Gender Neutrality in Translation

The purpose of this questionnaire is to describe languages based on their use of gender pronouns. Some
languages have third person (e.g. they, them) pronouns that are used for gender-neutral translation
while others have binary (feminine or masculine, e.g. she/he) gender pronouns. RWS would like to know
if and how gender neutrality is possible when translating in your language.

Please answer the following questions:

1) What is your language and region? (E.g. French/Canada)

_______________________________

2) Does your language have binary pronouns (feminine and masculine, e.g. she/he)? Please choose
either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ (If ‘No’ please skip to Question 4)

 Yes
 No

3) If you answered ‘Yes’ to Question 2, please list the binary gender pronouns below:

_______________________________

4) Does your language have a third person or non-binary gender pronoun(s)? If so, please list them
below:

Third-person pronoun(s): _________________________________________________

Non-binary pronoun(s): __________________________________________________

5) Does your language have gendered nouns? If so, please provide an example with the English
equivalent and the grammatical gender (E.g. “La maison” (home/house) in French/France is feminine
gendered)

________________________________

For each of the Example Text items below, please respond to questions 1, 2, 3, and 4:

Example Text 1) Is there a 2) What is the Gender- 3) What is the English 4) Is the
Gender- Neutral Translation Back-Translation? Gender-
Neutral for text in Column 1? Neutral
Translation Translation
for the awkward
Text in in your
Column 1 language?
(Yes/No)? (Yes/No)
 Is your child
able to feed
themselves?
No problems
washing or
dressing
herself/himself
A lot of
problems doing
her/his usual
activities
Do you think
that the person
would say
she/he has no
problems in
walking about?

Thanks for answering our questions! We appreciate your time and effort, and we hope this information
will serve to improve healthcare questionnaires and their translations.