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Bug 512539 - Status title should be gender-dependant
Status title should be gender-dependant
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: empathy
Classification: Core
Component: General
unspecified
Other Linux
: Low enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: empathy-maint
empathy-maint
Depends on: 588922
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2008-01-28 11:14 UTC by Guillaume Desmottes
Modified: 2018-05-22 13:06 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Guillaume Desmottes 2008-01-28 11:14:01 UTC
Original bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/113230

English language doesn't have gender category, but many other languages do. It means that people use one word for male contacts and another for female.
Example: status title Away is now translated to Russian as «Ушёл». But this makes sense only for masculine contacts. For females it should be: «Ушла». There are a lot of other languages beside Russian having gender category: Spanish, Portuguese, French. For example, "Busy" in Portuguese should be "Ocupado" for men and "Ocupada" for women.
Now it is just like, contacts have female names or nicknames, female avatars (maybe even photos) and standard status message, but telling us "I'm a man"! This is weird, we know they are females.

This is important because instant messaging is so personal. When you chatting with your girlfriend, it is stupid, that the computer tells you things about her like "HE is now online".

Expected behavior. XMPP specifications have gender field for contacts. Most of the closed IM networks have it too. ICQ even has default male and female (and neutral) avatars for users. Application should use (if available) contact gender information and show the right statuses.
Comment 1 Xavier Claessens 2008-02-06 12:47:37 UTC
How can I know the gender of a contact? We need contact info support in TP spec for that I guess.
Comment 2 Diego Escalante Urrelo (not reading bugmail) 2008-03-21 19:59:14 UTC
I would rather use the gender neutral form for all cases. We won't avoid problems outside of our control: user input.
I could have filed my MSN account as female by mistake, or vice versa. So it would be quite weird to explain that. Or the lack of info, wouldn't it be weird to male-ify contacts without info?.

For a better consistency I would prefer neutral forms in sentences and translations.
Comment 3 Stefan Friesel 2008-05-30 23:44:21 UTC
Mh, what would be the neutral form in Portuguese?? I think i18n requires knowledge of gender.
At least it should be confirmed as very low priority bug (especially as I don't have the problem in german myself :-D )
Comment 4 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2008-08-25 17:09:50 UTC
For example, in Polish, to neutralise gender-specific message, adding another word is needed.

Normally, when contact goes offline we see "«contact» rozłączył się", but for women we should see "«contact» rozłączyła się".

Neutral form would be "Kontakt «contact» rozłączył się", but that makes notifications too big, when not needed.

XMPP and GG protocols give gender information so that shouldn't so hard to retrieve them and utilise.
Comment 5 Matěj Cepl 2008-08-25 22:06:31 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> Neutral form would be "Kontakt «contact» rozłączył się", but that makes
> notifications too big, when not needed.

And at least in Czech “Kontakt «contact» odešel” sounds like a pretty poor Czech. I think there are only two ways out of this:

1. “Math is too hard, let’s go shopping”, i.e. WONTFIX — this is just too complicated to do it well, and benefit of fixing are not that big.
2. Making some general functions to the Empathy itself and then trying to collect the information from any channel where possible (I think at least ICQ, AIM, and MSN asks about gender when the account is being created; if you fill it incorrectly, I guess it is just too bad for you). Moreover, process of adding required functionality to the protocols where possible (XMPP, IRC) should be initiated.

Presenting the latter option only to show that it is IMHO far from being trivial and I would go for WONTFIX myself. 
Comment 6 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2008-08-25 22:51:30 UTC
IMHO, notification can graphically indicate that contact appeared online or gone offline. Let me explain :> .

 _________________________________
| _____                           |
| |   | *«contact»*             x |
| |__o| /"«status message»"/      |
|                          [chat] |
|_________________________________

"o" on this square (avatar) is basically emblem: online/offline status icon.
when contact is online, avatar is displayed normally, but when contact goes offline, avatar is in black&white.

what do you think about such neutralisation of gender?
Comment 7 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2008-08-25 22:53:55 UTC
Hmmm, Matej, I think you're right - getting gender info from protocols is bad. Esp. when metacontacts will be ready in Empathy.

BTW, Czech is similliar to Polish :) .
Comment 8 Stefan Friesel 2008-08-25 23:08:52 UTC
+1
Maybe this bug should depend on some metacontact bug as it's not quite feasible to solve otherwise.
Comment 9 Stéphane Maniaci 2009-03-17 10:29:39 UTC
What about male and female translations ? In French, "away" is "absent" for men and "absente" for women, so the usually translation found is "<contact> est Absent(e)".
Comment 10 Gilles Dartiguelongue 2009-04-29 08:54:13 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> [...], avatar is in black&white.
> 
> what do you think about such neutralisation of gender?

what about people who can't distingish colors properly ?

