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[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

Yes, unfortunately, that’s the case.
Just a few weeks ago, our translation agency asked if they should accept the proposed gender-neutral translations, and I reluctantly said no.

IMO the translators shouldn’t accept those changes for multiple reasons:

• It will break the UI in various places. Discourse already struggles with long German words, and it’s already difficult to fit “Benutzer” (user) in the UI in some places. Extending that to “Benutzer:innen” or “der/die Benutzer:in” will be a challenge.
• There are multiple styles for writing gender-neutral. For example, “user” could be translated as:
  1. Benutzer:in
  2. Benutzer*in
  3. BenutzerIn
  4. der/die Benutzer/in
  5. Benutzer und Benutzerin
  6. 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 that’s a different story.
We had similar discussions about the usage of formal / informal language (Sie / du).

Don’t get me wrong. I’d 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 don’t break the UI for everyone at once. It would allow us the time to adjust the UI where long words don’t fit.

However, for that to work, we’ll 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 3–5 days of effort for that.

I don’t know when yet – time is unfortunately a scarce resource – but I intend to implement the necessary changes in Discourse and our integration with Crowdin this year, so that we can finally offer language variants (for German, this means du/Sie and at least one gender-neutral form).