[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.

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> 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).

[nicky0]

To address your central question, yes, knowing someone’s pronouns enough as long as the pronoun is a traditional one in the language. That is unless somebody wants to use a genderless neopronoun of some kind, in which case, good luck. But as long as people are happy to go with traditional male or female pronouns, the actual gender identity of the individual is a separate point.

[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.