And my point is that the very conception of *what inclusivity and fluidity are like* in this thread is very centric to (a) North Atlantic Cultures and (b) the English Language, and variations of the Anglophone conception thereof grafted onto other languages (such as Romance, Slavic, Semitic etc.). I brought up East Slavic conceptions of fluidity, where you just use the pronouns, verbs, numerals and adjectives of whatever gender the word is. This way the same person can be a she when talked about as a human, a he when talked about as a specialist, and as it when talked about as a wonder (a somewhat affectionate reference). That's fluidity too, and it's been around for centuries; but somehow it gets overlooked, or seen as 'not the real' or 'not the right' way for a language to work. In contrast, the English vocabulary seems to be heavily biased in favour of one out of three genders, yet somehow Englishmen somehow overlook said lack of inclusivity, instead worrying about one of the two less-represented genders (out of the language's three and a half) being slightly more default than the other.

This sort of localization to the language is usually handled by the translators working with the language involved. The overall goal remains to support people's identities in whatever way the language and culture the book is being localized to handles that. Which means in some situations the note on pg 19 changes dramatically - and it's a case by case basis depending on the solution the language speakers themselves have come up with. It's more understandable and *more polite* to use the solution that the people who speak the language you're working with came up with for solving this problem, instead of trying to force another language to solve the same problem the way your language does. Certainly more polite than acting like speakers of other languages are doing it 'wrong' on purpose and yelling at them about how their language goes about it. In short: When in English - we use singular they. When in other languages - we use their solution. --- Setting that aside - the English language has overloaded the meaning of the word 'gender' by calling the noun-case agreement feature of various languages 'genders'. So overall we should keep in mind that 'gender' doesn't mean the same thing in a linguistic context as it does in a social context. That extra meaning isn't something we can do a whole lot about at this point. Prescriptive approaches just get a whole lot of push-back, and we don't have an English Academy like French does... So we are going to have to just *deal*. If it helps I can suggest making a habit of saying "grammatical gender" to make the difference clear about which context you mean. About 25% of the world uses some form of noun-agreement (aka gender) system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

Vicky. That note about politeness also applies to you.

Hm - in that case, if you're planning to work with an official translation I would suggest talking to the publisher first then. They may already have an approach in mind. If they don't and they've left it in your hands - it may be worthwhile to look up publishers for other translations and ask them directly? You may want to see if there's any other works out there that may have worked on translations from English to the language you're working on and see how they handle it? I think Altered Carbon has a lot of translations out there and the concept of sleeving comes from there. If not - then Altered Carbon's translation feature for the Netflix show might have some examples to start from? So many languages are trying to figure out how to address this need all at the same time so there are a *lot* of possible solutions out there. Even in English - singular they is only one solution, neopronouns are also another way to address it. You may also want to ask a queer rights organization for your target language for the latest suggestions. They're more likely to be up to date on the latest approaches and be able to help you with any explanation you want to include in pg 19.

Hm... when I was working on my unfinished translation of EP1 into Polish, I have encountered this problem. And... hm... Basically, I translated the box saying "singular they" and noted that there is (sadly) no possibility to reflect that in the language I was using. I mean, person is "she" in Polish, so is character, so I probably was using more feminine-words than translators of other languages, but such a thing as singular they does not exist in Polish. A little explanation - Polish has 3 grammatical genders, feminine, masculine and neuter. So far so good. Just... we use neuter ("to") only to items or small children. It's okay to say "to dziecko płacze" ("this child is crying") or "to krzesło jest wygodne" ("this chair is comfy"), but saying about an adult person "to" would be offensive. In fact, I have heard once or twice people saying about non cis-gendered people "to coś" ("this something") and... oh man, this was truly offensive : < Just, there is no grammatical category to call non-binary people in Polish. In fact, I believe this to be one of reasons why we do not hear about nb people as much as Westerners do. PS. People always claim that "Polish is so expressionist, you do not need so many words from other languages, you are making a rubbish out of our national treasure". Yet the same people are - I am sure of that - not aware of such a thing an "non-binary" and cannot offer any way to call them in "this beautiful, rich, descriptive Polish language". Personally, I see how many things can be said in English and how many words can be joined in a beautiful union in contrast to Polish, which has many restrictions. As a final note - I have no idea how they translated "Oathkeeper" from G.R.R Martin's books. It seems a very simple yet elegant word in English... and the only translation I can think of is "Dotrzymujący przysięgi" which is much longer, two-words construct that's not even half that cool. And, kinda long, sorry ^_^

Hm, modern Polish knows quite a lot of foreign words. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell how much actually (I'm not a linguist), but we have words inspired by German ("dach", "ratusz" from Rathaus etc.) and to a lesser extend French vocabulary (from the age of the French, when they had colonies around the world). Modern Polish also has many words from English, obviously. We got haker, komputer (we just changed the word to express Polish pronunciation), laser etc. Basically words from modern science and technology. However, I do not think that the word "fork" is well-knows besides computing circles (I have used that because there is not really a way to "Polish" the idea, the closest we got is "kopia" (copy) and "modyfikacja" (modification), but... you know, they are not the same concepts. In fact, I was using a lot of English words, even is just as names of things. I do not know if that was not a "cheap" course, but... we got "Internet" and not a Polish equivalent "Międzysieć" (in fact I have seen this word ONLY when explaining what Internet actually means and yes, it is a very awkward word) so I used that logic when keeping what I could not gracefully explain in Polish. EDIT: Oh, two more things, sometimes more about the Polish itself than this particular translation. I do not know if you know books of Sanderson, but in Warbreaker there were beings know as "Returned" who vere "resurrected" people with great powess. This idea - "Returned" - is very basic, but when reading this book in English, I could not stop wondering "how the translator got that idea in Polish"? Maybe they could be called "Przywróceni"? Maybe, but I realized that after thinking and thinking. I mean, such basic concept and such big struggle thinking of a Polish equivalent. Also, it was very hard - and none in the Polish RPG community could help me when asked - how to translate "Reclamationists" from EP into Polish. Polish word "reklamacja" is used when you bought something faulty and you wanna exchange your goodie for not-damaged one. There is not a similar word for talking about "getting back" something, like country or - in this case- Earth. The equivalent is "odzyskać" but the person from this verb would sound "Odzyskiwacz" or "Odzyskiwacze" in plural. Another very awkward word. So we settled with "Reklamatorzy" even if that does not necessarily make sense in Polish. Jet another not-so-complicated word that cannot be properly thought in Polish, I assume? Also, we translated "Factors" as "Faktorzy". This does not sound so bad if we treat it as a proper noun to be translated, but if they got their name because they are merchants... calling an alien race "kupcy" would be somewhat... also weird? As I said, I kinda envy English people, I read a lot of fantasy and RPGs and I see so many cool words created with such ease. Theoretically, you can combine also any Polish words as you please, but the results quite often arent aesthetically pleasant :/

To all you, all the respect to you. I can speak bad American English and your post make me think about my own language differently, and others differently too.