Rational beings might have come to the conclusion that the arbitrary assignment of gender to things is an aberration in modern languages, and I am one of them. I take as a basis for my observation my mother tongue, French, in which arbitrary genders are assigned to nouns for common things, as in Latin, and for which the authorities have very recently allowed the general use of feminine forms for the names of functions, the words that name the various occupations a person may have. Of course, the diversity that gender adds to the set of nouns and the consequent modifications on the other words in the sentence can provide an additional easy means of identification of terms in the sentence, but this is a principle that is of no help in a good number of circumstances and you have then to rely on other devices; anyway it is not available until you have assimilated a rather voluminous grammatical paraphernalia that goes along with this principle of assignment of genders. One might wonder in the end what is a real advantage of an arbitrary attibution of genders.
When it comes to words for functions, this principle still results in aberration, as two terms are used in parallel for what is but one single function; to compound this illogicality, when a group of persons (of both sexes) having the same function has to be identified by the name of their function—that happens often—there is no term to do so; logically, a third, plural, mixed gender term should be used, but there is none—the use of three terms for a single function seems a very impractical way to deal with this question, and of course, no one even suggests anything such as that, as they are too aware of what is implied—; you are in fact left to your own devices in this case, and you are inclined to use the plural for the masculine term, as in the past, which results in incoherence; the option of using a coordination of the two "functions" is of course a heavy burden ("les professeurs et les professeures"), which at times is not even a possibility: for instance the feminine for "vétérinaire" (veterinarian) cannot be derived by using an inflection, and there is a certain number of words for naming functions that are like that.
Anyone willing to face the facts is bound to recognize the superiority of English in that domain, and on all counts: preservation of a perfect logic, simplicity where no complication is needed, ease and rapidity in the learning process, ease and rapidity in the use of the language, less errors when using it, keeping at a minimum a useless clutter in the mind, thus freeing it for more productive thinking tasks. So foreign speakers of English who think as I do see the English system of providing nouns to things as, in itself and as far as we restrict ourselves to the present considerations, an irreproachable system. In fact if nothing else has opened somone's eyes to these realities in their own language (characterized by arbitrary genders and/or gender-marked), the learning of English should more or less rapidly do so, and they couldn't conceivably fuel a possible stance of detractor of English on the basis of this particular characteristic.
Of course, the difficulty in a translation to English is negligible in comparison to that of translating idioms and cultural references; you can go about it in a routine-like manner, even more so as there is a simplification in the rendering; a set of straightforward grammatical rules is all that is needed. Translation from English is nothing but a problem inherent to the foreign language, and it will be more or less easily solved according to how systematic the language is. In French, for instance, a certain care will be needed in deciding which gender to use, in finding a feminine counterpart for a genderless English word for a function, and in finding which term or expression will do for a mixed gender plural.
A person coming to English from a language where gender is extensively used for nouns is not affected at all as a learner. The learner simply distanciates him/herself from his/her native language and takes to the simple "noun system" of English; why find difficulty where things are kept as simple as they should be?. That is at least how I see this question from my point of view of French student of English. I might add that, personally, my adhesion to this system is such that I am most reluctant at the idea of conforming to the restricted Anglo-saxon usage that consists in conferring to things like ships, engines, car, cats, etc a feminine gender, that being so in the light of the fact that the word "car" is feminine in French.
