Thanks to Carlos León, there is now a Spanish version, “Los Dos,” of my simple but (I think) provocative story generator “The Two.” The system was previously translated into French as “Les Deux” by Serge Bouchardon.
Stop by and check them out; all three are available in JavaScript versions that run right away in a browser. For those who are interested, the original Klingon, er, Python, is also available for each of the three languages.
The reader who takes the time to try to actually understand the output and resolve the pronouns in it will see that often this task is complicated by ambiguity in gender, although syntax and power relations also work to suggest certain ways that pronouns can be resolved. The need to leave the gender of the characters indeterminate in the first line posed particular problems, and slightly different problems, for the French and Spanish translators, who each found a solution.
Hiding the gender is quite a challenging task in Spanish. Subjects can be easily omitted, but direct objects must be present and they always reveal the gender if pronouns are used.
The basic workaround was to use gender-neutral descriptions instead of pronouns. Those descriptions should be understood as literary definitions of the charaters in the story. In that way, the Spanish version is a bit more verbose than the French and English versions, but it still keeps the meaning. And, what’s more important, Nick’s original objective in the English version is kept as well, namely the game of power relations and the ambiguity in gender.
Little modifications of the Klingon code (er, Python) have also been necessary because of certain rules, but the structure is still the same. I hope the final version does justice to Nick’s great idea.