Make WordPress Core

Opened 13 years ago

Closed 9 years ago

#18003 closed enhancement (wontfix)

On the Credits page, add Male/Female tags for each person, for use in translation

Reported by: ranyanivhartstein's profile RanYanivHartstein Owned by:
Milestone: Priority: normal
Severity: normal Version:
Component: I18N Keywords:
Focuses: Cc:

Description

The Credits page mentions contributors along with their role in the project: "Lead Developer", "Guest Committer", etc.

When translating to certain languages (for e.g., Hebrew), these roles are translated differently when the person is male or female. For example, in Hebrew there would be a different translation for male lead developers (מפתח ראשי) and female lead developers (מפתחת ראשית).

This doesn't cause an issue with translation at the moment, since the only woman on the credits page that has her role mentioned in Jane, and she's the only "User Experience Lead". So in translation, we can translate everything else as male and only translate that string as female.

In the interest of future proofing the credits page, I suggest we add two different strings for each role - male and female. In English and other languages will use both the same way, but languages that are not gender-neutral will be able to translate them correctly. This would obviously require that we know the gender of all the people mentioned.

I tried very hard to ignore all the political aspects of this issue - I hope we can get through this without having to discuss them :)

Change History (6)

#1 @nacin
13 years ago

  • Milestone changed from Awaiting Review to Future Release

Let's bring this back up at a point where it's relevant due to the people we're including.

#2 follow-up: @knutsp
13 years ago

Can't the English term just be translated to a language string including both genders? Like 'User Experience Lead' -> 'User Experience Lead/Leadess' (for Pseudo English 'en_PS' used to illustrate the point).

#3 @jane
13 years ago

I generally know the gender of everyone, so that's not an issue. In the 3.3 credits screen I would expect there to be 1 or 2 females in the recent rockstars section if all goes according to plan.

#4 in reply to: ↑ 2 @RanYanivHartstein
13 years ago

Replying to knutsp:

Can't the English term just be translated to a language string including both genders? Like 'User Experience Lead' -> 'User Experience Lead/Leadess' (for Pseudo English 'en_PS' used to illustrate the point).

I don't know if this is common in other languages, but there is something like this in Hebrew. However, because the language does normally distinguish between gender, writing something like "Lead/Lead-ess" is very impersonal and we only resort to it when it's legally required to be gender inclusive (think public job listings or government documents). It's not something we'd want to associate WordPress.org with, and it would miss the whole point of the credits page.

#5 @iseulde
11 years ago

  • Component changed from General to I18N

#6 @helen
9 years ago

  • Milestone Future Release deleted
  • Resolution set to wontfix
  • Status changed from new to closed

Well, now that this is a little more relevant (not by much, though) - I don't think it's possible for this not to be "political" in that this inherently means that WP the project would be requiring the assignment of or explicit opt-out from declaring a human characteristic. Whatever your own take is on gender labels and identification, I don't think that it's a good idea for WP to do something like add this to your .org profile, and the minefield this would put us in far outweighs whatever small benefit might be derived from having gendered labels. Also, assuming that people would be able to opt-out since that would be a proper option to have, languages would still have to come up with some kind of neutral term.

To be frank, I already stick out enough. Maybe there will be a day where that's not the case, but it's not today. I don't need my title to add to that, and right now I'm the only person this applies to. The next person I could see this applying to also does not want to see gender definitions or gendered translations. I will continue to ask each person this might apply to as time goes on, but this is a wontfix as far as I can see it.

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