Noun gender affects articles and adjectives

What it is

Grammatical gender agreement means that a noun's grammatical class requires matching forms on articles, adjectives, pronouns, and in some languages participles or verbs. Gender here is a noun class in the target grammar, not a user's social gender. Inanimate nouns such as file, button, or device can be feminine, masculine, or neuter, and that class is not inferred from a real-world property.

Why it happens

When a source language does not overtly mark gender on modifiers, developers may reuse an “adjective + dynamic noun” fragment. In translation, changing the noun can require coordinated changes to article and adjective endings; replacing only the noun creates an agreement error. Gender may also interact with number, case, and animacy, yielding several forms of one modifier. Correct generation needs lexical grammatical features and the full syntactic context, not a guess from the source word's surface form.

Where it stops holding

Languages differ in the number and assignment of gender classes, and the same concept can receive different gender across languages. Names, self-description, and personal pronouns concern identity and cannot be inferred from a dictionary noun's grammatical gender. Neutral rewriting may reduce branching, but it can sound unnatural, alter tone, or still trigger agreement in some languages; target-language writers must evaluate it.

Applying it

• Give translators the complete message containing the dynamic noun and all dependent articles, adjectives, and pronouns; do not concatenate isolated modifiers.
• Store grammatical features as locale-specific lexical metadata; never inherit one global value from the source-language term or a real-world object property.
• Use a message system that can combine gender, number, and case selectors to choose complete translated variants. Generate inflected forms only where the runtime and locale data explicitly support that entity and feature; otherwise prewrite reviewed variants.
• For identity-related copy, use an explicitly supplied title or pronoun; when it is missing, use a target-language-reviewed fallback that does not reveal a hidden guess.
• Enumerate only reachable feature combinations for the locale, test real nouns plus missing/unknown metadata, and have native-language reviewers inspect every agreement target rather than a meaningless Cartesian product.

Related

• Same group: S1.04.1 Languages have different numbers of plural forms · S1.04.3 Singular/plural pairs cannot cover most languages · S1.04.4 Zero quantities need a distinct expression
• Adjacent: S1.05 Translation context and string reuse · T1.08 Inclusive language
• Search terms: grammatical gender · morphological agreement · multi-selector message