Fl4k wrong gender on official german website?

Borderlands 3 FL4K the Beastmaster
#1

Hi , i dont care either way im just curious why " the robot is a he" in the official german website ?

here is a analogical comparison to what it indicates (THE changes depending on gender in the german language so i use “HE” and “SHE” as replacement)
DER Bestienmeister (“HE” Beastmaster)
DIE Bestienmeisterin (“SHE” “Beastmistress”)

The only working way would be if left undefined:
Fl4k Der/Die Bestienmeister/in

The problem is as far as i know “they” is the same as “female or multiple people” SIE/DIE
which makes it even more confusing in this language

Since germany has absolute pronouns (for example the robot is DER Roboter, the car is DAS Auto, The flower ist DIE Blume)
It could be a simple and honest mistake but it should be adressed as people could get banned because of incorrect OFFICIAL sources …

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#2

Does German have a singular gender neutral pronoun? I know some languages don’t, but I know next to nichts about German.

From what you’re saying, I’m guessing not? If so, that doesn’t leave a lot of choice for the translators.

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#3

not officially … if we need to we would write both … like the example i gave … which is why im wondering they didn’t do it in the first place

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#4

I honestly don’t know. Probably either someone wasn’t clear on how to handle it, or they were just translating some of the 2K materials (which aren’t all uniformly correct based on some posts I saw yesterday.)

At least they didn’t just throw it all in to Google Translate…

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#5

Lords below, I literally hate when that happens. While reading up on some of the stuff around the game I found an article where “Gearbox”, yep the company name, was translated as “Getriebe”.

The google translator just did its job blindly and translated everything including names. Proofreading would have been nice, but obviously no one bothered.

Even in the games themselves there are often enough involuntarily funny translation falls. I remember finding a halberd in Diablo II that had the german name “Latte der Dämonen” which can be colloquially translated as “erection of the demons”. Worth a laugh, but for sure not intended that way…

Stimmt. But that would look silly if there always were both options mentioned.

Nah, don’t worry. In English, Gearbox made clear what the pronouns for Fl4k are (they/them) and even there they only ask to use those on the Gearbox forum. Up to now, I haven’t seen a similar statement in German.

If someone wants my guess, in German it is “der Roboter” (the robot) as OP stated correctly, so going by “der” should be alright for the time being. Btw, afaik Gearbox has no german forums, so there is literally nowhere OP could be banned from.

In here, the correct English pronouns are they/them. I hope that helped a little. Btw the banning part is a misinformation from some clickbait websites. No user here has been banned.

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#6

I don’t think companies actually give a damn about being tolerant and supporting lgbtqa+ and everything like that, they want profit and market themselves as pride supporters only where it makes them money. You know how every june lots of companies sell their merchandise with rainbows slapped on them and stores and restaurants have “support pride” banners but if you go to eastern Europe countries like Romania, Ukraine or Russia you won’t find any rainbows anywhere. Really makes you think why, doesn’t it? Do companies just forget about their pride support? Of course not, it just doesn’t create them a positive image in these countries and as such doesn’t bring them profit. Companies are hypocrites.

Same thing with Fl4k. The only countries that have any noticable amount of “gender non-conforming” people are english-speaking countries. So they made Fl4k they/them in English. It’s not like they can’t make Fl4k they/them in other languages, they just don’t have a reason to.

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#7

Or there’s LGBTQ development and writing team members.

That’s actually it.

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#8

Definitely made me laugh. And then there’s the added bonus that ‘latte’ means something totally different in Italian…

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#9

No-one has been banned for misgendering.

#10

its kinda the same in French he/she= il/elle , in english they design design a group of people regardless of the sex, or like fl4k can be used to design something asexualy. In french the plural for pronouns are Ils/elles, we dont have any ‘‘universal’’ pronouns so talking about Fl4k would have to be something like this:

“They look good with their pets”
Il/elle est joli(e) avec ses animaux "

*Edit
I just check the skill tree in french its all male singular pronouns

#11

I remember that pretty much every inanimate object also has a ‘gender’ in French, but doesn’t the language also have neutral case? Admittedly, it has been a very long time since I took French classes, so I might misremember stuff.

