Hi,
spriver:
> maybe I am entering a bit controversial topic in here, but I am
> thinking about it a lot lately. So German is definitely not a gender
> neutral language and in my opinion we should take care a little bit of
> it in our German documentation and use
> non-discriminatory/genderneutral language. What do the others of the
> translation team think of it? I am looking forward for some input here (:
without having looked at the translated documentation for some time,
some ideas/suggestions:
o Can we measure how severe the problem is? a la
find $WIKIPATH -name *.de.po -type f -exec \
grep -ioE "Nutzer|Anwender|$MOREWORDS" '{}' \; | wc -l
That could allow us to decide whether we have an urgent problem in
our documentation that needs to be addressed in general, or whether
it occurs only in a few places that can be fixed manually by
slightly twisting the language.
o Via the same approach as we handle other translation issues: How do
other wikis/translations handle the same problem? Like TorProject,
GNOME, Debian, Wikipedia,... What would be the "official" (Duden?)
way to do it? (for comparison)
o Other languages are not gender neutral as well. How is it handled in
the French/$MORELANG translation?
Of course it is difficult to compare "good" and "bad" languages with
regard to gender neutrality, and every language needs a mechanism to
express/discriminate between, for instance, gender where it is
necessary for understanding.
o It should be decided what we want to achieve: non-discrimination
between which groups? A candidate/idea for a solution should again
be evaluated for this aspect. For instance if we decided to use
"Benutzerinnen und Benutzer" consistently, we might accidentially
exclude all groups that don't want themselves to be categorised to
male or female. We could bite the bullet and accept that we cannot
fix natural/spoken languages and need to take a feasible option.
Another approach could be to only remove/replace words (versus
adding them) to make the language less specific, and thus, less
discriminating. (On the other hand, there are some people that are
very effective in saying nothing with a lot of words.)
~flapflap
