French DLC comic misgendering the lamb !

[terse glen]

Hi! Was reading the DLC comic in french with queer friends and we noticed the Lamb goes by he/him there?
In French, we mostly use 'iel' for they. Them is 'ellui'.

This is a sensitive subject in french, a lot of (cishet) people saying the singular they (iel) is an abomination to the language and should be banned from school. There was even a law trying to be passed to do so. Yet it is the pronoun mostly used by non binary people to talk about themselves and is very important for the queer community.

That's why I think it's really important to put a iel when we're talking about the Lamb in the comics. I know a lot of people reading it may even never have heard of this pronoun and this will be their first encounter with non binary people.

Come to think of it... The Lamb is going by he/him in the French translation of the game, isn't they? Shamura too?

Can you let it be known by the translation team, please? As someone NB going by they/them and being told nearly everyday non binary people don't exist, this feel really important to me.

Edit: Scroll down to read in details while using he/him for them in french as neutral isn't working.

[silver agate]

I do agree that this is a glitch, but honestly I think there are higher priorities to the game at the moment. But this should be fixed.

[wide seal]

I have the same glitch

[ashen wyvern]

Text changes should mostly be a matter of changing some words in strings following searches; that's much simpler than functional bug and mechanics changes

[silver agate]

True but mac rn is broken like this

[ashen wyvern]

Let me rephrase: Changing some words in strings that you can find with a simple IDE search is dramatically easier to do than rewriting UI and gameplay code. I disagree that some typo corrections shouldn't be quickly tackled because of there being more complicated bugs in the game.

[silver agate]

I don’t think the bug mac is having is the hardest thing to fix. I think it’s just a Sprite mixup or something

[ashen wyvern]

Its more complicated existence is irrelevant to whether and when misgendering-related typos should be super quickly fixed

[wide seal]

Well, a lot of other bugs are reported, you are not the center of the world. What right do you have to tell non-binary representation is or isn't important ?

[ashen wyvern]

I can say as a software engineer that doing a find and replace-all on some quotation mark-surrounded values is super fast to do in comparison to fixing a system compatibility or UI display bug

[silver agate]

Well, I think it is important but the bug I’m experiencing is flashing lights and probably could actually cause seizures maybe.

[wide seal]

Just do as everyone else here, let developpers see what to do in priority.

[silver agate]

Mhm, I am. I didn’t say this was not important I just said something simple.

[ashen wyvern]

The only potential complication to typo fixes would be if there wasn't already a system that separated sentences into multiple lines based on width but that seems to already be in the game so I'm certain that making string replacements is faster to implement than GUI bug fixes

[silver agate]

Most likely also when they fix the bugs they will fix most of them at once.

[wide seal]

Well just go judge all other "less important" topics and tell them the same, everyone is gona react the same : you are not the one to judge what developpers have to do... But right here, you are just saying that misgender isn't important and I think that's not okay.

[silver agate]

I wasn’t judging bro you kinda made it like that. I’m going to stop talking here now because there’s no point to fight at all.

[ashen wyvern]

"but I think there are higher priorities to the game at the moment"

That's the part that I take issue with.

Especially when one is string replacement and the other is programmatic bugs

[silver agate]

Why are you even fighting about it?

[wide seal]

You did judge that this problem wasn't a priority

[silver agate]

It is but I just want to play the game.

[wide seal]

It's not by comming to us acting like a transphobic that you are going to play faster.

[silver agate]

Wait, why are you calling me transphobic?

[wide seal]

I said "acting like"

[silver agate]

Ah, alrighty

Oops

[ashen wyvern]

Then post a separate thread if you haven't already, but it's kind of insensitive to tell non-binary people that their issue should take less priority even though they aren't even closely comparable in terms of how long it takes to address them in code

[ashen wyvern]

I wasn't trying to fight anyhow; you posted your development prioritization thing before anyone else replied in the thread

[vale lava]

Ok? This isnt your bug report post. Youre literally going to someone elses post and saying “erm mine is more important actually”. Like… nobody asked?

[terse glen]

(Just adding a screen of the comic using 'he/him' on the lamb to illustrate my saying. Feel free to delete it if it goes against copyright. Also, spoilers ahead.)

[silver agate]

Sorry. I didn’t mean to be offensive like that. I’ll get out of this chat now for ya.

[terse glen]

(This message is more for the translation team)

I'm adding another point, cause in french, nouns of animals (cat, dog, lamb) are male or female. ("Un chat" "un agneau" "une abeille") So someone could answer that using the male setting to talk about a lamb is neutral. (I have 2 years university degree in english-french translation (DEUG anglais) + a 3 year university degree in french (Licence Lettres Modernes) so I'm pretty sure of what I'm talking about and qualified to say so.)

