Is the Russian Luna the Same as Polish Księżyc? Sense and Nonsense in Translation and Reception of Grammatical Gender
Is the Russian Luna the Same as Polish Księżyc? Sense and Nonsense in Translation and Reception of Grammatical Gender

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to investigate the importance of grammatical gender in conveying meaning and what difficulties this grammatical category can cause for translators. For the purpose of the study, a fairy tale was created in Russian, the axis of which is grammatical gender, which affects the meaning of the text. Interestingly, all nouns of a given gender in the original correspond in the translation to equivalents that are relevant to the story but are of a different gender. The change of gender modifies the message of the fairy tale, and inconsistency in its use disrupts the meaning of the story. In order to see what consequences the decisions made by the translators have on the reader’s reception, three translations produced by students of Russian Studies were subjected to audience evaluation. As a result of this experiment, it was found that grammatical gender determines the physical and psychological characteristics of the characters and their behaviour, contributes to the creation of the world depicted, affects the reception of the text, and is thus a category that cannot be used unreflectively.

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