Subject: Re: bug#57046: Spanish documentation uses exclusive language

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2022 15:46:17 +0200

Hola,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]> skribis:

> * the main Spanish translation po/guix/es.po uses usuario
>
> * the French translation switches between “utilisateur·rices”,
>   “utilisatrices et utilisateurs” and more often masculine “utilisateurs”
>
> * the Portuguese, Russian, German translation use masculine (although at
>   least for German I use feminine in some examples)
>
> * German word for users is masculine Benutzer and feminine is
>   Benutzerinnen; there is a psychology study that Benutzer*innen is
>   perceived feminine while listing both masculine and feminine Benutzer
>   und Benutzerinnen is perceived as including men and women (a different
>   language and I might give too much weight to one scientific study)
>   <https://www.hw.uni-wuerzburg.de/aktuelles/news/single/news/gendersternchen-lassen-an-frauen-denken/>

Just like for French, my suggestion would be to use a mixture of several
techniques to achieve gender neutrality, probably in this order:

  • Using gender-neutral words—e.g., “personas” or “quién” rather than
    “usuarios”.

  • Talking to the user: “puedes hacer …” rather than “usuarios pueden
    hacer …”.

  • Using the -e suffix, which has the advantage of being concise and
    readable, but potentially off-putting (at least today).

  • Using repetitions, “usuarias y usuarios”.

Latin languages (among others) are problematic but techniques like these
can get us a long way, and by mixing them we can avoid making the text
hard to read.

Ludo’.