Feminism as a condition
I’ve been translating Quassel into Russian for some time now. That’s in spite of my despise to all the localized software. I just thought it would be good to popularize a project that is almost, but not quite, entirely like the best IRC client ever. I don’t know if the translation or a news post on one of the major Russian Linux users community sites somehow helped it, but now I see more and more Russian IRC users using Quassel.
Even though I don’t use Quassel anymore, I still feel it is my responsibility to continue updating the translation. Recently, I’ve had a free moment and, as usual, pulled from Quassel repository and rebased my russian branch. And what do you think? It did not rebase cleanly, so git had to do its merge magic! Somebody touched my translation! Dey tuk mah job! I’ve read git log for the translation file and saw a commit whose author, and I quote, “Fixed gender-specific language and some punctuation mistakes in the Russian translation”. Punctuation mistakes were there, I admit it, but what the bloody Mary means “gender-specific language”?
Turns out, I have been a chauvinist and women discriminator for the better part of my life, because I translated past tense verbs into past tense verbs. True, in Russian they must have one of the three genders, and I used masculine (as did xchat’s translators, kvirc’s translators, and tons of software before this point). The phrases like “Mary joined #channel”, where grammatically Mary is supposed to have balls, is of course somewhat stupid. But that’s not because I, or anyone else in the world hate women! That’s because “Mary is joining #channel” looks way more stupid! And that’s what was introduced by aforementioned commit.
Somehow it feels related to other Debian guys (and gals, yeah) issues. They just don’t have anything better to do.
My translation is always available at Github, branch russian. It’s with masculine verbs in past tense. If you feel offended by it, just merge it with master, I won’t come to your house and slaughter you. Honestly.
