[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Broken grammatical gender syntax in translated interface strings (Issue #6341)

[Minh Nguyễn]

1ec5 created an issue (openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#6341)

I just went through Translatewiki.net fixing a number of [syntax errors](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/4eaf4404ad5629f0f5341433720cabd63518035a/config/locales/ja.yml#L2485-L2486) from [missing braces](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/4eaf4404ad5629f0f5341433720cabd63518035a/config/locales/fi.yml#L3029-L3030) in the `{{PLURAL|…}}` syntax that were probably introduced by translators accepting machine translation suggestions without reading them closely.

Along the way, I noticed that some translators have gotten the idea that OSM messages there support full MediaWiki wikitext syntax, since [the `{{PLURAL|…}}` syntax for CLDR-based projects](https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Plural#Plural_in_CLDR) looks a lot like the `{{PLURAL:…}}` magic word in wikitext. In particular, they’re adding [`{{GENDER:…}}`](https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender) to switch between grammatical genders where the language apparently makes a distinction.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/4eaf4404ad5629f0f5341433720cabd63518035a/config/locales/hsb.yml#L1488-L1489 https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/4eaf4404ad5629f0f5341433720cabd63518035a/config/locales/sq.yml#L1142

The Greek localization also used this keyword in e-mail subject lines until b45eb03a6c026ec0f19415100c7bb14c4c53e6cb.

In theory, we could support varying interface messages by grammatical gender by adding a user preference. That’s how MediaWiki supports the `{{GENDER:…}}` magic word throughout its interface. But storing this information would raise privacy concerns, especially if a user can get e-mail notifications that address another user by their choice of grammatical gender. A preference seems like overkill. It seems like we have a relatively small number of potentially gender-specific messages, though it’s hard to tell if some languages are just working around the problem.

Unless anyone feels strongly otherwise, I’m thinking we could just replace the `{{GENDER:…}}` syntax with a more literal “foo/bar” format, similar to the workaround that the Greek translators are using.

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