Change in-game pronouns from his to his/her or their or use the player's gender

[Een]

Internationalization is hard, and this specific problem is a pretty much unsolved one. Thing is, it's a context that occurs rarely. Most translation is done either in a context where gender is absent or doesn't vary. I was one day at a software convention, a guy from wikipedia asked how to do exactly that (saving me the trouble), and the speaker on internationalization didn't even seem aware of the problem... I suspect he just never ran into it.

Summing up the current situation:

• we have no "correct" solution for this (i.e. generic, no side effects, working well for English and for other languages);
• we use his/her on the main site;
• we recommend using gender neutral sentences as much as possible in games.

We also have been contemplating a "not correct" solution that would add a layer to parse strings to replace "his" by "her" if the player has selected a female gender (obviously, it would also replace legitimate "his" by "her" and that player would now think she plays only with women even if their nickname is BeardedMike and PrinceCharming). Don't know when we'll try this, there is a lot of stuff we'd like to do on the translation system that has been waiting for a long time already, but anyway you should know that it will always be glitchy. Just think of some sentence such as "Anna moves her tower and Mike loses his knight". You understand that Anna is a woman and Mike a man and you can use the proper possessive form. The computer doesn't.

Hi there! We got to try the "not perfect" solution working around the "context is difficult" problem. We are now replacing "his" by "her" during the games in the action text and game logs when the player being talked about has selected a female gender.

This sould solve most of the cases of wrong pronouns for English in games. If you see some places where it doesn't work, please tell me so that I can take a look and maybe solve it there too.

If translators for other languages read this and have the same type of gender troubles for the language they translate to, please list the replacements that should occur according to gender in your language so that we can see if the same solution could work.

Hope this will help making everyone feel welcome playing around here on BGA!

[JollyBird]

Hi there! We got to try the "not perfect" solution working around the "context is difficult" problem. We are now replacing "his" by "her" during the games in the action text and game logs when the player being talked about has selected a female gender.

This sould solve most of the cases of wrong pronouns for English in games. If you see some places where it doesn't work, please tell me so that I can take a look and maybe solve it there too.

If translators for other languages read this and have the same type of gender troubles for the language they translate to, please list the replacements that should occur according to gender in your language so that we can see if the same solution could work.

Hope this will help making everyone feel welcome playing around here on BGA!

Thanks!
When translating to Dutch the same type of gender troubles occur.

...please list the replacements that should occur according to gender in your language so that we can see if the same solution could work.

Maybe don't understand correctly what your mean here but I give it a try:
English male "his" , female "her"
Dutch male "zijn" , female "haar"
Please let me know if you need other information.

[Een]

Dutch male "zijn" , female "haar"

Thanks! This replacement for pronouns in Dutch will be included in the next release.

[JollyBird]

Dutch male "zijn" , female "haar"

Thanks! This replacement for pronouns in Dutch will be included in the next release.

Ok; thanks!

[Een]

Dutch male "zijn" , female "haar"

Thanks! This replacement for pronouns in Dutch will be included in the next release.

Ok; thanks!

It should work now.

[JollyBird]

Thanks! This replacement for pronouns in Dutch will be included in the next release.

Ok; thanks!

It should work now.

Yes, it works great! Thanks!

[Shaq Jenkins]

Internationalization is hard, and this specific problem is a pretty much unsolved one. Thing is, it's a context that occurs rarely. Most translation is done either in a context where gender is absent or doesn't vary. I was one day at a software convention, a guy from wikipedia asked how to do exactly that (saving me the trouble), and the speaker on internationalization didn't even seem aware of the problem... I suspect he just never ran into it.

Summing up the current situation:

• we have no "correct" solution for this (i.e. generic, no side effects, working well for English and for other languages);
• we use his/her on the main site;
• we recommend using gender neutral sentences as much as possible in games.

We also have been contemplating a "not correct" solution that would add a layer to parse strings to replace "his" by "her" if the player has selected a female gender (obviously, it would also replace legitimate "his" by "her" and that player would now think she plays only with women even if their nickname is BeardedMike and PrinceCharming). Don't know when we'll try this, there is a lot of stuff we'd like to do on the translation system that has been waiting for a long time already, but anyway you should know that it will always be glitchy. Just think of some sentence such as "Anna moves her tower and Mike loses his knight". You understand that Anna is a woman and Mike a man and you can use the proper possessive form. The computer doesn't.

Hi there! We got to try the "not perfect" solution working around the "context is difficult" problem. We are now replacing "his" by "her" during the games in the action text and game logs when the player being talked about has selected a female gender.

This sould solve most of the cases of wrong pronouns for English in games. If you see some places where it doesn't work, please tell me so that I can take a look and maybe solve it there too.

If translators for other languages read this and have the same type of gender troubles for the language they translate to, please list the replacements that should occur according to gender in your language so that we can see if the same solution could work.

Hope this will help making everyone feel welcome playing around here on BGA!

Thank you so much for fixing this! I really appreciate it, and it makes me happy that you cared enough about this issue to change it.

[Silene]

It took me a while to notice that it wasn't just my fingers writing something different than my brain planned to write...

In chat input occasionally "his" gets replaced by "her" but not according to the person I am talking about but probably according to my own set gender.

For example I wrote something like:
"Isdariel has many 2s in his hand"
but "Isdariel has many 2s in her hand" appears in chat. (Even though Isdariel is male and I know about that...)

I couldn't figure out what exactly triggers it because it's not happening with every "his" I write.

I appreciate your work on gender-sensibility but could you please remove changes in the chat window?

[Een]

It took me a while to notice that it wasn't just my fingers writing something different than my brain planned to write...

In chat input occasionally "his" gets replaced by "her" but not according to the person I am talking about but probably according to my own set gender.

For example I wrote something like:
"Isdariel has many 2s in his hand"
but "Isdariel has many 2s in her hand" appears in chat. (Even though Isdariel is male and I know about that...)

I couldn't figure out what exactly triggers it because it's not happening with every "his" I write.

I appreciate your work on gender-sensibility but could you please remove changes in the chat window?

That's indeed an unexpected side effect
I'll look into it.

EDIT: a fix will be included in the next release.