#12

We (German speakers) have no fitting neutral pronoun for the word Beastmaster as that is exclusively masculine, but for the individual that is Fl4k we can use “sie”, which is at the same time plural for multiple people as well as gender neutral AND our feminine “the” or “she”.

I guess that this will be an issue anyway if we take the localization into account as there is literally no elegant way to neutrally address a single person as our more polite way to address someone is ALSO “Sie” or the just as pluralistically used “Ihr”, which nowadays is primarily used to address a group of people at once. It’s basically like “you” in the english language in that case. I would permanently use “Ihr” though as it will result in the least unusual sentence structures and is the easiest to integrate naturally without adding too many syllables or restructuring the sentence.

The problem on the german website is not really fixable though. They would need to completely rewrite the description in a way that might even interfere with the given lore as the used gender in the description is that of the word “Roboter” or robot, which is male/masculine. The only albeit it clunky solution I see is to write Fl4k as “robot Individual” as then the german word “Individuum” would then be used for gendering and that is neutral in the sense that “es” or “it” is neutral, gender-non-specific. The only other way would be to take Fl4k as plural, which makes sense lore-wise as they are part of a pack, but that would throw away the gender-neutrality for the sake of linguistics.

#13

To be considerate of human behavioral psychology (as far as we can currently make predictions) I would argue that any form of living being that becomes sentient after any significant interaction with any species or collection of species with sentience would lack individuality in the sense that they have no clue who or what they are and therefore would not know their place. Often, to overcome the fear of being seen as a “fraud,” they’d blend in (read: a temporary “chameleon” personality type) in whatever ways they could observe (clothing at first) until they picked up more sophisticated social mannerisms (slouching, spitting, more masculine tone).

Consider that the amount of sentient species is wholly unknown to us AND we have no clue what this tracker of knowledge has seen, downloaded, etc… and we wind up with a pretty complex lack of any form of individuality as FL4K attempts to figure out how to shift between mental phases of assimilation and accommodation (basically read: outside things make sense compared to things I “know” vs what I “know” and what I am learning do not pair so I must adjust what I “know” - we do this our whole lives lol). FL4K’s entire life has been solely shadows of these concepts and the first part of that code to break is this highly fundamental comfort element.

Gender would have no immediate value to FL4K at this time and individuality is not something they’d care, but exploring the concepts and ideas of individuality ARE (basically, they’d watch all of the individuality traits that make others different from the whole and try to understand HOW to discover that). It could be stated - though I wouldn’t wholly agree - that FL4K chose to become a beastmaster because of the simplicity of the beasts v the more sentient, complex beings in the galaxy. They want companionship and to belong. This is likely the most fundamental driving force they have making gender irrelevant and giving individuality less value than belonging (which, by the way, is a form of individuality that Americans just don’t typically recognize because we’re afraid of our own society lol)

Linguistically, I can’t tell you how that would play out, but FL4K would not only be non-binary, the concept of gender would be of such low consequence that they would likely never have a priority profile for it. How does one express that in language, though? I mean, FL4K’s response to “you a girl or boy robot?” would likely be to walk away not knowing how to answer or just stare at them until a new question was asked lol (this is, of course, with VERY limited observations on the way they respond to dialogue in gameplay I’ve seen, so this is a wild guess, but I feel probabilistically confident about that).

ALL OF THIS IS SPECULATION based on my observations, studies, and research since I was 14 lol that does not mean it’s right or even close it just means I think I might have some clue, but I know I could also be wrong (science is VERY humbling lol)

Wow. I typed waaaay too much for this conversation and it probably didn’t even add to the point lol I’m going to go call a friend cause clearly I need to have some deep nerd chat hahaha

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#14

oops haha… german language is rather complicated with its possessive pronouns and all that jazz.
there’s no good (established) neutral pronoun in german like “they” in english.
There are options of course, but they don’t flow like “they”.

#19

fl4k is a male

#20

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Yawn.

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#21

Closed because 8 months have passed…