#204 Use of inclusive language when translating in French
Closed: moved a year ago by jflory7. Opened 2 years ago by nattes.

Hi, I am starting to translate in French some of the docs, and I stumble upon the fact that translated versions use exclusively the masculine form (for exemple the word "utilisateur" is used extensively). I would like to know if there is an official policy for the use of inclusive language.

For "utilisateurs" (plural in the masculine form) there are several options:

  • "utilisateurs et utilisatrices" (double flexion, leaves out non binary people but still better than the sole masculine form)
  • "utilisateur·ice·x·s" inclusive for all genders or utilisateur·ice·s
  • "utilisataires" see for example this guide https://www.alpheratz.fr/linguistique/genre-neutre/
  • "les personnes utilisatrices" (generic term, goes unnoticed but used extensively leads torepetitions)

Another question : is the use of "·". allowed? Some people argue this can lead to accessibility problems, although some others contradict this (https://www.lalutineduweb.fr/ecriture-inclusive-accessibilite-solutions/#point-median-accessibilite).


Metadata Update from @jflory7:
- Issue priority set to: needs review (was: awaiting triage)
- Issue tagged with: needs feedback, type - inclusion, type - internal organization

2 years ago

We are discussing this in today's meeting and thinking about what the best approach might be.

One general theme we are discussing is to better understand the effort required for this task and what kind of impact we seek to achieve by undertaking this work. We foresee some possible pushback on this but we don't know from where that pushback might come. We need to better understand who key stakeholders are.

I was thinking a two-pronged approach could be helpful, but there are some other pieces to resolve before this:

  1. Draft general best practices for inclusion with localization, and publish in DEI docs. This can be used as a general resource for all languages without trying to create unique documentation for every language we localize in Fedora.
  2. Engage and coordinate with active language coordinators as key stakeholders in this process. The coordinators are the main reviewers of new translations and would be key for this work to be successful.

There are some other details that came up in discussion, but perhaps @siddharthvipul1 or @riecatnor can fill in the gaps.

I wrote a draft[1] from some resources I could find online and seemed trustworthy! We are waiting on reviews :)

[1] https://pagure.io/fedora-diversity/pull-request/227

Discussed in 2022-12-05 video meeting.


This ticket is moved to gitlab:fedora/initiatives#1.

In our meeting today, we agreed that there was a larger scope to this issue around language inclusivity. This could also tie into related work in communities like Inclusive Naming. However, we have a limited capacity to take on new work. In 2023, we are getting organized to focus on one or two key initiatives to drive over the next year (#183).

This issue is now moved to the initiatives issue tracker linked above. This issue tracker is part of our existing migration to GitLab (#241) and will be stored here as a candidate for a longer-term initiative that the DEI Team could take on. I am closing the issue here as moved.

Metadata Update from @jflory7:
- Issue close_status updated to: moved
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

a year ago

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