Abstract

While discourse was gaining prominence on the language side, there was a transformation in feminist theory and gender studies regarding conceptions of gender, and instead of seeing gender as merely an identity that one ‘‘has,’’ analysts started to understand it in terms of what people ‘‘do’’. From this perspective, gender not only exists but is also continuously created, recreated, and transformed through individuals’ enactment of gendered behaviors. This occurs as they assert their own claimed gender identities, affirm or contest the identities of others, and support or contest systems of gender relations and privilege in various ways (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013). In relation to this, gender, particularly women’s image, is reconstructed when translating from one language to another, and it may cause ideological changes (gender roles, stereotypes, equality are presented differently in a target language), ambiguity, and alters meaning in literature texts (Lardelli, 2023). The aim of this study is to explore how manipulation and neutralisation function as translation strategies influencing the representation of women in German–Kazakh official translations. Although existing studies focus on translating between English paired languages, there is a lack of research on German–Kazakh translation (Peña-Aguilar, 2024) and how gender representation is affected in translations. The study adopts a comparative mixed-methods research design, combining corpus-based quantitative analysis to identify patterns of gender-related translation shifts and Critical Discourse Analysis to interpret their discursive and ideological implications (Saldanha and O’Brien, 2013). Preliminary observations suggest that gender-marked elements in German may undergo manipulation or neutralisation in Kazakh translation, potentially altering women’s visibility and agency.