Handling of different word variants for persons in Czech - eg. autor/autorka

[vactomas]

Hi,

I have a first very crude draft of czech .ltx file. During testing, I ran into an issue. In Czech there are different variants of certain words, which depend on the target person. This means that e.g. we have two words for author - autor (a man) and autorka (a woman).

In order to correctly adhere to ČSN ISO 690:2022, we have to solve this. There might be a way to deal with this, but I don't know how. Perhaps a change in .ltx file?

I would appreciate your thoughts on this issue.

[wg030]

In Czech there are different variants of certain words, which depend on the target person. This means that e.g. we have two words for author - autor (a man) and autorka (a woman).

Well, that's actually the same for my mother tongue (German). We have "Autor" for a male author and "Autorin" for a femal author for example.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this issue.

Well my thoughts on this issue are as follows: First of all I checked the official ISO 690:2021 norm (English version) for any hints on how to deal with that, but I haven't found any. As far as I know there is no official German translation yet, so I could not check if there was maybe some official addional rules on that. Hence my first conclusion was that gendering might not explicitlly required by the latest ISO 690 standard. I mean is there an official Czech translation of the ISO 690:2021 standard? It might give us some mor clues of whether or not this is explicitlly required. I see that you posted a link to a document in #4, but that document rather looks like a summary of the ISO standard so that if the authors of this summary write about this issue, it cannot be clear if this is their own interpretation or standard or if that's an official requirement, can it?

But on the other hand even if this was not explicitlly required, as of now I can't see why differentiating here would violate the official standard either. Having said this, gendering might quite likely be considered a valid interpretation of the norm even if the standard does not tell you anything about how to deal with that. Since the technically implementation in biblatex is supposed to make use of thegender attribute by creating entries like

@book{musterfrau,
  author = {Mia Musterfrau},
  authortype = {author},
  gender = {sf},
  % [...]
}

anyone using this style could decide on his or her own if they wanted to be gender specific or if they preferred to go with the generic masculine. I think it would probably not be too difficult to implement that altough I would need to look for a biblatex style that has done that first so that I can understand the details of how to do it. That's because unfortunatley the standard biblatex style does not allow for gendering (at least a quick test showed no effect on the gender attribute) and therefore cannot be used as a model for implementation. Moreover there is potentially one downside to an implementation. It will likely increase the effort of creating new language a lot since instead of

author = {{Autor}{Autor}},
authors = {{Autoren}{Autoren},

we would need something like

authorsf = {{Autorin}{Autorin}},
authorsm = {{Autor}{Autor},
authorsn = {{Autor}{Autor}},
authorpf = {{Autorinnen}{Autorinnen}},
authorpm = {{Autoren}{Autoren},
authorpn = {{Autoren}{Autoren}},
authorpp = {{Autorinnen und Autoren}{Autorinnen und Autoren},

Nevertheless, all in all I would tend to realize that feature at some point in the future, but it would not be my highest priority at the moment because anyone who wants to gender can already do so manually by using something like

@book{musterfrau,
  author = {Mia Musterfrau},
  authortype = {Autorin},
  % [...]
}

[michal-h21]

I've checked the Czech translation of the norm, and I cannot find anything about gendered author roles. In the interpretation, they use gendered roles in examples. However, it is possible to use short roles, which should fix that issue, as they are the same in both grammatical genders: editor/editorka -> ed.

[vactomas]

Is there a way to access the norm itself? I only managed to find the interpretation, where they use the gendered variants.

[michal-h21]

@vactomas we have it in the library. The problem with norms is that they are available only in-house. You cannot borrow them at home. I can study it freely only because I literally sit three meters from the shelf where it is stored.

[vactomas]

I figured that'd be the case. That's quite unfortunate as I can only work with the interpretation.

[wg030]

I've checked the Czech translation of the norm, and I cannot find anything about gendered author roles.

So my initial conjecutre that this is not explicitlly stated by the norm seems to be true.

In the interpretation, they use gendered roles in examples. However, it is possible to use short roles, which should fix that issue, as they are the same in both grammatical genders: editor/editorka -> ed.

Yes, that would be a simple and elegant solution. However some people might not want abbreviated expressions or they might have to follow strict rules of their insititution which does not allow them to do so.