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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

A particularly tricky case of this is with usernames and user defined content.

Eg, a notification like "Alice is online" in some languages requires knowing Alice's gender. Which may be something that's not even stored anywhere in the system. There's probably some language out there that requires some other piece of personal info for a correct translation.

To make things tricky, try having a multitude of items that you refer to: "You're holding a dagger". Now you need to have a serious discussion with your translators, because this is going to get all kinds of tricky, as the maker of Obra Dinn discovered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMi6xgdSbMA

And to make things extra-tricky, allow users to create content. "Alice gave you a banana", where "banana" is a custom object Alice made herself.

Most translation efforts seem to give up at this point and resort to something stilted like "Alice: online"

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And then you "discover" that depending on context "Alice" can change as well. In finno-ugric languages there is no prefixes and names change themselves. In Finnish:

Alice is online -> Alice on verkossa

Mail to Alice -> Postita Alicelle

And no, you can't use "%s"+ "lle" either, it depends on name:

Mail to John -> Postita Johnille

I think most common languages you can either choose between a combo adjective like

Alice es activo(a)

Or alice es activ@

But honestly as engineers, we should follow the advice of making the stilted constructions. We're already trained as users to expect that anyways from all the other apps.

If it's just a monolingual app. Sure go nuts, make it read super fluidly. If you have to localize, just do it the tried and true way

@ as a superposition of “a” and “o”; very nice.

If gender is how we sneak conditional expressions and nondet Prolog predicates into natural languages, then I’m in.

In this particular case, only "está" (instead of "es") is correct. Otherwise it means that the person is an active person, instead of meaning that at the present period of time, the person can be found active/online.

Also, in Chinese, the logogram might change depending on the gender: 他/她, he/she, also part of his/her

To make things even worse. There is 祂 specifically for god-like characters (for example jesus). And 牠 for animals.

> If it's just a monolingual app. Sure go nuts, make it read super fluidly.

The Polish IM app Gadu-Gadu was monolingual. The user's gender was part of the user profile. Now, virtually all female Polish names end in -a (foreign names aside, there's maybe one or two exceptions). There's a fairly popular male name (Kuba) that ends with -a, and GG did use the feminine verb when showing the notification that he's online.

It's usually a diminutive form, but some people have this as their official name, and people are likely to use a diminutive form in your contacts list.

But honestly as engineers, we should follow the advice of making the stilted constructions. We're already trained as users to expect that anyways from all the other apps.

I do the opposite.

Instead of training my users to accept a kludge, I take the time to make it correct, even if it's hard.

I have the luxury of full-time professional translators on staff, and I know that not everyone else does.

But I've always believed that computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around.

Seamlessly embedding user-generated content into template text is a losing battle. There are always going to be users who test the waters with emojis, zalgo text, l33tspeak profanity, SQL/XSS injection attempts, copypastas, and so on. In the face of such merry nonsense, linguistic idiosyncrasies like proper gendered forms are moot concerns.

That reminds me I need to add some Zalgo test cases to my layout code. I got a stern warning from dang for Zalgo-ing a HN comment once.

awesome video

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