Summary: | Poor grammar or logic in status change message.\ | ||
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Product: | [Applications] kopete | Reporter: | Matt T. Proud <khanreaper> |
Component: | general | Assignee: | Kopete Developers <kopete-bugs-null> |
Status: | RESOLVED DUPLICATE | ||
Severity: | normal | ||
Priority: | NOR | ||
Version: | 0.8.0 | ||
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Platform: | Gentoo Packages | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: |
Description
Matt T. Proud
2004-02-09 03:02:56 UTC
"their" was chosen so that it not be gender specific. their can be singular or plural. Not in an attempt to contest unduly, I can assure you that ``their'' is not singular--i.e., at least in non-colloquial terms. Rather, it is plural; any guide to pronouns will confirm this. 1.) http://www.kentlaw.edu/academics/lrw/grinker/LwtaGender_Neutral_Language.htm 2.) http://www.writing911.com/realworld/t101grammar.htm 3.) http://www.wonderfulwritingskillsunhandbook.com/html/pronoun_agreement.html Whether correct or not, I still find the text awkward, but I'm not a native speaker... Anyway, what about the same text that the passive popup uses? i.e. "Foo is now Online" (or Offline, Away, ...). Alternatively, "Foo is now marked as ...", or "Foo's status changed to ...", although I wonder if the latter possessive form can be properly translated in a gender-neutral way to notably the central European languages. Martijn Martijn: What you have proposed would generally work. Would it seem fair to assume that ``User is now {offline,away,online}.'' would translate well? On Monday 09 February 2004 21:22, Matt T.Proud wrote:
> What you have proposed would generally work. Would it seem
> fair to assume that ``User is now {offline,away,online}.'' would translate
> well?
That's what I wonder too...
We have it in the passive popup and got no complaints, but I'm not sure that
tells enough...
I was told long time ago that "their" can be used instead of "his/her" if you want to be politically correct. I don't know how much this neologism is codified in todays English, but I have been using is for some years now. Strangely enough, this is no problem e.g. for Czech, we have "svůj" as a word used for both genders. But "User changed his/her status" still is a little akward to translate as we have different word for male-user and female user and the verb has different suffix as well. So it would be "Uživatel/uživatelka změnil/změnila svůj status". :-) http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69700 is already ASSIGNED! :) |