What it is
Institutions have written down how their texts handle gender: which job titles, which pronouns, what to do where the person is not identified. The guidance is recent and revised often enough that a rule and its edition must be quoted together.
What the system leaves open differs sharply between languages, and that is the difficulty. English marks gender in few places, mainly pronouns and a handful of nouns. Dutch, German, French and Spanish carry it through the noun, so a job title is masculine or feminine before anyone decides anything.
The structures section owns the parameter; this record owns the community's choice inside it. Job titles are also the class governed by capitals-in-institutions-and-offices, which rules their case where this rules which is written.
Where the expectation comes from
Three bodies were opened and each binds its own texts, which is the House tier exactly. Nothing codified was found: no orthography authority rules gendered wording, and this section has looked at four.
- The English Style Guide gained a section on inclusive language in February 2019 and clarified it in October 2019 to avoid word choices implying that one gender is the norm. Two later changes matter more: in May 2021 "the use of 'he or she' is no longer recommended as a gender-neutral alternative", and in July 2022 "themself" joined the pronouns used of non-binary people.
- The Stijlgids Nederlands of the same Directorate-General states at 9.1 that gender-neutral language is preferred and gender-specific nouns and pronouns avoided. It adds: "In het Nederlands zijn veel functiebenamingen in grammaticaal opzicht mannelijk. De meeste ervan worden in de praktijk echter als neutraal beschouwd en worden ook voor vrouwen gebruikt". Words marking the holder's sex are still replaced, bewindsman by bewindspersoon and sportman by sporter. Among its strategies for avoiding a gendered pronoun it lists, at (d), "gebruik 'hij of zij'".
- The United Nations Guidelines address United Nations staff and claim no reach beyond them, applying to "any type of communication". They ask authors to tell translators the gender of a person referred to, calling that crucial for Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish.
Put the first two side by side and the record has its finding, which is not the one a quick reading gives. On the lexical question the departments agree: both remove the word marking the holder's sex, chairman on one side and bewindsman on the other. They diverge on the pronoun, the English guide having withdrawn "he or she" in 2021 with singular they to fall back on while the Dutch guide still lists "hij of zij", Dutch having no equivalent. That is not a house choice left open but two gender systems showing through guidance pursuing one policy, and under GB-2 the two kinds of divergence call for opposite responses: one is a gap in the guidance, the other is the guidance working. A reviser who meets one is owed the test, not the verdict.
None of this measures what a readership expects, binds a translator working for anyone else, or says what to do when source and target communities differ.
Consequences for translation
What follows turns on whose guide is in force and what its language offers.
- Inside a commissioning body's work a deviation is a finding; outside it, a preference. Naming the guide and its edition is part of it.
- The adjustment is graded. Two compliant renderings of one gendered source can distribute the neutrality differently, across plural, second person, article or omission, and no checker ticks it off.
- Do not carry a device across the pair. Removing "hij of zij" because English withdrew "he or she" applies an English solution to a language that has no substitute.
- A translation into a heavily gendered language may need information the source never carried, and its absence is a query, not a licence to guess.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: This does not apply where a passenger misses a connecting flight they have a reservation for.
- Target: Dit geldt niet wanneer een passagier een aansluitende vlucht mist waarvoor hij of zij heeft gereserveerd.
- Comment: The Stijlgids's own illustration of strategy (d) at 9.1. The expectation is that department's, and its English counterpart in the same institution has withdrawn the equivalent paired pronoun. A translator applying the English rule to Dutch would look for a singular they Dutch does not have.
NL>EN
- Source: de voorzitter [mevrouw Von der Leyen] betuigde haar instemming
- Target: the President expressed her agreement
- Comment: The guide's own example of the case where the person is identified and the gendered pronoun is correct. Voorzitter is grammatically masculine and read as neutral, so Dutch marks the gender on the pronoun alone; English marks nothing on the noun and its pronoun does the same work for another reason. The systems differ, the outputs coincide, and reasoning from the output misleads.
References
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Section 15 (Inclusive language) is listed in the contents at page 71 and lies beyond the file's extraction limit; the dated changes are quoted from the guide's own What's New in the Style Guide companion, which records what was changed, and no page of section 15 is cited.
- Stijlgids Nederlands. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, fifth edition May 2025, last amended 21 October 2025. Chapter 9 (Inclusief en genderneutraal taalgebruik), section 9.1 (Genderneutraal taalgebruik).
- United Nations. Guidelines for gender-inclusive language in English, read at un.org, which carries a copyright line of 2018 and no edition statement. The contrast drawn there with Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish is the guidance's own framing rather than a measured claim.