Nova

English-French translator; Qt localiser
Bridging the gap between natural & programming languages

📜 EMT Meeting Poster

Page added on 2026-05-12.

This page reflects the content of the poster I presented at the European Masters of Translation meeting (2026) at University College Cork, Ireland.
Here is the poster I presented

Introduction

In French, the masculine grammatical gender is generally accepted to be a “neutral” gender. Though, this “neutrality” historically comes from a perceived “superiority” of men over women (Labrosse 1996). This has led to feminists calling for the use of other forms of neutrality (commonly referred to as « écriture inclusive »)— but which are not non-binary inclusive. While there are non-binary inclusive forms being developed, those are largely not academically studied— thus, translators seem to lack proper guidance to use them in practice (Lardelli 2024).

This lack of representation means that non-binary inclusivity that was present in an English source text is likely to be lost in translation to French.

From feminism to broader gender representation

Several academics have brought up the (need for a) distinction between binary and non-binary inclusivity. Alpheratz (2018a, 2021) has notably written extensively about gender inclusivity in French, with a particular focus on documenting non-binary inclusive forms that are currently in use.

Binary inclusivity: Only considers feminine and masculine genders.
Non-binary inclusivity: Considers all genders, and non-gendered identities.

In the literature

The Manuel d’Écriture Inclusive (Haddad and Baric 2016) is often considered to have sparked public debate on inclusive forms in French. It encouraged writers to make use of a handful of strategy to avoid reinforcing gender stereotypes. Though this is not the first work of its kind, and notably points to earlier work by the French government, it heavily popularised these ideas, and seems to be what formalised the use of the point mĂ©diant (“middle dot”) as a compact way of representing both feminine and masculine genders.

Ensuring non-binary representation in translation

The main challenge seems to be a lack of widely available documentation on these forms of language (Lardelli 2024). Few academics document these practices, and the terminology is inconsistent.

Terms used to describe non-binary inclusive forms of language:

While Alpheratz has done significant work theorising classifications for systems of inclusive language and documenting existing forms of non-binary inclusivity in French, these forms are still non-standard, and multiple incompatible systems are in use at all time (Alpheratz 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2025).

There are no guides or toolkits specifically made for translators to apply these strategies in French.

In the literature

Grammaire du français inclusif (Alpheratz 2018b) details what Alpheratz considers to be a “diaethical variety of French” (Alpheratz 2018a) (that is, a variety used for ethical reasons). It documents various systems of neutrality in use by French speakers, and tries to give a cohesive guide to them. While it does not target translator, it can be a good resource for anyone trying to get a hang of inclusive French.

When to translate in a non-binary inclusive style?

From an activist standpoint, non-binary inclusivity should be used everywhere there are non-binary people. This includes groups of people whose gender is not known, or groups where people may not openly disclose their non-binary identity. But, in practice, even non-binary people do not always use non-binary inclusive forms of language. Cipolla (2026) for instance, studied the case of an Italian non-binary writer advocating for the use of non-binary inclusive neopronouns on social media, while reverting to using masculine as a “neutral” gender in their book. Interestingly, in the English translation, some of these occurrences were translated using they/them pronouns. Knisely (2020) also showed that French non-binary speakers were likely to use more standard forms of language to avoid being misunderstood by peers.

Bibliography

“(fr)” indicates French-language references; “(en)” indicates English-language ones.

In this section