[UbuntuWomen] Gender specific pronouns in applications

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Jennie Petoumenou
<epetoumenou at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see your point. I guess that means that the chosen solution should be
> optional and also offer an appropriate non-gender specific version.
> Let me clarify one thing though.  I propose that the personal pronoun I
> choose for myself should be stored locally on my computer and be available
> only to me, in exactly the same way as my account's login, password and icon
> are. I am not suggesting that this information should be public or stored
> online. And while I definitely prefer not giving up my gender to all kinds
> of corporations where I have an account, I would like to see my computer, on
> which I spend several hours a day, to use the appropriate pronouns when
> referring to me. And I'm specifically thinking of the ubuntu me/messaging
> menus here, and how they translate in languages like French, German,
> Spanish, etc., where adjectives like busy and away are inflected based on
> gender.

Alan Bell ended up bringing this conversation into #ubuntu-women today
and gave me permission to share:

< AlanBell> with this thread on the mailing list about gendered
pronouns in Ubuntu applications, has anyone ever seen one?
< AlanBell> I know there are quite a lot in OpenERP (it talks about
salesmen and uses male pronouns referring to customers throughout)
< pleia2> AlanBell: in my experience most applications I interact with
don't use pronouns since they talk to you directly "put your name
here" "you should fix this"
< pleia2> it's almost always in documentation where I find annoying
pronouns (less in formal documentation these days, but it's all over
wiki-type)
< AlanBell> I saw the emails and thought it would be good to file a
collection of bugs and tag them with something, but I couldn't see
anywhere to start
< pleia2> inclusion of he/she at all (rather than just he) is a
recent, hard-won battle, a proposal to change it and replace it with a
configuration file that requires you to select a gender (or pull from
a master gender file somewhere) seems... impossible
< pleia2> and what would you default to?
< pleia2> defaulting to he/she doesn't get rid of translation
problems, defaulting to either gender makes things worse
< maco> i got the impression those emails weren't talking even just about he/she
< maco> because how do you do that in a language where the rest of the
sentence changes?
< AlanBell> well things could be rephrased to avoid the issue (but I
can't find any)
< maco> busy (male) in spanish is ocupado
< maco> busy (female) is ocupada
< nigelb> Interesting.
< maco> so do you use $user está ocupad(o/a)
< nigelb> So how is it translated?
< maco> if the user is a woman it'd be $user está ocupada

(discussion continued to mention other details from Mackenzie's email).

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com