Gender awareness in Hebrew FOSS translations

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 04:49:20PM +0300, Haggai Eran wrote:
> I think that while there are situations where such translation isn't
> suitable, there are on the other hand situations where it is very much
> needed. I was just discussing the other day how facebook notifies you by
> email about a new message from your friends with an ambigous gender:
> >
> > your friend הגיב/ה על הסטטוס‏ של another friend ...
> 
> This looks very unprofessional as the software knows of course the gender of
> your friends.
> 
> Perhaps gender specific translation isn't always optimal, I think that
> having an infrastructure for it as Shlomi suggested would benefit the
> localization for many languages.

My mail program and IM client never wanted to know the gender of each of
my contacts.

Mailman never asked me for my gender when subscribing to a mailing list.
If it did, I would have avoided answer that question.

So, no. In most cases you'll have to have a usable fall-back. And
naturally for Mailman, it would be male. At least until someone forks it
as Mailperson.

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