Which gender to use in German translations

[Een]

I think there had been a change some time ago (2 years or more), that a word like "sein" should automatically replaced by "ihr" when displaying a translated notification, if the gender of the player is female. This does not seem to work properly, but I also do not have any details.

Of course it will not work if the player does not set a gender in her profile. And it will most likely not work if there are translations like ("sein/ihr").

Indeed the possibility to replace pronouns has been introduced for English some years ago. This technique is useful but not perfect; specifically, in some languages, it can lead to incorrect replacements if the pronoun overlaps another word.

This was developed for the English speaking community (which has since largely moved to using directly "their" instead which makes it less relevant), and only Dutch speakers asked to use it at the time (with sometimes the overlap issue I described). It could be used for German, if you let us know which replacement to make, but remembering a little German, I think there would be an overlap issue with "sein".

As this subject on how to manage gender in translations is dependent on language, I would encourage you to open a thread in German about it, to allow for better communication and to include also German speaking people who don't speak English in the discussion (in general, we advise to discuss translation directly in the target language).

[KongKing123]

This was developed for the English speaking community (which has since largely moved to using directly "their" instead which makes it less relevant), and only Dutch speakers asked to use it at the time (with sometimes the overlap issue I described).

Indeed, and I must say that I am not a fan of the Dutch version (it was implemented before I registered). While the intention is good and it often works (though not everywhere), it means we have to dance around using any plural form of "to be", since it would get replaced for female players (e.g. in Hanabi "these cards are blue" becomes "these cards her blue").

In the New Year post, it was mentioned that pronoun support would be improved. Does this mean a less "naive" system is in the works (perhaps with a global variable)? If not, I would like to open a discussion with the Dutch community to disable this automatic replacement and see if we can find a better solution.

[Dorian Gray2]

I think there had been a change some time ago (2 years or more), that a word like "sein" should automatically replaced by "ihr" when displaying a translated notification, if the gender of the player is female. This does not seem to work properly, but I also do not have any details.

Of course it will not work if the player does not set a gender in her profile. And it will most likely not work if there are translations like ("sein/ihr").

Indeed the possibility to replace pronouns has been introduced for English some years ago. This technique is useful but not perfect; specifically, in some languages, it can lead to incorrect replacements if the pronoun overlaps another word.

This was developed for the English speaking community (which has since largely moved to using directly "their" instead which makes it less relevant), and only Dutch speakers asked to use it at the time (with sometimes the overlap issue I described). It could be used for German, if you let us know which replacement to make, but remembering a little German, I think there would be an overlap issue with "sein".

As this subject on how to manage gender in translations is dependent on language, I would encourage you to open a thread in German about it, to allow for better communication and to include also German speaking people who don't speak English in the discussion (in general, we advise to discuss translation directly in the target language).

What about using a special placeholder for such pronouns, which would be replaced by "sein" or "ihr"? That would work for other languages as well.

Otherwise I agree, replacing for german would be too error-prone. I looked for "sein" in the Main Page translation, and all of the first hits were false negatives:

• Standardmäßig wird ein Datum im Standardformat deiner Sprache angezeigt. In einigen Fällen kann dies verwirrend sein, sodass du dich stattdessen für das eindeutige ISO 8601-Standardformat entscheiden kannst.
• Um ein Turnier zu erstellen, musst du Premium-Mitglied sein.
• Im Spiel oder seinen Regeln ist ein Bug
• Das System ist sehr tolerant: Wenn deine Reputation gefallen ist, musst du nur spielen und deine Gegner und die zeitlichen Begrenzungen respektieren, und dein Karma wird bald wieder perfekt sein.
• Deswegen kann dein Ansehen vielleicht schlechter geworden sein
• Wenn du denkst, dass das ein Fehler ist, mache dir keine Sorgen: Spiele fair und freundlich, dann wird dein Ansehen bald wieder perfekt sein!
• Die Anzahl der Partien muss mindestens %s sein
• Wenn dein Timer Null erreicht (oder negativ wird), kann jeder andere Spieler dich aus dem Spiel rausschmeißen: Du solltest aufpassen, NIE in dieser Situation zu sein.

