Hoi, So far I knew that the Slavic languages need support to properly address women. I just learned that the Indic languages also differentiate between a male and a female user (inlike English). To top it off, Hindi has a form for inanimate objects. I do not think that we need to go as far and localise for our bots. We can safely address them though their operators but then again, it is not for me to say. :)
What I would like to learn is if Bishanka has an opinion about being addressed as a woman in her mother tongue. If other women on this list have an opinion I am equally interested to learn their opinion
Any way, at translatewiki.net the overwhelming majority of the localisers is male.. This is not by design, it just happens to be that way. When there are women who are interested in supporting specifically their gender in their language or in supporting their language in general, they are more then welcome at translatewiki.net. Finding someone who is happy to hack at translatewiki.net and help with our internationalisation and localisation work would be absolute bliss. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
To top it off, Hindi has a form for inanimate objects.
Some Indian languages have genders for nouns, others don't. Hindi is one of those that has two genders: feminine and masculine nouns [1], including for inanimate objects [2].
What I would like to learn is if Bishanka has an opinion about being
addressed as a woman in her mother tongue.
My mother tongue is Bengali, which is genderless - it does not have 'gendered' nouns or other aspects of gender like Hindi. So a man and a woman are addressed in the same way in Bengali. This is what I grew up with, am used to, and what I like. But that's just my personal preference, not necessarily my opinion on how women should be addressed in their mother tongues. (I can't speak for other women on this; I imagine it would differ from woman to woman.)
Cheers Bishakha
[1] http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hindi_1:2_Nouns_and_Adjectives [2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi_Lessons/Lesson_4
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