The representation of gender in translated literature is critical for negotiating ideological values between cultures. Internationally, this negotiation has been documented mainly in audiovisual, political, and postcolonial translation contexts; its dynamics within Indonesian literary translation, particularly amid the sociocultural shifts of the Reform era, remain unexamined. This study aims to compare the gender-stereotypical content in Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I and its Indonesian translation, and to connect observed shifts to the specific sociocultural anchors of Indonesia’s Reform period. By extending prior audiovisual-translation findings on the Bridgerton franchise to a literary case study, and identifying the specific linguistic mechanisms through which gender ideology can persist even as overt sexism declines, this study offers a novel, corpus-based account of how gender stereotypes are negotiated in literary translation. Employing a mixed-method approach, the study integrates Sara Mills’s (2008) theory of language and sexism with the social practice dimension of Norman Fairclough’s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Sketch Engine corpus statistics. The analysis indicates a significant shift from overt to indirect, sanitised gender stereotypes, with overt sexism declining from 17.77% in the source text to 10.38% in the translation. Meanwhile, female-targeted stereotyping increased from 57.82% to 65.14%, showing that hostile language is softened even as underlying patriarchal beliefs persist and become increasingly concentrated on female characters. This linguistic change highlights a complex ideological compromise in Indonesia’s Reform era, where progressive democratic aspirations coexist with the entrenched traditionalism of State Ibuism, thereby repackaging rather than dismantling existing gender hierarchies.
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