Gender awareness in Hebrew FOSS translations

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 12:03:04AM +0300, Shlomi Loubaton wrote:
> 2010/7/5 Yaron Shahrabani <sh.yaron at gmail.com>
> 
> > I must agree with Tzafrir, this issue should be solved in a lingual way
> > like the Gezer Project suggests
> >
> 
> When did Tzafrir say this issue should be solved in a lingual way? (I
> probably missed that part)

Just in case it's not clear enough: Tzafrir claims that:

1. Your proposed solution required fixing much more than gettext. It
requires saving and using gender configuration in quite a few places in
the user interface. Practically: in most places where you can currently
set the language.

2. For languages there's a sane fallback: "C" normally implies "English
text". There's no sane default for gender.

3. In many cases of "web interfaces" the user is annonymous (e.g.:
reader of the archives of this list through Mailman).

4. In other cases, you really won't bother asking the user for gender
information (e.g.: mailman's configuration screen. Which currently only
asks for name and email. not even language).

5. Actually for web applications there's another sane fallback for the
language: the language of the browser. Do you want to add gender
negotioation to HTTP? Do you really want to expose that information when
browsing sites?

6. This increases the translation work. Adds quite a lot of redundancy
into it. You'll also get many parts that are untested.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
tzafrir at cohens.org.il |                    |  best
tzafrir at debian.org    |                    | friend