(In reply to comment #9)
> What about male and female translations ? In French, "away" is "absent" for men
> and "absente" for women, so the usually translation found is "<contact> est
> Absent(e)". 

previous posts alreadt say this does not work in all languages. In French, it is easy most of the time to have cross-gender messages that don't hurt the eye, we could even use only male messages because it also is the "neutral" form in case you can't properly determine the gender.

I think using information from the protocol is best and if we have problems with meta contacts, here are two ideas about how to solve this:
 * calculate the average gender (that one sounds funny :))
 * rely on a prefered order of transportation per contact
these two solutions are subject to strange changes wrt. what transport your contact is currently using but this is the best that can be done if the information isn't stored somewhere (say in eds for meta-contact support).
Comment 11 Xavier Claessens 2009-04-29 09:33:31 UTC
AFAIK, only Skype has a gender information in contact info, and we don't support that protocol.
Comment 12 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2009-04-29 13:04:13 UTC
Gadu-Gadu too.
Comment 13 Guillaume Desmottes 2009-08-28 12:40:37 UTC
Once Empathy will implement ContactInfo, it could fix this by checking the 'x-gender' key.
Comment 14 Maia Everett 2011-06-06 18:27:48 UTC
I strongly disagree with gender-dependent statuses. For one, gender is not a binary, it's a complex multi-faceted, multi-valued aspect of human identity (and yes, it can have values other than male and female). For two, it's not a problem with statuses - it's a problem with localizations. It's localizations that should be made gender-neutral, not English made gender-specific.

For the Russian localization, for instance, you could translate "Away" as "Нет на месте", like some other IM software.
Comment 15 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2011-06-06 18:37:58 UTC
You're welcome to try this one in Polish.

Adjective "dostępny" (available) is gender-dependent (-y ending for masculine and -a for feminine).
The same with "niedostępny" (unavailable) and "zajęty" (busy) or "niewidoczny" (invisible).

The reason why eg. Gadu-Gadu features gender option in their "public catalogue" is not only looking for people made easier but notifications about status changes made human-friendly.

I honestly can't imagine seeings statuses using eg. nouns in their names: availibility ("dostępność") etc. It just sounds stupid.

And just one more thing: Russian is pretty special language. The fact you can work around such a problem in Russian doesn't mean it applies to rest of Slavic languages (which in fact also tend to have gender-specific endings of adjectives).

So, it's not problem with localizations but with Empathy not using provided data (contact info).
Comment 16 Maia Everett 2011-06-07 03:46:21 UTC
I don't know Polish, but I have trouble believing it has literally no way whatsoever to convey the intent of the status in a gender-neutral way. What about a present-tense verb? Those are gender-neutral in Russian. (For example, "Отсутствует" would be yet another acceptable translation of "Away".)
Comment 17 Gilles Dartiguelongue 2011-06-07 06:56:22 UTC
(In reply to comment #16)
> I don't know Polish, but I have trouble believing [...]

stop believing and read the comments again, we already demonstrated than more than one language has no way to have gender-neutral status message.

For some like French, it is custom to use a combined form ("Absent(e)", "Occupé(e)"), but I'm sure this doesn't work for all languages.
Comment 18 Maia Everett 2011-06-07 07:01:47 UTC
Perhaps the developers could look at how other software does it? Facebook has an "undocumented feature" in that setting your gender to the "Select Sex:" option (yes, it's actually selectable) changes the wording referring to you to be gender-neutral (for example, "they" in English). We could look what language constructs they use in different languages.

If Empathy does ever implement a gender option, it should not be binary (at the very least there should be an "Other" option) and there should be an option to bail out.
Comment 19 Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek 2011-06-07 09:12:04 UTC
Stop it right there. It is known for years that languages tend to have different grammatical forms for specific parts of speech.

In many places you'd just make thing look awkward and out of place.

I can't even imagine seeing eg. "Dostępn(y/a)" as "online" translation while comfortable feature is possible to be implemented. You're making problem even bigger than it is. Stop thinking struggling with translation is easier than programming. Both are hard, but the latter is nothing new and that's the objective of "gender" option presence.
Comment 20 Maia Everett 2011-06-07 09:13:47 UTC
I'm not proposing what's easier - I'm proposing what I believe is the right thing to do.
Comment 21 Matěj Cepl 2011-06-07 09:17:16 UTC
I would go back to my comment 5 … this is almost impossible to do well without huge sacrifices in simplicity (remember, Empathy is supposed to be a messenger for your Aunt Tillie) and benefits are minuscule.

I strongly suggest WONTFIX and asking translators to deal with it any way they can.

Meanwhile, removing myself from CC list here, because this is just silly.
Comment 22 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2018-05-22 13:06:48 UTC
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