Learn English – Is the “female” in “female cousin” redundant here

adjectivesgrammatical-genderkinship-termstranslation

"My female cousin working for a finance company was dismissed. Disappeared along with her job were her confidence and smiling face."

There is a very complicated system in Chinese for naming different relatives. For example, in Chinese, different words are used for a female cousin and a male cousin. Also, the word for an elder female cousin is different from the word for a younger one.

I'm having some trouble writing this sentence in English. I used "female cousin" in the first part, to translate the word that actually means "elder female cousin" in Chinese, but it still sounds awkward. I suspect that the "female" may be redundant too, because in the second part I use the pronoun "her".

Best Answer

This comes up a lot with cousin as many other languages have more words for different types of cousin than English, though not always in the same way as you say for the Chinese languages.

Generally, we just say "cousin" unless it's particularly relevant. If it was relevant we might be happy enough that the subsequent her does indicate her being female.

We might include it if it was particularly relevant, even given the subsequent information from her. E.g. if you suspected discrimination.

But in terms of translation, normally the natural way to talk about any such relative is just a bare "cousin".

Related Topic