[danShumway]

So genuine question, because I am in the middle of building a dialog system that I'd like it to work with multiple languages -- it sounds like in the worst-case scenario we can encompass all of that behavior by just having a toggle in settings next to the pronouns for specifically those languages: "use masculine word variants / use feminine word variants".

If even that; if I know someone uses "el", then "el mar" isn't a problem, and I know to use masculine word variants in other locations. Is there any scenario where knowing that a user/player uses "el" to refer to themselves wouldn't allow you to derive what gender-variant of another word to use when referring to them?

I guess if someone is using completely agender pronouns (I don't know what that would be in Spanish) I'd need to ask about feminine/masculine word variants, but I'm still struggling to see why I need to know their actual gender.

[dale_glass]

Translation is actually a very tough problem, especially in games.

Take a sentence like "$PERSON picked up $ITEM".

Russian requires knowing the gender of $PERSON because the verb "to pick" is modified depending on the gender of the person. It also needs the accusative declension of the $ITEM. In Russian you don't just say "book" in every context possible like in English, the word "book" gets different endings depending on the context it's used. A bit like verbs vary in English: become, became.

You also need to be very careful with things like word play -- it just doesn't translate right. Eg, there's a point in Monkey Island where an actual monkey is used as a wrench, because "monkey wrench". That just doesn't translate, at all.

And culture. Eg, things like honorifics and the general way people talk may not necessarily translate. For instance apparently the famous Star Wars "Do not want" happened because in Mandarin shouting just "NO!" isn't a thing.

Point being, no, you can't translate simply and naively. Translating something like a game is a very serious job where you should actually talk to translators in advance if possible to figure out whether your wanted design is going to be a huge pain or not, and if something might not translate at all.

[danShumway]

> Russian requires knowing the gender of $PERSON

But this is exactly what I'm asking -- does it actually require knowing the gender of the person, or does it just need the pronoun to line up with other word variants? Because those are two different things. I keep asking this, and people keep on replying with language examples where knowing the pronoun would be completely sufficient to translate the sentence.

Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.

What is an example of a sentence where if I knew someone's pronouns in a given language but not their explicit gender identity, I would not have enough information about them to be able to translate that sentence?

----

> Point being, no you can't translate simply and naively.

This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting from players would allow a professional translator to translate that game.

I'm told up above that this requires not just knowing someone's pronouns but also their explicit gender identity. I can't find a language example where that's true.

[dale_glass]

> But this is what I'm asking -- does it actually require knowing the gender, or does it just need the pronoun to line up with the variant of the word?

That's one and the same the way I understand your question. Gender implies a specific pronoun. Though there can be exceptions, like where the "sea" in Spanish can be both a "he" or a "she", and which a famous poem uses to a hard to translate effect by alternating between both.

But, and I say this very seriously, translation is very lacking in things being "just" something. Eg, see this for a discussion of more issues:

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man3/Locale::Mak...

> Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.

Russian allows for sentences without any pronouns, or only neutral ones. Eg, the sentence "I forgot", in Russian has "I" as not indicating any gender, and it only being present in the ending of "forgot". You have to understand Russian grammar and cases to extract it from there. And yet "I know" is gender neutral. It's funny like that.

> This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting would allow a translator to translate that game.

I'm not talking about auto anything. I'm talking about that support for translation in a game is complex and requires serious planning. Any time you're composing a sentence from parts is likely a place where complexity will explode exponentially as you add support for more languages.

There's also all sorts of weird quirks to consider. Eg, if you have some sort of mystery, in Russian gender appears pretty much everywhere, so if your mystery murderer is one of the few women in the setting, then Russian makes it nigh impossible for anybody to refer to her, or for her to talk about herself, and not drastically reduce the list of suspects by instantly revealing it has to be a woman.

If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".

In some languages you need the gender of $PERSON, and it'll affect the verb. You'll need to know the right declension of each item that can be possibly picked up. Plurals of course need to be accounted for, and in Russian the forms of "file" for amounts of 1, 2 and 5 are different. So a little thing like that can balloon into pages worth of weird and complex code.

An additional fun quirk is polite language and honorifics. "Do you want some coffee?" can be said to anyone in English, has formal and informal forms in Russian and Spanish, and a whole bunch of possibilities in Japanese. If you happen to mention 5 different people in a Japanese sentence you'll likely make it clear who's your younger sister, who's a classmate, who's your superior, and who's the jerk you hate.

[danShumway]

> Russian allows for sentences without any pronouns, or only neutral ones.

Right, but you're describing a situation where a specific singular sentence doesn't happen to have a gendered pronoun in it, you're not describing a sentence that requires knowing a person's gender. If you knew as a translator what pronouns a person commonly used, you'd still be able to translate the sentence "I forgot" in a grammatically correct way, right?

Unless Russia supports someone simultaneously using a masculine pronoun and a feminine variant of "forgot" when talking about them? But my understanding is that it doesn't.

We're not talking about a situation where we have no idea who the subject of that sentence is -- if you know what pronouns a person usually uses in Russian, it still seems like you could pretty easily translate that person saying "I forgot" -- because the important grammatical part of that is the consistency between the gendered variant of "forgot" and the gender variant of the pronouns that person usually uses.

