Gender of cited authors : a problem for the english-arabic translation of scholarly research

incl. ref.

This study addresses a unique translation problem which translators from English into Arabic need to consider when inflecting the introductory verbs for the gender of in-text cited authors in scholary books which use a style sheet that does not spell out the first name of authors in the list of references. Suppose a translator comes across the following sentence: 'Sander (1972) pointed out...', and that the reference list of the book provides E as the initial letter of the first name of Sander. Do we expect this sentence to be rendered into Arabic, a gender-specific language, as ashaara and and ashaarat show masculine and feminile inflection, respectively. As is clear, the readily available bibliographical information about Sander's first name does not tell the translator whether this author is a male, e.g., Erick Sander or a female, e.g., Emma Sander.