"Male"/"female" values are taken from "Keyed/Menus_Main.xml" file. These values are used in many contexts and meanings:
- as noun
- as adjective
- for singular form
- for plural form
- for people
- for animals
The same word ("male" or "female") can be used in such a number of cases only in English language. This makes proper localization almost impossible.
As per my final stop-gap suggestion (just now) in the original thread posted by Elevator, the addition of an adjective form for "male/female" to accommodate for the inability to use "male" as both a noun and adjective in some languages is my suggestion.
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=30182.0
For proper localization support, I would suggest a review of the keywords and strings they are used in, and then separate them into their necessary categories.
My suggested usages, for the English base, would be:
"male/female" (singular noun)
"male/female" (plural noun)
"male/female" (singular adjective)
"male/female" (plural adjective)
Additional copies could be added referring to animals, using the same set of nouns and adjectives.
Effectively, no changes would be made to the English version in terms of language, only the addition of separate keywords.
(For those wondering, in English, male/female can be used as a noun, adjective, and as both a plural and singular. In other languages, like Russian, there is no direct equivalent that can be used in all places.)
This would, obviously, be quite a bit of work.
Up to Tynan and the development team; simply my suggested course of action if full localization is to be supported.
QuoteMy suggested usages, for the English base, would be:
"male/female" (singular noun)
"male/female" (plural noun)
"male/female" (singular adjective)
"male/female" (plural adjective)
This look like a good solution. But I'm afraid, even in this case there could be some tricky situations. For example for a specific context in English a noun form should be used, but in some other language there should be an adjective.
In my opinion, a better solution would be to let localization teams specify gender words for each context.
For instance:
<LetterIncidentPsychicDrone>Every {0} in the colony winces in pain...</LetterIncidentPsychicDrone>
<LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Male>man</LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Male>
<LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Female>woman</LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Female>
If keys like LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Male and LetterIncidentPsychicDrone_Female were added for all gender-related contexts (there are not so many of them), then both translators and players would be happy
Of course, the final solution is up to development team.
It can help some translators but I think in most case is it possible to adapt sentences to avoid this kind of problem.
Personnally, as a French translator, I have a lot of difficulty with personnal pronouns that exist in two forms both depending of gender in French and only in one in English so I'm forced to adapt sentences to avoid as much as possible to use the not initialized one.
Another possibility that we use too is to write both gender seperated by a "/". For example : waiter/waitress.
It's heavy and not pleasant to read but the only option in much case.