[KongKing123]

[...]

[...]

What about using a special placeholder for such pronouns, which would be replaced by "sein" or "ihr"? That would work for other languages as well.

Otherwise I agree, replacing for german would be too error-prone. I looked for "sein" in the Main Page translation, and all of the first hits were false negatives:
[...]

Luckily it's not that naive: it only works in games, and even then only for the log messages as far as I know.

Still, it gives problems with any plural form of "to be", like "PlayerX cannot use his allies, because they have been disabled by PlayerY" or my previous Hanabi example.

Indeed, and I must say that I am not a fan of the Dutch version (it was implemented before I registered). While the intention is good and it often works (though not everywhere), it means we have to dance around using any plural form of "to be", since it would get replaced for female players (e.g. in Hanabi "these cards are blue" becomes "these cards her blue").

Hence my similar question of whether a global variable is in the works.

[Een]

Please find below an update about pronouns, as in the last version I finally found time to fix an issue that prevented pronoun replacement from applying in the status bar (while it was correctly applied in the game log).

Sorry that it took so long, but some of you may have noticed that we have been - still are - pretty busy

This issue sometimes made visible, from the point of view of other players when waiting for a player to take their turn, a pronoun for this player in contradiction with their preferences. A rare occurrence, not directly visible by the person themselves, but still that was reported and discussed many times. Now it's fixed, and pronoun replacement should apply wherever possible. (@KongKing123 as far as I'm concerned, that's the improvement about pronouns that was within reach from a technical viewpoint; a global variable would not serve a better purpose that I can see while bringing strings to translate further from natural text).

How does this replacement feature work exactly?

I found the word "naive" used by KongKing123 to describe the system a little stingy at first, but trying not to take it personally and considering things neutrally, it's pretty much on point. A computer is completely "naive" about language and meaning and gender and semantics (I won't discuss AI here). So any computer processing of natural language is more or less "naive". Naive is also about simplicity, and while I have seen proposed some meta-language that would change translators into programmers, simplicity is a good point, and the system should be kept "naive" in that respect to allow as many people as possible to participate.

That being said, here is the formula: in games, the gender declared by players in their preferences is taken into account to apply the replacements defined by language in sentences containing the player name.

Some notes:
_ We don't have this outside of games because we can't push to your browser the gender preferences of all 6M+ BGA players.
_ We have to be able to associate the gender somehow with the sentence being displayed. There is no magic there. We rely on the player name, substituted in the string with the framework variable ${player_name} that you can see in the string to translate. If it's not there, the system has no clue about gender.

What are the current replacements by languages?

For English:
" his " is replaced by " her " for the feminine, by " their " for neutral.
" his/her " is replaced by " his " for the masculine, by " their " for neutral.

For Dutch:
" zijn " is replaced by " haar " for the feminine.
" zijn/haar " is replaced by " haar " for the feminine (and should be replaced by " zijn " for the masculine, but this had somehow be forgotten ; it will be in the next version)
"zijn gekozen" is blacklisted so that it never becomes "haar gekosen"

For French:
'·e', '·es', '·e·s' are removed for the masculine
'·' is removed for the feminine

Translators for other languages have not requested to set up replacements. It is possible to add useful replacements in other languages or to change the current replacements upon request.

Grammar is very diverse (there is even a fair number of genderless languages in the world) so the situation is obviously very different depending on languages. That's why we recommend translators to have a specific thread in their own language about translating BGA to reach consensus about how best to translate.

This is not perfect / can you make it perfect?

Agreed / probably not ; we can fix bugs if any are left, we can add some replacement rules to make it better, but the system will stay "naive" by nature. If only one language was considered, we might find a set of rules covering all useful cases. With 40+ languages, it's much less likely.

[merlin they them]

That being said, here is the formula: in games, the gender declared by players in their preferences is taken into account to apply the replacements defined by language in sentences containing the player name.