----

> If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".

So I have looked into this a bit as part of building dialog systems for my games, and yeah, it is super complicated. But while yes, it absolutely requires writing a ton of code and supporting a ton of variants and possibly even writing specific language-dependent code for certain translations, and while yes, it does require tracking object state to a much greater degree than you typically would for a purely English game, it still doesn't seem to change anything about what information I need to ask the player during their profile setup.

I'm still having trouble finding an example of where asking a player what their pronouns are isn't sufficient information from that player to do a translation.

Understand, I am not saying that translations would be easy, I am not saying that dynamically constructed sentences would be simple (they would not be simple). I am not saying that cultural translation and differing norms and references wouldn't be intensely difficult to deal with. But I can't find an example where I need to know the player's gender. I don't know of a language that gramatically distinguishes between pronouns and gender to a degree where knowing someone's pronouns wouldn't be sufficient to determine what gender-variant words to use to when referring to them.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone says, "I use primarily he/him, but technically I'm actually agender", and I reply, "oh, good to know, we couldn't have done a translation with your character without also knowing about the agender part."

[dale_glass]

> I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone says, "I use primarily he/him, but technically I'm actually agender", and I reply, "oh, good to know, we couldn't have done a translation with your character without also knowing about the agender part."

Ooh, so that's what you mean. In that case I'm quite sure it'd be extremely situation and culture specific, probably to the point of being impossible to accurately translate. Concepts like "agender" are deeply mired in local politics and characteristics of the specific language.

In English a game could treat somebody as "they" without much difficulty.

But in other languages, you quickly run into trouble. Eg, Spanish has seen some use of "@" as a stand in for indicating "either masculine or feminine", eg, "invitad@s" -- but that's rather quirky, goofy, literally unpronounceable and unfitting in any kind of serious context.

In anime there are characters whose gender is supposed to be unknown, like Nanachi (https://madeinabyss.fandom.com/wiki/Nanachi). This works in Japanese and English, but Spanish and Russian outright treat Nanachi as female, and just stick a "gender is supposed to be ambiguous" note somewhere in the corner and this particular bit about the character gets completely lost in the translation.

[danShumway]

> This works in Japanese and English, but Spanish and Russian outright treat Nanachi as female, and just stick a "gender is supposed to be ambiguous" note somewhere in the corner

I don't mean to dismiss the concerns of nonbinary people who don't want to use any gendered variants of words to describe themselves, because 100% agreed, that's a real problem with translations to Russian, Spanish, German, etc... No dispute at all on that point.

But outside of that context, it sounds like Spanish and Russian do have a way of dealing with this situation? They use a default gender and add a note that it's meant to be a bit ambiguous. This is kind of what I'm getting at, it's not that Spanish/Russian languages have no way to talk about someone who's nonbinary, they just use a default gendered pronoun.

That is a real problem if you want zero gender at all, but most people aren't going to care -- for most people it would be fine to just ask their pronoun in that language, and at most follow up with "do you want feminine/masculine variants" if they provide an ambiguous answer.

----

Coming back to this conversation a day later with a bit more thought, I really feel like we're talking past each other. My contention isn't that gendered languages provide an easy way to be completely genderless. I agree with you about pretty much all of the difficulties in translation you've talked about, and agree with you that nonbinary representation in those languages is difficult. I even agree with you that gendered verbs/nouns make writing ambiguous dialog much harder, absolutely hiding the gender of someone in a novel in Russian is going to be harder than it would be in English.

My contention isn't about any of that stuff at all, it's that the languages:

A) do still have mechanisms for ambiguous gender (ie, using default gendered pronouns) where defaulting to masculine case is probably fine for many contexts where you don't know who your user is or where you're referring to a generic non-specific user. It seems (at first glance at least) like that won't offend many people.

B) But more importantly to the starting point of the thread, making the determinations of which gendered nouns/verbs to use only really requires knowledge of the pronoun, not knowledge of the underlying actual gender identity that someone has.

In other words, if you know someone uses "el" in Spanish, it doesn't actually matter to the translation anymore whether they're nonbinary or not. Just from them telling you what pronoun they want to use, you know what gendered word variants to use when referring to them. My understanding is that Russian is the same; you don't need to know if someone is nonbinary, you need to know whether they want masculine or feminine word variants.

That being said, completely agreed that if you ask someone for a Spanish pronoun and they say "elle", that complicates things (although maybe that's a bad example since it seems like modern Spanish language in specific is now starting to some tools in that direction).

[netvl]

You’re right in that knowing pronouns is sufficient to determine grammatical gender of words to be used with relation to a character in Russian. Combining a particular gender of pronoun with an unmatching form of verbs/nouns/etc is definitely not a part of the language, even outside some formal norms.

One possibly unobvious thing is, though - there are only three grammatical genders in Russian, so all words which do have gendered forms can have at max 3 of them (male/female/neuter). This means that if you do allow more than 3 kinds of pronouns, you’ll probably have to define the pronouns->grammatical gender mapping somehow. Well, I guess plural variant also counts, so maybe 4.