Issue with translating to male/female + singula/plural words

[Gabriel Torres]

Hi guys,

As usual, we face limitations when translating certain strings since in English there is no male/male words like in Portuguese, Spanish etc.

In addition, some words in English don't change regardless of singular/plural.

Right now, the following strings that are giving us trouble.

notification__unapproved_content_bulk_title

notification__unapproved_content_title

These two strings default to: ⚠️ New %s awaiting approval

There are two problems here:

1. We don't know deforehand whether "%s" will be a male or a female word. "New", in English, doesn't have gender, but in Portuguese/Spanish/etc the adjective changes depending on the noun: Nova (female) / Novo (male). And we have a mix here! Some examples:

Male: post, tópico (topic)

Female: avaliação (review), respostas (reply)

2. We don't know beforehand wether "%s" will be a singular or plural word. In English, "New" doesn't change with singular/plural, but in Portuguese/Spanish/etc it does. So, if we translate "New" as "Novo", when %s is plural, the grammar is incorrect (ex: "Novo posts" instead of "Novos posts").

I tried to use the {!#[1:novo][?:novos]} trick, but it didn't work here. But this would fail the male/female problem anyway.

I got a little creative here and solved this by translating this string as:

⚠️ Há %s aguardando aprovação

Instead of using the adjective "New", I changed it to the verb "Há" (There is/There are). So we have "There is/there are %s awaiting approval". The meaning is slightly different from the original string, but it does the trick.

Even though I have found a solution, I thought it would be interesting to tell you this, so you understand the challenges we face when running non-English communities.

However, the major issue now is with the following string:

notification__unapproved_content_grouped

Which defaults to:

There are {count} new %s requiring approval %s

Here, since we have the {count}, we can correctly apply the singular/plural trick, so I translated it to:

Há {count} {!#[1:novo][?:novos]} %s aguardando aprovação %s

The problem now is, we don't know whether the first "%s" will be a male or a female word. So we have a gender mismatch whenever it is a female noun.

Now, another issue we have is when it is a review in Pages that is pending approval. It is pulling the string "avaliação" (review), in the singular form, even when more than one is present. See the screenshot below. This may be a bug, maybe the system is pulling __defart_content_record_reviews_title instead of __defart_content_record_reviews_title_plural, and I kindly ask you to take a look into this. In other words, which string is being used in the first %s when the this notification is about reviews in Pages.

I hope I was clear enough for you to undertand what I mean, and let me know if you need any additional information.

Best regards,

Gabriel Torres

[Hisashi]

I'm suffering with the same issue to do some translations.

For example: "Your %s (...)" I'm having to use "Seu(ua) %s (...)"

Maybe I'll have to change the understanding, so it doesn't look so weird.

[Gabriel Torres]

@Hisashi Post here the string key and I will tell you what I used here. In most cases, we had to be creative and translate to something gender-neutral.

[Marc Stridgen]

I have marked this for a devs attention so we can comment on this in more detail. Someone will respond once we have gone through this 🙂 

[Andy Millne]

Unfortunately there isn't an immediate solution we can offer with regard to these specific gendered word cases. I would suggest emulating the French and German language translations where they have used neutral options.