Can more gender options be added? Having "woman", "man" and "do not display" is not inclusive to us nonbinary people

[Een]

Can more gender options be added? Having "woman", "man" and "do not display" is not inclusive to us nonbinary people

"Do not display" already covers neutral (replacement by "their" in English as described above). The preferences wording will be changed slightly in the next version to be more clear.

[KongKing123]

Please find below an update about pronouns, as in the last version I finally found time to fix an issue that prevented pronoun replacement from applying in the status bar (while it was correctly applied in the game log).

Sorry that it took so long, but some of you may have noticed that we have been - still are - pretty busy

Thanks for the extensive post and improvements. "Naive" was indeed not a jab at the system (nor the people who programmed it), but just my understanding of how it currently works. Even in English, where it does a pretty accurate job, this is not completely foolproof: a sentence like "that card is his" would trip it up, as it should then be "this card is hers" (I guess "this card is her" is grammatically correct, but it has a completely different and strange meaning ).

For English:
" his " is replaced by " her " for the feminine, by " their " for neutral.
" his/her " is replaced by " his " for the masculine, by " their " for neutral.

Is there no replacement for "he/she"? It seems that this could be added without much risk.

For Dutch:
" zijn " is replaced by " haar " for the feminine.
" zijn/haar " is replaced by " haar " for the feminine (and should be replaced by " zijn " for the masculine, but this had somehow be forgotten ; it will be in the next version)
"zijn gekozen" is blacklisted so that it never becomes "haar gekosen"

I was unaware "zijn/haar" was automatically replaced as a whole at all; I thought it could become "haar/haar", so I avoided it. In that case, there is actually quite a robust way of setting this up for Dutch (and probably German as well):

• Disable the replacement of "zijn", to avoid clashing with the verb "zijn" = "to be" (e.g. "those are his cards" = "dat zijn zijn kaarten")
• Treat "zijn/haar" like "his/her" in English: "zijn" for male, "haar" for female, leave unchanged for other. This is very unlikely to be misinterpreted, so us translators can then use this as the default form.
• Add a replacement for "hij/zij": "hij" for male, "zij" for female, else leave as is.
• Remove "zijn gekozen" from the blacklist. I understand why it's there, but "haar gekozen" is actually not unlikely to occur ("PlayerX must discard her chosen card" = "PlayerX moet haar gekozen kaart afleggen") and the problem would be avoided if "zijn" were no longer replaced.

There is no generally accepted neutral form yet, so it would leave it at that for now, at least before getting feedback from other Dutch translators.

The best alternative is likely "die (subject, currently a demonstrative pronoun) / diens (object, currently a formal and archaic male possessive pronoun)". They are singular forms, so they "work" within the existing grammar of the language, and also seem to be acceptable for non-binary people. Another option is "hen" (subject, currently a direct object) / hun (object, currently an indirect object)", but this is so jarringly grammatically incorrect that this will (hopefully) not become common: it would be like saying "their plays a card".

(@KongKing123 as far as I'm concerned, that's the improvement about pronouns that was within reach from a technical viewpoint; a global variable would not serve a better purpose that I can see while bringing strings to translate further from natural text). [...] Naive is also about simplicity, and while I have seen proposed some meta-language that would change translators into programmers, simplicity is a good point, and the system should be kept "naive" in that respect to allow as many people as possible to participate.

Agreed / probably not ; we can fix bugs if any are left, we can add some replacement rules to make it better, but the system will stay "naive" by nature. If only one language was considered, we might find a set of rules covering all useful cases. With 40+ languages, it's much less likely.

I think translators deal with variables enough not to be confused by this, though I do agree with your rationale. "${actPlayer} must select ${singularPronoun3rd} cards" would unambiguously work, but does look a bit robotic and more complicated. And it is of course possible that there are languages that have a completely different structure.

There might be a middle ground however: what if you defined some kind of "tag" for gendered words, so the system would only perform replacements on those? This would keep readability mostly intact, while still avoiding naive mistakes. It would of course have to be a tag that the system can technically support, does not look too strange, and does not clash with symbols that are (un)commonly used.

Underscores, for example: "${actPlayer} must choose _their_ cards" (should be replaced) and "All players must choose their cards" (should not be replaced). Or the vertical bar: |their|.

