German, the language my work and physical life happens in, really has no good and accepted solution for they/them pronouns. There are various attempts at neopronouns that seem to have similar chances of being widely adopted as mastodon has at becoming the replacement for twitter. Their application is not immediately obvious even to me, and I would not like to ask the many colleagues I have at work, some of whom are very fleeting contacts, to use quite experimental language that might just not stand the test of time. So my personal pronoun situation is: They/them in English, avoid using/tolerate "er" for simplicity in German.
They/Them has the advantage of not being neopronouns... those are oldpronouns. If an annoying douche complains, you can always point at Shakespeare or the bible and call them ignorant on top of being shit. Despite that, German schools do not teach about singular-they, and I have not managed to convince any of the teachers I work with to try it, at any age level (11-16). Most Germans will presumably believe that singular-they was invented like 5 years ago or something.
There's a they/them character in Overwatch now. The game is not interesting anymore, the pronouns are. Because this huge corporation has advertising copy that gets professionally translated. So I looked at what they wrote about the new character.
Here are two quotes:
EN: "you have already asked us so many questions about their backstory and personality"
DE: "ihr habt uns schon jede Menge Fragen zu Ventures Hintergrundgeschichte und Persönlichkeit gestellt"
EN: "First, we’re slightly shifting some of their burst damage [...]"
DE: "Erstens wandeln wir etwas vom _ Direktschaden [...]"
They just do the same thing I do. Avoid pronouns altogether. In German, the new hero has no pronouns. Where necessary, they restate (or re-position) the name in the sentence. In cases like the second example sentence, they rephrase it (in this case, from a possessive to a Dativ to not have to say the pronoun). Since Blizzard have never written a sentence like "Venture uses they/them pronouns", the translators were not forced to grapple with such a direct situation.
This works, but I would have really hoped that a giant corporation might have a more interesting solution than I have. By the way, it also has the very obvious effect that the German commenters just throughout call Venture a girl, while the English ones at least have a healthy mix of people who get it and bog-standard regressive jerks who only comment on the pronouns.
