender-fair (machine) translation to date, @xcite argue that there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to determining gender-fair language strategy in translation due to its complexity and context-specificity. from these perspectives, the translation department of the iqa offers an ideal use case, as most translators are ## gender-inclusive translation strategies at the iqa of the 8 iqa working languages, there is one genderless language (turkish), requiring no additional strategies for gender inclusivity in translation. the other languages express gender grammatically to different degrees: dutch is a grammatical gender language that is gradually becoming a natural gender language like english; catalan, french, italian, portuguese, and spanish are masculine-feminine gender languages; and german is a masculine-feminine-neuter gender language. to get an idea of the chosen strategy for each language and the factors that influenced this decision, i contacted all translation team leaders via the official iqa slack workspace. some answered my questions via chat, others wrote out a document outlining the strategies and factors in more detail. the following section offers aninevitably very condensedoverview per language, with the exception of dutch foot_0 . ## translator awareness and attitude to get a better understanding of how translators perceive gender-inclusive language at the iqa, i conducted a survey using google forms. the survey consisted of three main parts: the form was shared with translators via the iqa slack workspace and e-mail. the total number of translators invited to participate was 27 (19 official iqa translators on slack and an additional 8 community translators currently working on iqa translation projects). it must be noted that activity fluctuates greatly among translators, as these are unpaid volunteer positions, and many translators also volunteer within their own communities (either for local teams or within their ngbs), making some people less likely to regularly check the iqa slack or e-mails. ## discussion the iqa translation teams have a clear understanding of the importance of gender-inclusive language strategies and are very aware of the community they translate for (both the quadball and the broader lgbtqia+ community), which follows the recommendations of @xcite . the fact that strategies change as new research becomes available, or even when the translation team leader changes confirms the findings by @xcite that there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution to determining gender-inclusive translation strategies. at the iqa, the strategies are different for each language, and sometimes even change depending on the context. this can be seen most clearly in some teams' decision to change their strategy when translating the referee tests. these tests are taken under strict time limits, and there is a concern that gender-inclusive language forms might be harder to read. on the other hand, recent research suggests that this might not be the case in practice @xcite @xcite . team leaders explicitly mention the potential negative influence on people with dyslexia, adhd, or learning disabilities. to the best of my knowledge, this effect has not been tested in practice, making it a potentially fruitful avenue for future research. another aspect of gender-inclusive writing where the inclusion of one group might happen at the cost of the inclusion of another is in the visibility of women. while there is some evidence that gender-inclusive strategies actually improve the visibility of women compared to the generic masculine @xcite @xcite , this may not be true for all languages or all strategies (e.g. @xcite . going forward, it will be crucial to evaluate the impact of different strategies from an intersectional point of view. because of the variability and continuously evolving strategies, translation technology at the iqa is currently limited to the use of translation memories and glossaries within matecat @xcite to ensure consistency in projects with more than one translator. machine translation is not seen as a viable solution at this point as "machine translation cannot adapt to rapidly-evolving non-binary language" @xcite and "one generally acceptable and widely applicable solution does not and could not exist" @xcite . i am aware of some of the recent suggestions in this field @xcite and will continue to follow these evolutions. ## conclusion & future work as gender-inclusivity is one of the core values of quadball, this exploratory study set out to determine how gender-inclusivity is currently implemented by the different iqa translation teams, by means of input from translation team leaders and a survey conducted among the iqa translators. input from team leaders showed that each language has a different strategy, with languages like portuguese and italian taking a more cautious approach but willing to increase the use of gender-inclusive language in the future, catalan preferring an indirect non-binary language approach, and french, german, and spanish opting for direct non-binary language approaches. factors that are taken into account are the gender-inclusive element of the sport, awareness of community needs, input from lgbtqia+ communities and linguistic research. translators agree that gender-inclusive language should be used by the iqa, and seem to find lgbtqia+ resources, academic research, the opinion of the community and the readability of a text the most important factors to determine a strategy. the argument of 'readability' occurs frequently, among team leaders and translators alike, although actual empirical research on readability, particularly for people with learning disabilities, is currently scarce to nonexistent. overall, it is clear from the feedback that the gender-inclusive language strategies are not set in stone, and that team leaders and translators are open to changing the strategy as new information becomes available. given the fact that gender-inclusive language is constantly evolving and that translators indicate that they get used to reading and writing it as they do it more, my goal is to repeat this survey every (other) year, to eventually get a diachronic overview of the evolution in the respective iqa communities. in a next phase, i hope to expand the present survey with a survey among ngb board members and players, to explore the attitudes in the community at large. particularly interesting would be a comparison of referee tests using different language strategies, to empirically verify whether or not a gender-inclusive strategy is indeed harder to read (with regards to speed and comprehension).