Guildines provided to linguists/translators for the creation of the gender definition lexicons.

The gender definition lexicon consists of pairs of corresponding entries – one for male gendered forms and one for female gendered forms. In general, for every male gendered form, there should be one or more female gendered forms, and for every female gendered form there should be one or more male gendered form. It should be noted, however, that there may be some rare cases, where there are entries that do not have a opposite gender equivalent form in some languages.

A gender definition entry is a concept that can only ever be attributed to a person of a specific gender; they represent words that are associated with gender by definition. They are unambiguous – they only ever have one possible semantic interpretation. They are primarily nouns or pronouns that refer to a person of a specific gender (e.g. he/she/zie, actor/actress, father/mother) but may occasionally include adjectives/adverbs/verbs (e.g. masculine / feminine, manly/womanly). There may also be a third gendered form for certain languages, where the concept can be used in relation to non-binary/genderfluid people; but the cases of these is expected to be rare.

Goal: The tasks is to provide a complete list of male, female and non-binary/genderfluid gender (where/if relevant) definition words for your language, using the English list and concept descriptions as your starting point.

• Each row corresponds to a gendered form of a particular concept (m=masculine, f=feminine, n=neutral/non-binary). If the language has a neural/non-binary word form for the concept, you may add a row to the sheet. If you are inserting a new row, please ensure that the row has the same ‘PairID’ value as corresponding m/f rows.
• Provide masculine singular, plural and feminine singular, plural translations.
• Provide variants and/or synonyms in the “synonyms or variants” columns as a comma separated list. Include singular forms in “synonyms or variants sing” column and corresponding plural forms in “synonyms or variants plural” column.
• Highlight and provide comments for any ambiguous words (see ‘Considerations’ sections for more details’)

• Variants & Synonyms:
  • All variants of the word are to be included - singular, plural, adverbial/adjectival variants as well as case variants (nominative, genitive etc.).
  • Include any words that may be market-specific under the “synonyms or variants column” e.g. for Spanish you should include words that are used in European, Mexican and Latin-American Spanish. The differences are most commonly present in more colloquial terms.
  • Include any common colloquial forms under the ‘synonyms or variants’ list e.g. in Spanish ‘chico’ and ‘chiqui’ could be included as synonyms for ‘hombre’.
  • For adjectives and verbs that are indicated as ‘m’ or ‘f’ in English, this indicates gender-association e.g. fraternal/paternal (m), maternal (f), make sure to include all variants, including all masculine & feminine forms on the same row. In some languages, adjectives like fraternal will have masculine and feminine variants; as fraternal is indicated as a male gender definition word form (‘m), both masculine and feminine variants should be included on the ‘male’ gendered row.
• Retaining Pairings:
  • Ensure that the PairID is retained for related concepts.
  • Where possible, for every concept there should be both an entry for male and female (singular & plural) forms. However, it is understood that not every concept may have an equivalent male, female, non-binary form. In those cases you should insert “n/a” (not applicable) into the field
• Multi-word expressions:
  • The word forms should not contain any phrases or multi-word expressions e.g. ‘software developer’ for any language. For the example of ‘(m) software engineer’ the word to be included on the list should be the male form of the word ‘engineer’ in the language, and the female form of the word ‘engineer’ on the equivalent row. Hyphenated words are acceptable e.g. step-father.
• Polysemous and Ambiguous words:
  • All words must be unambiguous, in terms of their common definitions (i.e. some words may have multiple meanings, but the majority of those may be not very commonly used – in this cases the ambiguity is not considered an issue). Common ambiguous or polysemous words often can have more than one part of speech e.g. noun, verb, adjective. Any words that may be ambiguous/polysemic should be highlighted in yellow and a comment should be included to explain the reasons why the word is highlighted.
    • e.g. ‘host’ (masculine) / ‘hostess’ (feminine) could be considered as gender definition words, however ‘host’ is ambiguous ([noun] a person who receives guest, [noun] a great number of items, [noun] a place that accommodates an event, [verb] to accommodate an event, [verb] a computer that provides a service). The definitions in red do not refer to a male-identifying person, therefore both ‘host’ and ‘hostess’ (and their variants) should be highlighted.
    • E.g. ‘lei’ in Italian, may refer to either she or you (formal), therefore it should be highlighted.
  • Be wary of pronouns in languages that have grammatical gender (gender agreement between words as a function of the grammar of the language), as they may be used to refer to either an animate or inanimate object (i.e. a person/animal or a thing). Therefore, they can be considered to be ambiguous and should be highlighted in the sheet. The exception is any pronoun that can only ever be used in reference to a person.