Ja, das ist leider so.
Wir haben erst vor ein paar Wochen von unserer Ăbersetzungsagentur die Frage gestellt bekommen, ob sie die vorgeschlagenen, genderneutralen Ăbersetzungen akzeptieren sollen, und ich habe das derzeit schweren Herzens verneint.
IMO the translators shouldnât accept those changes for multiple reasons:
- It will break the UI in various places. Discourse already struggles with long German words, and itâs already difficult to fit âBenutzerâ (user) in the UI in some places. Extending that to âBenutzer:innenâ or âder/die Benutzer:inâ will be a challenge.
- There are multiple styles for writing gender-neutral. For example, âuserâ could be translated as:
- Benutzer:in
- Benutzer*in
- BenutzerIn
- der/die Benutzer/in
- Benutzer und Benutzerin
- Nutzende
I can promise you that as soon as we start using one of those styles, people will complain that we are using the wrong style. They will also complain that we use gender-neutral language in the first place, but thatâs a different story.
We had similar discussions about the usage of formal / informal language (Sie / du).Donât get me wrong. Iâd really love to support a gender-neutral German language in Discourse. The same goes for formal language. But it should be up to the admins to decide what they want to use, not us.
And, keeping the current type of translation as default while allowing users to choose between informal/formal and gender-neutral or not, comes also with the benefit that we donât break the UI for everyone at once. It would allow us the time to adjust the UI where long words donât fit.
However, for that to work, weâll need to support language variants in Discourse. Some years ago, I created a proof of concept plugin. It should be easy to integrate into core. But our Crowdin integration (translator-bot) will need changes to sync language variants. I estimate somewhere between 3â5 days of effort for that.
Ich weiĂ bislang nicht wann â Zeit ist bedauerlicherweise eine knappe Ressource â, aber ich habe mir vorgenommen, in diesem Jahr die notwendigen Ănderungen in Discourse und unserer Integration mit Crowdin zu implementieren, damit wir endlich Sprachvarianten (fĂŒr Deutsch also du/Sie und zumindest eine genderneutrale Form) anbieten können.