You could encourage developers to use these tags in the source texts and display an information message to translators when they are not present in the translation. Preferably a less intrusive one than the current pop-ups (like a label underneath the translation box), because it might be intentional and correct.

Worth considering, perhaps.

[Een]

Thanks for the extensive post and improvements. "Naive" was indeed not a jab at the system (nor the people who programmed it), but just my understanding of how it currently works.

Thanks for your clear and constructive feedback. "Naive" got me to think and probably helped me explain the system more clearly, so thank you for that.

Even in English, where it does a pretty accurate job, this is not completely foolproof: a sentence like "that card is his" would trip it up, as it should then be "this card is hers" (I guess "this card is her" is grammatically correct, but it has a completely different and strange meaning ).

Clearly, it's not foolproof at all (as I said, it's not perfect, and unlikely to ever be). In the context of games though, most of the time the player is referenced by their name (and otherwise, as I explained, there is no link to gender and thus no replacement), so the kind of construct you mention is unlikely. But if it happened, indeed the system could be fooled. To note though, that for replacement, all characters matter, _including spaces_. So as this construct seems an end of sentence likely not followed by a space, there would be no replacement at all.

Is there no replacement for "he/she"? It seems that this could be added without much risk.

Not really thinking in terms of risk here, but more in terms of solving most likely issues. This would usually not happen since we use the player name everywhere. It could theoretically happen if a developer segmented a log in two parts, such as "playerX does something. He then does something else". But that case is easily solved by using "and" or using one log entry per action (which is recommended in most cases anyway for clarity).

I was unaware "zijn/haar" was automatically replaced as a whole at all; I thought it could become "haar/haar", so I avoided it.

Yes, communication with translators about this kind of thing is a little scattered in the forums since it was done following feedback from the community. I should probably make a pinned post with a summary about it in the translations forum.

In that case, there is actually quite a robust way of setting this up for Dutch (and probably German as well):

• Disable the replacement of "zijn", to avoid clashing with the verb "zijn" = "to be" (e.g. "those are his cards" = "dat zijn zijn kaarten")
• Treat "zijn/haar" like "his/her" in English: "zijn" for male, "haar" for female, leave unchanged for other. This is very unlikely to be misinterpreted, so us translators can then use this as the default form.
• Add a replacement for "hij/zij": "hij" for male, "zij" for female, else leave as is.
• Remove "zijn gekozen" from the blacklist. I understand why it's there, but "haar gekozen" is actually not unlikely to occur ("PlayerX must discard her chosen card" = "PlayerX moet haar gekozen kaart afleggen") and the problem would be avoided if "zijn" were no longer replaced.

Thanks. Done for the next version, except for "Add a replacement for "hij/zij": "hij" for male, "zij" for female, else leave as is." as explained above for he/she, this seems to be a theoretical case that should not happen in the game strings corpus, or very rarely. Also at the moment, I noticed that in the code I can replace multiple matches, but with the same content (different for masculine/feminine/neutral). I could evolve that but I prefer not to spend time on theoretical issues at the moment (not that I don't like it, just there are a lot of practical issues waiting for time). Also, in that case there would also be an issue of matching capitalization.

There is no generally accepted neutral form yet, so it would leave it at that for now, at least before getting feedback from other Dutch translators.

Ok.

I think translators deal with variables enough not to be confused by this, though I do agree with your rationale. "${actPlayer} must select ${singularPronoun3rd} cards" would unambiguously work, but does look a bit robotic and more complicated. And it is of course possible that there are languages that have a completely different structure.

There are definitely languages with different structure. This would practically make sentences untranslatable in French for example, as in French the pronoun is not declined according to the subject but according to the object. Definitely better to use post processing with replacements, as it keeps the original sentence more readable for translators, and prevents making assumptions about grammar. Even our current use of ${you} as a subject variable to be coloured with the player colour, while nice from an interface point of view, seems to be creating difficulties in some languages.

There might be a middle ground however: what if you defined some kind of "tag" for gendered words, so the system would only perform replacements on those? This would keep readability mostly intact, while still avoiding naive mistakes. It would of course have to be a tag that the system can technically support, does not look too strange, and does not clash with symbols that are (un)commonly used.