Why we should not use he/him for the Lamb in french even if 'a lamb' is using the male setting:

• The Lamb with a majuscule L isn't a lamb. They are humanised and 'Lamb' is taking the role of a first name more than just a lamb from the specie. You have something working like that with 'un dieu' meaning a god between others and 'Dieu' meaning the God. Dieu here is a pronom personnel with its own setting.
• In english, we usually don't use he/him to talk about an animal but 'it'. When we use he or she or they, it implies a degree of humanisation (usually a beloved pet). If we use she/her in english to talk about a cat, we translate it by she/her as well. ("My cat ? /She/ has eaten a tuna." "Ma chatte ? /Elle/ a mangé un thon.") Here, they/them has the same function. ("The Lamb ? /They/ have gone crusading." "L'Agneau ? /Iel/ est parti.e en croisade.")

I can also add that agneau (lamb) is usually used for males and we have the word agnelle for female baby sheeps. So basically the right way to call them should be L'Agneau.elle (using the inclusive) but I can understand that agnelle isn't a well known word in french. Yet, I can't point enough how important it is to use they/them. I guess the choice was made to make them male in the french translation so you would not complicated your work with the inclusive or the neutral of the following adjectives but doing so, you're loosing all the queer representation and I do guess and hope representation is dear to the game creators.

Also it seems quite dumb to discuss why the use of the inclusive or of the neutral is necessary and isn't just an option for a ✨non binary character✨. The inclusive is thriving in the queer community and we mostly use it to talk about non binary people or about someone when we don't know their pronouns. C'est comme traduire une phrase en langage familier quand elle est déjà en langage familier dans la langue originelle et est dite par un personnage qui parle familièrement. Utiliser le soutenu ferait très bizarre. De même, ici, ne pas utiliser de neutre ou d'inclusif pour parler d'un personnage LGBTQIA+ non-binaire n'est pas approprié et est une erreur de traduction dommageable.

[terse glen]

Moreover and in addition, the Guide de Grammaire Neutre et Inclusif de Divergenres suggest this:

So you have the choice between l'Agneau.elle, l'Agneaus/L'Agneausse, l'Agnelleau.
I really like the last. But I know using the neutral for the word lamb instead of the male word is a more difficult battle to lead that I may not win. Maybe just focus on the iel instead of that nasty he/him.

(And please don't answer that the inclusive or the neutral isn't grammatically correct. The singular they is also and in the same way controversed in english and yet they put it in the game. Langage is meant to be of use, not to restrain us. I already have proven above why despite of it being controversed by conservatives, there's not other choice for the translation.)

Update: I'm sorry if I'm spamming. (Autism goes hard here, I have no idea what's requested to be said.)
But it hovers over my brain and weights on it to know that my (french) friend group thought that The Lamb was male since the launch of the game due to the game translation being off from the start. Of course, Shamura has less lines about them and me being a fanperson of them, it was easier for my friends to know. But The Lamb, for playing the game in french, I also got confused and convinced they were a male. We're like 7 doing a cosplay group of COTL, I'm cosplaying The Lamb and none of us thought they weren't a male. And I know for sure that even if a small detail like using iel in the comic is now added as a sorry bandaid, the french fandom will lash out. People will be in tears for "the woke lobby ruining their favorite game" "COTL turning suddenly woke". It's only thanks to the discord I had in the back of my mind the reassurance there were some representation, all of this due to some translation choice despite my langage having the tools to include queer people in the game.
And I think that's awful and that's sad. Really sad. And maybe that doesn't really matter but with queer people being used as political tools and off-ed in my country because of what they are by extremists... Once again, I do feel erased.

[ashen wyvern]

As an English speaker, I usually try to refer to animals with they personally; I never really liked the idea of referring to animals like they're inanimate objects

Many people still use it for animals and I personally hope that's something that we gradually move away from

[terse glen]

I do hope so as well. We need more empathy for the animals if we want to survive as a society.
I didn't know that, thanks for telling me. I'll use it (*the word they)too from now on.

Sorry. I'll use it, the word "they". It's 4AM here I'm kinda dumb when I don't sleep

(Have a random picture of a cat having the whole double sized bed for herself while I'm sitting in a corner of it, triggering on non binary people erasure from a cool game I like)

[wide seal]

https://tenor.com/view/cult-of-the-lamb-narinder-gif-9088596454889958332

[glossy ether]

Hey all! Lets calm down here, every bug report is important! And either way, if anything is changed, they will all be in the same patch going out together. No guarantees (as I personally have no knowledge of the French language, will need the localisation team to look into it) I have passed this onto them to look into 🙂

[terse glen]

Thank you!
Sorry if it looks like I've overreacted. I'm not angry, just very autistic with social difficulties that leads me to overexplain. 😅
I'm here to help if the localisation team have any question regarding the use of neutral and inclusive in the french queer community. I'm not an expert, thought so I may not have the answer. But I wanna help the best I can.