The male / female dilemma

No. 1 Hebrew translation challenge when addressing anonymous users

Verbs in Hebrew are conjugated according to the people they refer to. The conjugation is different for male, female, singular or plural. This turns into a real pain when you want to address an online anonymous user, whose sex is unknown.

Solutions used in printed content

The traditional solution used in printed content, was to address people with masculine verbs. If they wanted to be nice, they would add a footnote saying the document was written in the masculine form but refers to both males and females. When feminism started to kick in, we got the slashed verbs (fe/males), referring to both male and female at once, and forcing the recipients to adjust their reading to their sex. This was (and still is) a heavy handed solution that nobody liked. 

No slashed verbs in digital content

We thank the KIS (Keep It Simple) usability rule for preventing professional content people from using the slashed verbs solution. Luckily, that has always been too complicated for the web. True, we can always find some stray web pages whose author hasn’t heard of KIS, like this Skype Login page. This one uses slashed verbs for potential new customers, but settles with the traditional masculine verb for existing customers, and thus ‘’login’’ is translated in the masculine form:

  
But when we check out the Skype Hebrew Homepage we find the traditional masculine verbs, which keeps it simple after all, though not too modern. 

The only leading website that hasn't heard of usability and makes an extensive use of the slashed verbs solution is Facebook. This is ironic as Facebook is one of the websites that actually know its users' sex, as they are required to state it when they register.

The digital alternative:  plural verbs

The traditional masculine verbs are still very visible on Israeli websites. We find them on banks’ websites, some news and content websites, Microsoft’s and Google’s websites and products, and more.

But there’s an alternative used in top native (not translated) local Hebrew websites:  verbs in the plural form. It’s used by some of the top Israeli websites, like Ynet (news), walla (content),  Tapuz (communities), Globes and Calcalist (financial mews), and gov.il (the government’s website). This is a compromise, as the reader is obviously one person, but plural verbs are used for both males and females, so none is left out. 

 

 

 

Some of these websites use a mixed version of masculine verbs (mostly in UI) and plural verbs (mostly in the content). And there are always the confused ones, who use both masculine and plural verbs, on the same registration page, addressing the same user:

I like to assume that the mixed versions are products of work in progress, which will eventually result in the consistent plural verb alternative.

And then there’s the no verbs alternative. This solution gives up on verbs altogether, and replaces them with infinitives and verbal nouns. Hence we get ‘’to email’’ or ‘’emailing’’, instead of ‘’email’’, ‘’to edit’’ or ‘’editing’’ instead of ‘’edit’’, etc’. The sad thing about this alternative is that in the effort to avoid discrimination, it ignores the users altogether. It doesn’t allow addressing the users directly, and thus breaks one of the basic rules for digital content. And as addressing the users is needed for every ’call for action’, this alternative will never work for marketing content:

 

The localization conclusion: Follow the top local Hebrew websites

As translators, we strive to convey not only the meaning of the text, but also its tone. This is why the unisex solution cannot be applied by translators. When the source addresses the users with an active language, its tone is friendly and active. A translation that ignores the users and avoids verbs all together changes the tone of the text into an alienated and passive one. And this kind of change means bad translation.

And then, there’s localization, which requires that our translation not only keeps the source's tone, but is also culturally appropriate. And if none of the native top websites use a solution (i.e. Ynet, Walla, Tapuz etc’), it’s probably not culturally appropriate.

After all, the best way to localize digital content is not to follow other translations, but to follow original local content used by top native websites.