for this kind of situation, when the translation does not render all the informations from the other sentences (like there the English sentence does not render the gender),
is too not indicate this in the sentence itself, but in comments (after we will create something more specific) the reason is this sentences can be used for data processing, and so we want them as clean as possible :)

http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/02...eba.html#rule8
for more explanation

by the way thanks a lot to contribute so much in Arabic

http://blog.tatoeba.org/2010/02...eba.html#rule9

my previous link point to the wrong rule ^^

sorry, I think I read the post but didn't notice that the rule applied here.

How about I just make it part of the sentence as in "female students" and not "(female) students", would that be acceptable?

(no problem, we don't expect users to know the rules in their first days of contributions, and if new comers just do everything perfectly me and Trang will feel useless ^^)

if the english sentences still sounds natural with "female students' then no problem, but as I'm neither an English native nor an English master (I think my English self-explains :p) I wait for something else to tell if it can be done that way

It appears to be an acceptable usage, since it appears in a respectable site:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-143868172.html

but it still sounds wacky to my ear.

The sentence "Eleven female students recieved the award." (apart from the spelling mistake) does sound natural, but implies that there is a reason for singling out female students in particular.

For example you could have a sentence like ...

Since 1990 this award has been received by 12 male students and 8 female students.

If, on the other hand, it was an girl-only school then you wouldn't say "female students" because you'd already know that they were female.

St Paul's Girls' School has no more than 30 students to a class.
("~ 30 female students to a class" would be odd, because we already know that they are female).

P.S. recieved -> received

Thx paul for clearing this up :) . I feel stupid lol.

I'm so taking your example sentences; they sound so natural, that's with your permission ofc :P.