Hi fellow translators,
I was asked about the reason for my changing of the gender forms in the German translation.
My main idea at the beginning was that I thought the direct adress of users (I will call them player_name-strings) should be gender specific as before it was
"Lisa zieht eine Karte auf
seine Hand" = "Lisa draws a card to
his hand"
After scanning the German translations, it occurred to me that they were inconsistent. Some had only the male form, some the male and female forms separated by a "/".
So I was thinking about a readable compromise, which was consistent throughout all translations and since using the male form in general felt a little outdated with regards a modern boardgaming community for me, I used the following scheme
1) Every noun was used in a gendered way with a "*" separating the male and female forms like
Spieler*in which is almost a standard gendering nowadays
2) To improve readability articles, adjectives and relative pronouns were only used in the female form while possessive pronouns were used in the "female/male"-notation to have the gendering of the direct adresses above (e.g. "Jede gute Spieler*in, die drei Karten auf ihrer/seiner Hand hat, zieht drei weitere."). Also the plural were used as if the words were female.
This avoids the general clunkiness of the usual gendering in German like "Jede/r gute Spieler/in, die/der drei Karten auf ihrer/seiner Hand hat, ..." and gives a consistent, gender sensitive and (in my opinion) readable translation for every string.
The only thing that people have to get used to is the "*"-gendering of nouns.
Regarding pablo74's propositions I think that the bracket-solution would make the text much more unreadable, the mixture-solution would not solve the gendering of the player_name-strings and would definitely cause some confusion.
I am personally not against using the male form in general strings like "Bester Spieler" instead of "Beste Spieler*in" but I think player_name-strings should be regarding the user's gender.
So obviously I'm still in favour of my solution described above, but if there's a large number of people opposed to it I would assist in changing the translation to a favored form, but I would strongly encourage to find a consensus on the translation of player_name-strings.
Best regards
Roland
This avoids bs like "Expert*innen" which rather should be Expert*inn*en btw (Experten = male, Expertinnen = female) and inconsistency [search for "expert" and look for yourself].