The Chinese word "剩女" means "an unmarried girl over 27 without a boyfriend". Since better girls are already in love or married, some girls are left and it seems that no men are interested in them. The word has a negative meaning. A TV station in China translates the word into "leftover woman". I searched some English corpora and the data show clearly that the adjective 'leftover' is invariably collocated with food. So I think "leftover woman" is a miscollocation.
Do native speakers understand the meaning of "leftover woman" if it is used at all? Is it offensive?
I want to use the word "spinster", but it is a negative word. "Single" is unsuitable here because its meaning is too broad. What is the best neutral word or phrase for that meaning?
Best Answer
There is not going to be an ideal fit for a neutral version of this term in English. Traditionally, older unmarried women were looked upon negatively So you have older words like spinster and old maid that have strongly negative connotations. There are also adjectives like unmarried and unattached that may come across as negative due to the un- form.
It is only in the last few generations that women living independent and unmarried lives has been widely regarded as neutral, let alone positive, so there are relatively few terms for them. Some collocations (like single woman) are technically fitting, though they don't pertain to a single age. Bachelorette might have fit at one time, though many English speakers will associate that word with the TV show The Bachelorette, which features a woman being taken on dates by a number of competing eligible men. So the neutral options don't exactly fit either.
So if you are translating the term, you may need to decide whether an English translation is sufficient or whether you need to translate literally and gloss the concept, a practice common in academia (JSTOR) but less common in other contexts.