Gender conventions in documents

[Jordi Mallach]

Hello Yaniv,

On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 11:59:13AM +0200, Yaniv Abir wrote:
> However, we do need as a team to decide on the convention for doing this
> in _English_. There was a mailing list thread about this some time ago,
> and nothing was decided. What does the team feel is the best convention
> to adopt for gender?
> 
> When this is decided, we can update the styleguide.

As far as ubuntu-translators and rosetta-users should be concerned, I
think this should be a decision to be taken exclusively by the different
teams. We have this same problem in Catalan or Spanish, and the
traditional and most extended way is to use the male form when refering
to male or to both genders. Some people contest this and like writing
"user" as "usuari/a", or using the female "usuària" form, but in my
opinion it makes texts hard to read.

When writing, I sometimes use the form "usuari i usuària" in some place
at the beginning of the document, but normally just once, and to make it
clear what's going on.

> So I refer this question to you - Is it possible to include the above notice as
> an option for translation in the guides for languages that require so?

Up to the translation team, I would say. I see no problem with it,
although at least in a Catalan text it would make me think it's
completely innecessary, as the culture makes us interpret the text that
way already.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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