Underscores, for example: "${actPlayer} must choose _their_ cards" (should be replaced) and "All players must choose their cards" (should not be replaced). Or the vertical bar: |their|.

You could encourage developers to use these tags in the source texts and display an information message to translators when they are not present in the translation. Preferably a less intrusive one than the current pop-ups (like a label underneath the translation box), because it might be intentional and correct.

Worth considering, perhaps.

Yes, it could be a possibility. But keeping things practical, except for the bug discussed earlier that is now fixed, I'm not aware of any actual persisting difficulty with the current replacement rules for the BGA strings to translate corpus and think better to keep the language as natural as possible. When/if some cases arise that cannot be handled either by the current system or by a rewriting of the sentence either by the developer or by a translator change request of the English string, we'll see if we can find a solution. In general, it's best to work from an actual translation issue reported by translators than from theoretical cases.

[Erwt]

In that case, there is actually quite a robust way of setting this up for Dutch (and probably German as well):

• Disable the replacement of "zijn", to avoid clashing with the verb "zijn" = "to be" (e.g. "those are his cards" = "dat zijn zijn kaarten")
• Treat "zijn/haar" like "his/her" in English: "zijn" for male, "haar" for female, leave unchanged for other. This is very unlikely to be misinterpreted, so us translators can then use this as the default form.
• Add a replacement for "hij/zij": "hij" for male, "zij" for female, else leave as is.
• Remove "zijn gekozen" from the blacklist. I understand why it's there, but "haar gekozen" is actually not unlikely to occur ("PlayerX must discard her chosen card" = "PlayerX moet haar gekozen kaart afleggen") and the problem would be avoided if "zijn" were no longer replaced.

Thanks. Done for the next version, except for "Add a replacement for "hij/zij": "hij" for male, "zij" for female, else leave as is." as explained above for he/she, this seems to be a theoretical case that should not happen in the game strings corpus, or very rarely. Also at the moment, I noticed that in the code I can replace multiple matches, but with the same content (different for masculine/feminine/neutral). I could evolve that but I prefer not to spend time on theoretical issues at the moment (not that I don't like it, just there are a lot of practical issues waiting for time). Also, in that case there would also be an issue of matching capitalization.

There is no generally accepted neutral form yet, so it would leave it at that for now, at least before getting feedback from other Dutch translators.

Ok.

I've read the discussion and while I'm not sure I understand it completely, I would like to add 2 things.

1) Despite there being no official ruling from the people who make the rules for Dutch yet, interest groups for the LGBTQI+ community do already advise to use "die/hen/hun". Assuming I understood the forms correctly, it would be "die" as a neutral form of "hij/zij" (he/she), "hen" as a neutral form of "hem/haar" (him/her) and "hun" as a neutral form of "zijn/haar (his/her).

Regardless, using "hen/hun" or "die/diens" as demonstrative/possessive neutral forms, would definitely be in line with what the LGBTQI+ community advises and what seems to be the most popular choices for what non-binary people would like to be addressed as.

If BGA is serious about this, why not ask around in the community? There are bound to be some people from the LGBTQI+ community among the users. Perhaps you could ask around and choose to back one or the other proposed neutral form?
I believe that would reflect better on BGA than simply saying. "Well we'd like be inclusive but there's no official ruling yet, so there's nothing we can do to show our support."

https://cavaria.be/voornaamwoorden-in-e-mail and https://cavaria.be/woordenlijst (under "voornaamwoorden")
https://www.transgenderinfo.nl/wp/wp-co ... rlands.pdf (pages 7+8)
Even the people who make the dictionary recently made an article about it.
https://www.vandale.be/genderneutraal-p ... rnaamwoord

2) For the reasons mentioned above I would advise against using "zijn/haar" as the neutral form. It doesn't actually contain a neutral form, which excludes people who identify as non-binary.

Personally, I would either use "zijn/haar/hun" or "zijn/haar/diens" (his/her/their) OR simply use only the genderneutral pronoun