Murderbot pronoun thoughts
So this post is just going to be me having some thoughts about the german translation of the murderbot diaries and how pronouns are handled. (I read some of the books in german and some in english).
In German MB's pronouns aren't it (or so I thought!). The translation handles MB's pronouns by changing them depending on the name that is used for MB at that moment. In German, all nouns have one of three grammatical genders. SecUnit is a feminine word while Killerbot (in the german translation Murderbot is called Killerbot. Yes, "kill" is an English and word and not a German word. Yes, it seems a bit pointless to just switch one English word for another there. No idea why they did that) is a masculine word. So whenever MB calls itself (or is called) SecUnit, it is then refered to as "sie" (she) and whenever it is called Killerbot it is "er" (he).
It never is refered to as "es" (that would be german for "it"). That annoyed me a bit in the beginning but then I realized that they are not necessarily wrong to translate it like that.
When talking about an object with a word that is grammatically neutral (e.g. Buch (=book)) You would use it like this in a sentence: "Das ist mein Buch, leg es bitte dort auf den Tisch." (This is my book, please put it on the table there.) You use the word directly or use "it", exactly like in english. If, however, you have a word with a masculine or feminine grammatical gender (e.g. Tasse (=mug/cup)) it would be different. "Das ist meine Tasse, stell sie bitte dort auf den Tisch." (A direct translation to english would be: This is my cup, please put her on the table there.)
And this is what the translation did with MB in the books. They treaded it like an object without an actual gender, using only the grammatical gender depending on the noun that is used to refer to it right then.
In english there is no such distinction so indeed we can't know if this is the correct interpretation.
The other option would have been to have MB use "es" (it) as pronound to an neutral (actual and not only grammatical) gender. In that case, "SecUnit" or "Killerbot" would be treaded like names and not change the grammatical gender. "Das is Killerbot, es ist ein Konstukt./ Das ist SecUnit, es ist ein Konstruct." (This is Murderbot, it is a construct./ This is SecUnit, it is a construct.)
Anyway, those are just my thought on this, maybe I'm missing something. It was just interesting to think about this distinction between grammatical and actual genders and how this is making stuff complicated for translation.
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