[Koha-translate] Gender sensitive language in Koha?

[Katrin Fischer]

Hi Anke,

the Koha community even has a coding guideline for this:

https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Coding_Guidelines#TERM2:_Gender-Neutral_Pronouns

As you said, it's not easy to do the same in German. It would be nice to
come up with some guidelines and maybe a glossary page to help us being
consistent. Sometimes an easy change could be using more neutral
terminology, like 'Bibliothekspersonal' for library staff or
'Bibliothekskonto' for a user's library account. But maybe we should
move to koha-de mailing list for specifics. :)

Would also be interesting to learn about how other translation teams
tackle this!

Katrin

On 21.09.22 17:13, Bruns, Anke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> yes, I think they are both more or less (or completely) the same - gender sensitive was one of the possibilities my translation tool came up with for "gendergerechte Sprache", which means language that takes into account all sexes as opposed to masculine biased language.
>
> Of course, in English it is much easier, as there aren't so many nouns for persons that are gender biased (e.g. a teacher being either a male, female, or non binary person). In other languages, as Caroline Cyr La Rose pointed out for French earlier in this thread, it is much more complicated to communicate in a non gender biased language. In German, which is my main concern 😉, this is also the case, as e.g. a teacher (Lehrer) is male, and a female teacher has to be extra labelled by an -in syllable: Lehrerin. In order not to have to always mention both sexes (which would be very clumsy and would also exclude non binary people), there are some ways to express gender neutrality: Thus a patron in the library is either a Benutzer*in, or a Benutzende (meaning a library _using_ person). There are different other ways instead of using the asterisk, and there is currently quite a lot of discussion about this.
>
> I stumbled on translations like "Benutzer" in the German version of the Koha manual  and was wondering whether I should change this to "Benutzer*in" or what else. But this may rather be an issue for the German Koha list.
>
> Thanks for your thoughts, anyway, and the helpful links, Caroline and Victor!
>
> Regards,
> Anke
>
>
>
>
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