I will… I was just joking with the TOS idea while pointing out that this issue occurs very early.
Perhaps discobot to the rescue? Whenever there is a new user using a language that needs gender localization, send them a message saying something like
"Hey, you’re using Hebrew… Would you mind telling us if you are [Male] or [Female] so we can address you properly? We won’t disclose your gender unless you change your privacy settings.
Then all you need to add is a private profile setting for gender and an extra feminized localization for several languages.
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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.
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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. -
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.
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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_genderanduser_preference.gender← nullable. -
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_genderorgenderanywhere.
@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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French can easily get away with 1). We have gender neutral singular pronoun and can easily do ils/elles for plurals.
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Let me give an example.
This is discobot welcome message:
Thanks for joining %{title}, and welcome!
Our official translation is:
Grazie per esserti unito a %{title}, e benvenuto! (male gender)
In my local installation I add:
Grazie per esserti unito/a a %{title}, e benvenuto/a! (male and female gender)
So I’m for the 1st solution (gender neutral translation adding / if necessary). BTW often I have already changed the strings in translation to make them as neutral as possible. Adding /a for few strings is not a problem 
PS: I always read “Welcome” (male gender) as “Welcome - human gender”
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Persian (fa_IR locale) is gender-free, and 1 is ok for Persian.
in Arabic (ar locale), gender is important (specially in verbs). using infinitive (instead of verbs) as well as plurals is the solution at the moment for this locale.
I guess the suggested workflow (2-4) is better than the above solution for gender-based languages like Arabic. because then texts are easier to follow then + you feel the software is respecting you if it talks the same way that you used to.
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Very glad that this topic is picked up! Unfortunately the German translation is not gender neutral at all (e.g. “Benutzer” = male user), so I will try to dig into and discuss with @gerhard and other German collaborators how we could make it so.
(Removed by author.)
I would heavily argue against two locales for male and female, for two reasons:
- It would discriminate people who don’t identify with either gender.
- It would incur a lot of extra effort to maintain these and keep them consistent.
P.S.: A workaround is to just use the female form (e.g. “Benutzerin” = female user).
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Opening this can of worms is going to be … painful. Until large enterprise customers are begging us for it, I doubt I want to apply any of our engineering budget toward it because the risk and cost are very high.
I thought I was clear here, our #1 rule is that default locale is gender neutral
2-4 is only applicable in very exceptional cases, Hebrew and Arabic are probably the only place where I would consider this
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