[Po4a-Devel] Re: Planned po4a release on January 15. Please translate & test
On Jan 14, 2024, at 20:18, Jean-Baptiste
<jean-baptiste(a)holcroft.fr> wrote:
I have never heard of such a word but I fully agree that we can be more inclusive. Would
prefer a longer sentence including both genders, would it work for you ?
When I both authored and translated the OmegaT 6.0 manuals, I tried to avoid sentences
where gender appeared. So I went back and forth between the French and the English (which
was also checked by a native - Canadian - contributor) to fix most of the appearances of
gendered nouns.
For ex. I tried to mostly use “utilisation” and in a few cases where that was not possible
I used “la personne qui utilise” (and since occurrences were few, it was not too weird).
With OmegaT, the user is the translator, so it is easier the use the second person and
avoid gendered terms. In po4a translators are a third party, since the po4a user is more
generally the maintainer, so there is a significant number of 3rd person occurrences of
“translator(s)”, and even if in many cases it would be easy to use “the translation”
instead (and hide the translator), that would involve the passive form and would not be
super elegant.
I understand too that there is no rush and I would not mind if you removed “traductaires”
(I used the plural to remove the need to use le/la) altogether for now. But I am sure that
there are elegant ways to produce a natural sounding inclusive French version, so I’m open
for discussion. Professionally speaking I’m also investigating a lot to make my
translation sound natural and the less gendered possible. There are ways to do that that
do not involve new artefacts (I actually removed a (e) in the current translation), it’s
just a matter of thinking of new ways to write.
So, anyway, thank you for reacting to my changes, and I hope the rest is OK with you.