Gender Issues and Translation: The Gender of Te Kā Monster in Disney's Moana

Te Kā, a monster of lava and fire and one of the central characters in Disney's recent film, Moana, is female in the original American film. In the Spanish dubbing, however, Te Kā is a male character. The unequal grammatical properties of the two languages (English and Spanish have natural and grammatical gender, respectively) incorporate both a change in how the character's sex is perceived and a modification of the stereotype on which the character is built: the dichotomy of fertility and infertility. This article explores allusions to Te Kā relating to gender issues both in the English source text and the Spanish dubbing. Research suggests that the linguistic structure of languages in terms of gender (i.e. grammatical vs. natural gender) considerably influences the translation process and, hence, how the target language reader is meant to perceive reality. It also suggests that translation as an agent that shapes ideologies and roles can no longer be ignored, especially when the translated text belongs to one of the main manufacturers of ideologies and gender roles, such as Disney.