I speak fluent Hebrew so I had a look at our existing translation to see what is done and had a look at facebook to see what it does.
It is a bit odd to hear reactions here from people who are not fluent speakers of a gender based language to be honest.
Our story is … not ideal in Hebrew.
- When you are “tracking” a topic you are “tracking male” a topic.
- Reply is loosely translated to reaction, cause you have to avoid verbs so they use a noun there which is odd. Facebook uses “write male reaction” or “write female reaction”
- A bunch of other stuff is in male tense like “expand ‘male’”
- A bunch of stuff uses plural to avoid dealing with gender, cause when you are talking to groups in hebrew you usually use male.
- Changing locale requires guesswork (which is a PR welcome) cause user profile uses “he” instead of “ivrit” <- in Hebrew
- Some stuff uses magic postfix that is not really a word but indicates it could be male or female. Loosely it is like seeing “Open m/f” which is odd for a logged in user. But fine for anonymous.
Stuff is not DISASTA PASTA, but it can be much improved. When I just checked on facebook it is smooth as silk in Hebrew including all the verbs.
A VERY important note is that you can choose your gender but keep it private, so its basically a hidden user pref if you wish.
I would like to see us solve this problem but its a reasonably big piece of work.
Selecting upfront gender (and if you want to expose it) should be an option we provide, but we need to figure out the translation story first both in JavaScript and Rails.