Correct use of gender in English language

[JohnGillanders]

Hi,

I've been playing on BGA for a while now (great site!) and one thing that would make it a lot friendlier for the English-speaking women who play here is to use 'her' instead of 'his' (e.g. "Julie places her workers on the river" and any other male-gendered pronouns/other terms changed to female ones if the user's profile is set to 'female'.

A good friend of mine plays here and I know she finds it off-putting to be referred to as a man.

Since this seems to be 'across the board' (in all games that I have tried), is it possible to change this in the central BGA 'game' code part of the translation rather than having to modify it for each game? E.g. to have variables/placeholders that can be used in all English translations which are automatically replaced by the appropriate term based on the user's gender in their profile (defaulting to male if unspecified since I'm pretty sure more men play on here than women from what I have seen).
Something like "[Username] places [Possessive pronoun] workers on the [Place]" => "John places his workers on the river" or "Julie places her workers on the forest".

Thanks in advance for considering this.

[pejsek2]

I strongly agree with this idea! I can't stand the incorrect usage of genders on this site. What I would like is to have two translations for one string - they would be same by default but different when needed to use gender pronouns. This is actually the reason I stopped translating, because I got somewhat disgusted by this inequality.

EDIT: In many languages (Slavic ones for example) the gender forms are not denoted by pronouns only, but other parts of sentences changes accordingly. This is why I would prefer to have two different strings to translate instead of having global pronoun variables.

[Anansi]

The same discussion came up among the german translators some time ago (if interested, you can find the discussion here.
We settled on the compromise of trying to avoid pronouns whenever possible in translating strings.
I'd also strongly support the introduction of gender sensitive pronouns based on the user's gender (with male as default.)

[Jonah the Whale]

Digging up an old thread here. I agree with the other posters, and came across a novel (but wrong!) solution in Battle Sheep.

${actplayer} must choose its starting position

is just wrong. Is there any way to change it?

JtW

[Sawyer Einherjar]

Hey Jonah,

I changed it to: ${actplayer} must choose a startposition. "a" seems to fit in nicely here and avoids gender issue

greetings,
Sawyer

PS: If you had a better solutions let me know

[qwertasdfg]

English is my second language and I have learned it is acceptable to use 'their' as a singular pronoun when you want to avoid the gender problem.

But I'm not entirely sure whether it is actually used. A quick google search let me to some pages stating it should be avoided under all circumstances and other pages stating that it is perfectly normal and even encouraged everyone to use 'their' as a singular pronoun.

So, what do native speakers think?

[Sawyer Einherjar]

I know i'm not a native speaker of English, so you are probably not interested in my opinion but i share it anyway .

Doing some google-ing on this topic i came across quite some examples, where "their" is used for a singularity. However, one thing i noticed in each of these examples is that "their" never refers to a specific person (mentioned by name) while this is exactly what happens at BGA.

Biggest collection of examples on the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Evaluating the first 5 examples:

"Everyone returned to their seats."
"Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Would they please collect it."
"If a person doesn't want to go on living, they are often very difficult to help."
"The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay."
"But a journalist should not be forced to reveal their sources."

I observe that in each of these examples where "their" is used for a singularity, the singularity refered to is a generality and genderless. (Everyone, somebody, person, patient and journalist). As on bga it almost always refers to the person performing the action, the gender is fixed.

Sawyer must choose his startingposition; Jolene must choose her startingposition. VS Sawyer must choose their startingposition; Jolene must choose their startposition. It just sounds to counter natural in my opinion to use "their" in this context.

It would work, if it would say Player --> The player has to place their stack. Even then i don't really like the sound of it ^^, i'd prefer his/her instead of their.
But well lets wait for some native speakers opinions!

Greetings,
Sawyer

[Jonah the Whale]

Many people object to the singular "their", because it is supposed to be grammatically, and logically, incorrect. I don't object to its use in the situations given in Wikipedia, I think it has a long history of use and is much more elegant than "his/her". However I agree with Sawyer that when the gender is known, that "his" or "her" should be used. "Mary must place their piece" is just wrong.

In this instance Sawyer's use of "a" is perfect. Solutions avoiding his/her/their completely are probably the best as long as they are not too contrived. I couldn't change the string myself though. Do I have to be authorised somehow or am I just doing something wrong?

[Sawyer Einherjar]

In order to change validated strings you need to have done 100+ translations, which were validated. (i think) I received a quick account update for my interest in improving many of the Dutch translations. But i like to help out where needed

You can change all the other strings, but yeah not the validated ones. (Which was the barrier i ran into when i tried to improve the Dutch strings as well ^^)

So you didn't do anything wrong but you need to be authorised. ( i cannot help you with that though , i got my authorization after showing some commitment on the forums ).

hope it's clarified.

Greetings,
Sawyer

[Een]

Hi ♀ & ♂,

I wanted to answer this thread for some time. The thing is, internationalisation is difficult.

For example this his/her problem doesn't exist in French, since the gender of the pronoun depends on the object owned and not on the owner. And in some languages (for example Russian), you get different inflexions depending upon the number of items.

This means that to achieve 'perfect' translation you would need to translate the same string multiple times. For example, the string:

${player_name} uses his magical ring and earns ${number} points.

would need to be translated for gender (male/female) and for plural (1, 2 to 4 and >= 5 for slavic languages), so it would need to be translated 6 times. Then each time a string is displayed, the gender and the number would have to be used to choose the appropriate translation.

We currently don't have the tools to manage this level of complexity, so the recommandation is to use neutral forms when possible, and when it is not, to choose the most usual form for the language as used in rulebooks, tutorials etc.

I hope that these occasional grammatical imperfections will not get too much in the way of enjoying the games for those noticing them.

Cheers,
Een