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?
These seem to be more-or-less the same guidelines as this French university suggests.
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.