Today, for the first time, I noticed that the Russian localization of Quassel used gender-specific language in its IRC log views. It was jarring to see the nickname of a known female user followed by the masculine form of the verb “changed”. I’ve made a patch for the .ts file in git and sent it upstream, but I noticed that Gajim was also an offender at least with the “Away” status — not sure about Pidgin, I’ll need to check it.

Now, Russian is a highly gender-specific language — verbs in past tense singular are always gender-specific, for instance. Translators need to dance around these issues. Yes, it’s hard, but it pays off.

I’m not on a political correctness crusade, I just have an issue with the very concept of “default gender” that most Russians seem to accept without question. In these days of rising gender awareness in FOSS (if the recent posts on Planet Ubuntu are anything to go by), presuming that online users are male by default is simply unacceptable. I’d like to see users recognize the ways choice of language affects human interaction and report questionable uses, and upstreams be cooperative in fixing their localized UIs correspondingly.