Translating Identities: a Comparative Study of Gender-Inclusive Language Strategies in English and Italian

The present dissertation investigates the complexity of gender-inclusive language use and translation in English and Italian, exploring the concept of gender both as a grammatical category and a sociocultural construction. More specifically, building on existing studies on the importance of gender-inclusive language in relation to issues of social equality, modern gender-sensitive approaches to translation are analysed, including those developed in the context of Machine Translation (MT) with the aim of mitigating the phenomenon of gender bias that commonly arises in this practice. Finally, through a comparative study of three administrative texts in English and Italian, examples of gender-inclusive language strategies translated between these two languages are assessed on the basis of the current theoretical background on the matter. This analysis shows that using and translating gender-inclusive language is as feasible as it is crucial for an equal and just representation of genders in language; however, such a sensitive task is indubitably complicated by numerous challenges, and therefore further research is needed in order to find effective methods for overcoming them.