We’re trying to improve our Translation Volunteer onboarding experience, and this means I’ve been experimenting with some new tools, a new (lite) translator intro page, and onboarding some new volunteers.
One of our newest French translation volunteer has a great question:
French depends on the male/female subject. So to translate the text: “Are you sure you want to delete visit?” do you want me to use the following: Êtes-vous sûre de vouloir supprimer cette visite? or should we assume the default is male and use Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir supprimer cette visite?
Many languages have “grammatical gender”, where correct grammar requires masculine/feminine conjugations (examples here). So we should have clear guidance for translation volunteers. I’ve looked through the web for guidance and the recommendations vary:
Use the user’s gender (example) - I think this is more complexity than is realistic for us. More complexity in our code = greater risk of issues.
Handle both: So the translation would be like “Êtes-vous sûr/sûre de…” - I think this adds too much text and can clutter the UI. A cluttered UI = greater risk of clinician missing important info.
Re-phrase in a grammatically gender-neutral way: E.g. instead of Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir supprimer cette visite? we could use Voulez-vous vraiment annuler cet visite?
Stick to just masculine if grammatical gender is unavoidable: My only concern is, could this have a weird impact on Calls-to-Action in female patient charts?
Curious what people recommend we write as the best practice to follow!!
Thanks everyone for the input! It seems like our consensus so far is:
Re-phrase in a grammatically gender-neutral way: E.g. instead of Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir supprimer cette visite? we could use Voulez-vous vraiment annuler cet visite? We can have a list of alternatives for common gendered nouns as well (e.g. “Consider “l’individu” instead of patient or client which would client(e) or patient(e)”)
Use () if neutral phrasing is not possible: E.g. “Êtes-vous sûr(e) de vouloir indiquer ce(tte) patient(e) comme décédé(e)”
Use / as a last resort if () is not possible: E.g. “sibling” in French = “Soeur/Frère” (great example @ball). Although, I don’t love the idea of a bunch of ()/ symbols in non-Romance languages. @mksrom did this come up for you guys with Khmer?
I’ve searched i18next and their docs does not appear to have a solution (other than storing user-gender-specific strings) so I’ve left a query with that community too, in case there are any quick-win tools out there (though I suspect not):
I’ve also reached out to a few other Global Goods to see how they handle this.
@gsluthra how did Bahmni handle this? It seems to me going through both Bahmni and OpenMRS v2 translations on Transifex that we seem to have defaulted to the masculine in general, but I could be wrong.
Use the user’s gender (example) - I think this is more complexity than is realistic for us. More complexity in our code = greater risk of issues.
Re-phrase in a grammatically gender-neutral way: E.g. instead of Êtes-vous sûr de vouloir supprimer cette visite? we could use Voulez-vous vraiment annuler cet visite?
Stick to just masculine if grammatical gender is unavoidable: My only concern is, could this have a weird impact on Calls-to-Action in female patient charts?