Hi,
just the background for german (not how it's done in tails but how most
institutions do it).
A few years ago everybody changed from using only the male form when
referring to people of both genders (1 "Mitarbeiter") to using both words -
which makes the sentence much longer - or using a mixed word (2
"Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen" or 3 "Mitarbeiter/innen") which was used
by mostly everybody until they "discovered" gender-neutral forms which
don't take up that much space and also include all that crazy made up stuff
of people who identify as whatever they can think of, theoretical it would
also include animals (4 "Mitarbeitende"). So the current situation is that
most Companies and some public institutions use the long form (3 for
titles, 2 in long texts) while some public institutions (and maybe
companies, I don't know) have changed to using the last mentioned form (4).
I don't really know which of those would be better, so I'll just throw this
in here to inform those translators, that maybe don't live in germany
(anymore) and let you decide what to use.
Also I don't have any official sources for this, it's just my experience,
it might differ from other parts of germany.
Cheers,
Max
intrigeri <intrigeri@???> schrieb am Di., 25. Aug. 2015 um 18:55 Uhr:
> Hi,
>
> just a little bit of historical background to start with: years ago,
> for the French translation we (?) decided to stick to the official
> sexist grammar, mostly because doing anything else would have
> immediately put us into some weirdos/anarchists/queers category in the
> eyes of many people, and back then it felt like the Tails project
> would have more impact wrt. its core mission without this. We were
> weirdos enough without it. I dunno if it has worked, and I'm not 100%
> I'm happy to have pushed in favour of this back then, but anyway:
> that's what happened.
>
> Now, we're years later, the Tails brand is a reference in its field,
> we're respected, praised and all. I personally think (and told so to
> some French translators ~1y ago IIRC) that it's time to switch to
> gender-neutral language. There are many advantages in doing so,
> I would feel more comfortable about it, and at this point it can't
> harm the project in any serious way any more, and if it harms the
> project, well, so be it, at least we'll have done the right thing™.
>
> Regarding the specifics: I don't know about German, but at least in
> French it's entirely possible to phrase text without any
> gender-specific words, and without the male+female innovative language
> that feels ugly to many people [of course they're wrong, but I'm told
> that it's a subjective topic :] -- from experience, I can tell that
> it's sometimes a challenge, and might lead here and there to some
> weird phrasing, but it does work.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> intrigeri
> _______________________________________________
> Tails-l10n mailing list
> Tails-l10n@???
> https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-l10n
> To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to
> Tails-l10n-unsubscribe@???.
