In all romance languages (originating from Latin - Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese) the pronouns and adjectives are written/said according to the gender, case and number of the noun they belong to. These launguages also have a neutral gender, with in singular form is masculine, and in plural form is feminine. Guess what, the pronouns and adjectives change their form accordingly.

I have some experience in dealing with multi-language user interface, and I have noticed that english native speakers have hard time sometimes to figure out these gender-dependent forms. For example, I have seen strings built like this: "New" + lcObjectType, where lcObjectType was one of these words: "table", "trigger", "database" and so on. Well... in Romanian, New translates to "Nou" if the noun is masculine, and to "Noua" if the noun is feminine. The above rule is true for Spanish too, but I saw that English speakers who know Spanish know to avoid the problem. Concatenating strings in multilanguage user interface is a bad bad bad bad idea. Bottom line - never assume anything, and write the strings entirely, even you're duplicating 95% percent of the English content.

Getting back to your example, (which had catched my attention, because is very subtle), well... I can't tell about Spanish (maybe a Spanish guy will jump in), but in Romanian the word "someone" doesn't really have a gender. I have put it in feminine and in masculine form - they both sound bad. A good translation of your example would be "when someone wants to cross the road should look in both ways". That's it - he/she are missing. Your example is a particular case, but most of the time, the "he/she" pronoun is chosen accordingly to the gender of the noun. If you'd say "when a person wants to cross the road, she should look in both ways".

>"When someone wants to cross the road, he should look both ways." We don't really mean 'he'. Of course, we don't really mean 'she' either. In that case, a gender neutral word might be nice so we didn't have to convolute it by saying 'he/she' or 'the person'. We have 'one', but that always sounds a little pompous somehow.