Gender of Cited Authors as a Problem in the English-Arabic Translation of Scholarly Research

The main domain of this study is reference to one specific category of proper nouns, i.e. names of authors cited in scientific or academic textbooks. Suppose a translator of a scholarly work comes across a sentence which starts as follows: 'John (2007) reported …'. How can this be rendered into Arabic, a gender-specific language? While the author's gender does not require any change in verb suffixation in English, the Arabic speaking audience expects the verb to be inflected for gender. In English there is no subject-verb agreement in terms of gender. Thus, one can say 'John reported …' and 'Mary reported … .' However, the case in Arabic is quite different. The verb has always to be inflected for gender. The former two examples naturally translate into Arabic as 'ذكر جون ...' and 'ذكرت ماري ...', respectively. Further, suppose the same translator has come across the following sentence: "Sander (1972) pointed out that the widely quoted ages of acquisition for speech sounds, based on the earlier studies cited in table 3.1, are misleading if taken to reflect acquisition."
On reviewing the reference list of the book where this source was cited, one finds the following information:
Sander, E., "When are speech sounds learned?" Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 37 (1972): 55-63.
As is clear, the readily available bibliographical information about the author's first name does not tell the translator whether Sander is a male or a female. The initial letter E can equally stand for Eric or Emma. Thus the English-Arabic translator has to decide whether to attach a masculine or a feminine suffix to the formal equivalent of the verb 'pointed' in the sentence cited above. Put differently, shall s/he say 'أشار ساندر' or 'أشارت ساندر', respectively? The accuracy of this decision will determine the naturalness, cultural appropriateness and truth-value of the target text. Once, one knows that E stands for Eric, the translation puzzle is resolved successfully.
This short and superficially simple narrative poses, inter alia, the following interrelated questions:
(1) Is it really the case that English-Arabic translations of scholarly works which do not spell out the first name of cited authors suffer from gender-based problems associated with the reporting verbs?
(2) If so, how does the translator, once aware of the scope of the problem, mange to resolve it in the absence of sufficient and self-explanatory information in the reference list where the in-text study is cited?
(3) Is this a simple and straightforward process or a complex multifaceted one?
The study reported here is mainly meant to answer these questions.