Gender-neutral language in German – what will changing texts mean in terms of cost?

Some companies are currently assessing whether to shift to not using the standard generic masculine for their content any more. And German in particular has come up with a lot of different approaches for rendering gender-neutral language. Six are listed below:

• Schrägstrich (like in Lehrer/innen)
• Binnen-I (like in LehrerInnen)
• Gender-Sternchen (like in Lehrer*innen)
• Gender-Doppelpunkt (like in Lehrer:innen)
• Gender-Gap (like in Lehrer_innen)
• Mediopunkt (like in Lehrer·innen)

Now before you start adapting your style guides and changing all your existing documents, you should also think about what this means in terms of workload and cost. Because there remains the possibility of only changing content “a little” instead of “all over”.

Let me show you with the help of some example words, e.g. the German words for teacher [Lehrer (m)/Lehrerin (f)], pupil [Schüler (m)/Schülerin (f)], teaching staff [Lehrkräfte (pl)], learners [Lernende (pl)].

English:

teacher/teachers (neither specifically designating a female/male person)

teaching staff

German:

Lehrer (m)/Lehrer (mpl) or

Lehrerin (f)/Lehrerinnen (fpl) or

Lehrer (generic masculine for plural) or

Lehrkräfte (a term comprising both sexes and beyond and considered a neutral term)

German using the so-called “Gender-Doppelpunkt”:

Lehrer:in (noun in the singular, designating both a male or a female teacher)

Lehrer:innen (noun in the plural, designating both male and female teachers)

alternative: Lehrkräfte (encompassing all sexes, comparable to a term such as “the teaching staff”)

(Drawback: there is not always such a word, but if there is, it could and should be used as it makes the usage of a suffix such as :in or :innen unnecessary and improves readability)

Impact for the adaptation of existing content:

• Checking existing texts, translating new content etc. will require extra time.
  The challenge: It is not possible to search for terms that require changing.
  You must read through the whole text, looking for nouns, possibly exchanging them to avoid redundancies, and you may also need to adapt adjectives, relative pronouns, etc.
  When you have old and new content, expect an extra proofreading round to take place as it is difficult to concentrate on translating/reviewing translations on the one hand plus do this kind of checking/editing alongside.
• Typical spellcheckers and QA checks will fail with words such as “Lehrer:innen” as they do not recognize the words. They will consider the colon in the middle as a typo.
• If you skip perfect matches/100% matches during some of your CAT tool processes, you will have to check all of the old segments (again).
• Should MT(PE) be a topic for you, there will be additional challenges. A machine will not be able to make a decision whether “Lehrer:innen” or “Lehrkräfte” is the better solution in a particular instance. Moreover, it may not even come up with this alternative.
• The target audience needs to be taken into account – kids, foreign-language learners, immigrants and people with dyslexia may not be able to cope well with the specific typography of the above-mentioned gender-neutral language. Thus you may want to consider an approach to apply only changes that will not impair reading too much, i.e. either by naming both sexes (as in “Liebe Schüler und Schülerinnen”) or opting for neuter terms (such as “Lehrkräfte” and “Personal”) wherever possible, but not applying gender-neutral language in every single phrase.

The choice is yours!

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