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Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the programmer is female is mentioned implicitly - the female version of the “programmer” pronoun is used, the fact is not really stated anywhere.

So it should not to taken as „the shoulders of a novice, female programmer” (in which the fact that she is female is stated explicitly and could be used to further put down the person's programming abilities) but as „the shoulders of a novice programmer”.

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Well, that's the thing about Polish tongue (and many other too). Every single word does have a gender and you can't run away from it - in theory, masculine could represent gender-neutral meaning, but it would be very awkward to say (in Polish) "student" in one sentence and "Agnieszka" (Agnes) in the next one.

I don't find any emphasis on the sex of the person in question in the Polish text. It's only about experience and skill of the poor soul. Translations are hard because cultural context.

Uhm, no, it is not.

Did you miss the "Pani Agnieszko, naprawdę współczujemy, jesteśmy z panią!"("Ms. Agnes, we're really sorry too, we're here for you")(that's a terrible translation, but oh well) part? There's absolutely no ambiguity here.

I meant the “(female)” remarks in the grand-grandparent post.

There is no way to avoid that in the polish language, as someone else pointed out already. Nouns and sometimes even verbs or adjectives have gender, and you need to use either the male form or female form according to the situation

Right, but a translation to English should not include "(female)" unless it's essential information, which it isn't here.

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