Is the "female" in "female cousin" redundant here?

"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".

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".

Spanish also makes this kind of distinction: prima and primo, between a female and male cousin.

In English, we do not care about the gender unless it is relevant to the topic. Otherwise, why bother to say it? If I said "My female cousin got a new job today", someone might then expect to find out what my male cousin must be doing. It just sounds odd to a native since we generally do not care if the person was a man or woman. English is very gender-neutral because we don't want to emphasize that it matters someone is a male or female, and you'll probably get strange looks, or someone correcting you, if you continually add it in when gender is irrelevant to the discussion. Or they may think you are a feminist for adding female - especially if you emphasize it. It is simply more correct to say "My cousin ..." than "My female cousin", in English, for these reasons.

This is not just a gender issue. In English, cousin is incredibly non-specific (even when you take into account that first cousin is usually implied). When translating Chinese kinship terms to English, there is no escaping the loss of information without awkwardness — unless you are talking about your father, mother, husband, wife, son, or daughter.

Assuming that you meant to translate from 表姐 with perfect precision, you could say something ridiculous like

My female first cousin, who is older than me, in the same generation as me, and is not my father's brother's daughter, …

Once you accept the fact that you're going to lose precision in translation, you might as well accept that "My cousin" is the natural translation, especially since your cousin's gender is clear from the context provided in the following sentence. It is not idiomatic to include any additional information in English unless the information is specifically relevant to what you are trying to say.

By order of appearance, it's the word "her" that is redundant, but English doesn't have an appropriate gender-neutral alternative. That means that, strictly speaking, "female" provides information that is already available, albeit only later.

Whether this should be considered redundant depends on whether that information is important, and whether it's important that it be shared at that point. Personally, I like removing "female" and letting the deferred pronoun subtly provide the extra info on her gender.

A great value of asking this question comes from considering why it matters at all that your cousin is female? Is it important to the rest of the writing? Are you - or is your reader - left uncomfortable with either not knowing, or with that knowledge delayed? If so, is that discomfort usefully transgressive, or merely annoying?

It's almost always possible to recast without gender, and often (almost) unnoticeably:

Dismissed from a finance company was my cousin, whose confidence and smiling face left as well.

or

Dismissed from a finance company was my cousin, whose confidence and smiling face - and boyfriend - left as well.

or

Dismissed from a finance company was my cousin, whose confidence and smiling face, - and boyfriend - left as well. Fortunately, he soon found another.