Gender and translations

Dev Translations
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I did a bit of reading about this topic at:

You are all kind of lucky I speak Hebrew:

which has a high degree of grammatical gender, virtually every noun (as well as most verbs and pronouns of the second and third person) is either grammatically masculine or feminine.

Or as they say in Hebrew, עברית שפה קשה .

This is spelled “AVRIT SFA KSHA” cause you drop vowels in modern Hebrew, but pronounced “ivrit safa kasha” cause everyone knows that “ivrit” is pronounce “Ivrit” and not “Avrit”, they also know it is female, so the verb “is hard” is going to be the feminine version “KASHA” and not the masculine “KASHE”. But … I digress.

As with some other localization issues we have there is also a very strong order of operations here so I would like to lay out the policy.

  1. Our default translation is always gender neutral. You use all the tricks at your disposal to make it so. Including Hebrew tricks like “same spelling multiple meaning”, introducing / to denote that a word can be either male or female and so on.

  2. Gendered languages may introduce 2 extra partial translations for “interface targeting masculine” and “interface targeting feminine”, which covers terms in the translation that can not be cleanly expressed in a gender neutral way. This is not a must, some gendered languages get away just fine with neutral form.

  3. We will add an interface gender user preference for languages that provide the extra translations. By default you will not expose your gender but will have the option to if you want (which can make it simpler for people to talk to you). user_preference.interface_gender and user_preference.gender ← nullable.

  4. We will amend our localization to introduce the “gender” layer on signup and in preferences. By default all languages that do not have both (1) and (2) will not expose interface_gender or gender anywhere.

@eyalev @Pad_Pors thoughts on this?

@zogstrip @trash is French and Italian easy enough to get away with only (1: gender neutral translation) or is there a current hole in our translation system for French and Italian that require (2).

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