Grammatical gender
Noun classes that make nearby words change form, which is why an adjective, article, or pronoun cannot always be translated by itself.
What it is
Grammatical gender sorts nouns into classes that control the forms of nearby articles, adjectives, pronouns, and sometimes verbs. French 'message' is masculine, so 'a new message' is 'un nouveau message'. The class belongs to the noun and does not imply that the object has a human gender.
Plan for it whenever a translated sentence inserts a noun, role, or person and the surrounding words may need to agree. Give translators the full sentence and the grammatical properties of placeholders. If wording genuinely depends on a known category, keep the alternatives inside one ICU MessageFormat select message.
Gotcha: grammatical gender and a person's gender are different data. Do not infer either from a name, photo, or locale, and always provide an other branch that works when no category is known. Languages also do not share one universal masculine-feminine system: German has three genders, Swahili sorts nouns into more than a dozen classes with matching prefixes, and Hungarian and Turkish have no grammatical gender at all.
Ask AI for it
Refactor every gender-sensitive translation into one ICU MessageFormat message using {gender, select, ...} branches with an explicit other case. Keep the complete sentence inside every branch so translators can change articles, adjectives, pronouns, and word order together. Add translator notes describing each placeholder's noun and grammatical role. Never infer gender from a name, avatar, honorific, or locale; use the neutral other wording whenever the product has no explicit value.