Re:Google+ can now hide your gender "in response to user fee...
by ugh on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @11:29AM
(#2759257)
It looks like they will go the messy route in German. (More likely they already have. I’m not even sure whether they were ever using gender appropriate language in the first place.)
Here is how that looks: „Fügen Sie hier eine kleine Beschreibung über sich ein, damit andere wissen, dass sie die/den richtige/n Name erwischt haben.“ (“Put a little about yourself here so people know they've found the correct Name.”)
See those slashes at the end? They just write both and separate the two variants with slashes. An ugly and common solution, I’m not aware of any better solutions in German, though.
In Chinese, while he and she is pronounced the same way ("ta"), the writing is different for he 他 and she 她. That's the only difficult part I could think of in Chinese, there are no changing word endings, etc.
In German is should be more difficult, because there is no "their" like in English to replace her and his.