1. Magenta-Unicorn, 09.09.2020 22:49

Can we please have a feature where we can change our gender?

2. Nikola, 10.09.2020 00:56

I believe this was never done because now, there are many messages on the platform, so it would require a lot of time to go through each message, review it and make sure it has a female gender equivalent.

3. Sajad-Aliraqi, 10.09.2020 08:59

I really don't understand why changing messages is a big deal. Isn't it for what the translators are for? I' guess I'm waiting an answer although the argument itself is flawed. I don't really see it a big issue at all

4. YNWA, 10.09.2020 11:20

There is not much to the message but I would assume he means in games. like they do in RS, I Can't see where it would help anywhere else.

5. Sajad-Aliraqi, 10.09.2020 11:25

Those stuff are just silly works and if you plan on doing them you would do it progressively even if it would take a week of constant slow activity in developing the gender system as well as changing messages.

6. spaceship, 10.09.2020 15:04

No... translator work is not enough here... its in fact that much of programming work as well.
Based on my understanding, ameniel would have to mark each and every message where there could be different messages for different genders, replace every he, or the gender related words with some variables and then only he can use the database and send spesific strings to the variable based on the gender of the user.
I might be wrong though.. I am just speaking from my understanding... And its a lot of works to go through so much of code and find the messages.

7. Marina, 10.09.2020 15:13

I would like to clarify a misunderstanding, currently the only translator in the English part, as far as I know ,is Aminiel.
I do not know if it is possible to remove our names as translators from the staff page or not, but I think the process was automatic because we got access to work on a certain project, that you will maybe know about it soon.
So, Aminiel said before that such thing is minor and that he prefers fixing bugs or working on new games instead of going through all this data base to fix a minor message that probably doesn't matter much, since it was not meant to be sexist at all and fixing it would require a lot of work. Some sentences were changed to be more neutral and some sentences remained.
I honestly forgot whether someone volunteered to do it, or whether Aminiel talked about the coding part and if he would like to do it or not.
But my personal opinion is, do not let such thing bother you, the main goal is to play, it doesn't matter if in a game it said he while you are a female, the general message is understood. I am actually feminist, but IMO such things are overlooked. Maybe we can try to use a more neutral language in the future, and that is happening already. But at the end of the day it's a game, not an official paper.

8. Qais, 10.09.2020 15:57

hello:
This topic has been discussed before here:
http://qcsalon.net/en/forum6/topic49151
Aminiel said

It has been already requested several times. I'm not against, but the problem is that there are a lot of messages to fix and it isn't as easy as it seems to make it correct in all languages. It hasn't been implemented from the start and now it's quite hard to change. Be assured that it isn't sexist at all.

9. Aminiel, 10.09.2020 18:14

Hello,

The problem with gender isn't as easy as it seems for a multilingual system. Let me explain a bit better:

If the playroom were only in English, it wouldn't be a big deal to change "he" into "she" and "his" into "her". The problem come from the fact that every language has its own specific set of grammar rules.
IN most languages, changing "he" into "she" also implies to change verb and adjective terminations. As far as I know, English is the only one that doesn't do it at all.

In some languages, and theire come the most problematic, you need to change pronouns and noun terminations of the sentence objects. They can be in different grammatical states (often called direct/indirect, or cases: accusative/dative/etc.). Of course the rules are different between cases, but also, for a given object in a sentance, the state may be direct in English but indirect for the same translated sentance in french.

If we wanted to be exhaustive, there are also a lot of problems with plural. Some languages have more than two distinct forms. For example a singular form for 0 and 1, a first plural for less than 10, and a second plural for 10 or more. Note also that all languages don't agree if singular or plural must be used for 0. In English it's plural, while in french it's singular.

It's extremely hard to account for all possible cases in all currently available languages in the playroom, and impossible to extract any kind of general rules.
So there are grammatically incorrect sentance here and there, even in english and for extremely simple things. For example, someone recently pointed out that "an" should be written instead of "a" before the name of certain cards.
Incorrect sentances are worse and more frequent in languages I don't know myself. In english we are still generally safe because there aren't case and complicated rules.

Everything is in fact a question of compromises.

I can only agree that not handling gender at all in the playroom is quite a big unfortunate compromise. I didn't think about it 9 years ago when translating the playroom for the first time. I didn't know that many things about languages and linguistics, it came from translators as time passed.
Unfortunately, taking gender into account now would require to think about the whole translation system new again. That's not especially the most interesting to do, and the most interesting for players, since the machinery happens behind the scene.
IN short, that's an ungratful work to do.

IN fact, the translation system of the playroom is quite simple: only texts with gaps to fill in with names or numbers.
Almost all other usual programs do more or less the same, including those you are using everyday like Jaws, NVDA, Word, and even windows itself.

I'm aware of the limitations of the translation system of the playroom, and that's why I'm usually trying to do my best to avoid using "he", "she", "him" and "her" as most as possible, by repeating the pseudo for example, but I must also ensure that sentences don't become to heavy. I'm already doing so for quite a long time without anyone noticing anything.

There are entire books and even academic researches dedicated to the subject. This is called natural language processing, and more specifically in this case, text or sentance generation. Nowadays, artificial intelligence is used to takle it.
Except maybe at Google or Amazon, without AI, in general, compromises are made in computer translations. Complexity is traded for grammatical incorrectness up to an acceptable level.
Pay attention: I'm pretty sure that you will see in almost any software the compromises that have been made. Just a single example in french in windows file explorer: "0 élément(s) sélectioné(s)" so to avoid having two messages "0-1 élément sélectioné" and "2+ éléments sélectionnés". ON the playroom I generally chose to keep the plural form all the time because these "(s)" are inconvenient with the screen reader.

Again, I completely agree that it's quite unfortunate to not handle gender at all.
But I hope now that you have understood why it isn't at all simple, and that you won't incorrectly interpret it as being fool, sexist or anti-feminist. This isn't at all the spirit of the playroom.