Portuguese Portugal Terms Discussion

Dev Translations
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I have started working on completing discourse portuguese-Portugal (pt_PT) language translation.
I created this topic to document the translation and provide a meeting point for discussion.

##You: informal vs formal
You can be translated as “Tu” (informal) or “Você” (formal). Depending on your audience, one might be more appropriate than the other. The current translation uses the formal form.
There is a tendency to avoid using the pronoun, even if using the corresponding conjugations is accepted. I ignored this in cases where the readability is improved by being explicit via the pronoun.

Post, reply, topic and messages

In discourse english terminology, you have topics, to which users can reply to. “post” (noun) is used mostly for what replies create, but also for topics. This makes it difficult to know from the english version of a string alone if it is okay to replace “post” with the portuguese equivalent of “reply”.
“Tópico” is a direct translation of topic, which is widely used, so there’s not much to discuss there.
However, in portuguese, there is no widely used term for “post”.

A direct translation is “publicar”(verb) and “publicação”(noun), which loses the specificity of the english term. “post” in english refers specifically to online publications.
“post” at oxford dictionary
“publicação” at priberam dictionary

Therefore, “publicação” in portuguese is often used for blog pieces / articles, and not for what discourse calls posts / topics.
Example of “publicação” used for blog pieces: http://www.fpae.pt/

Other terms used in portuguese forums are “entrada” (entry), “resposta” (reply).
Some forums use “mensagem” (message), and then use “mensagens privadas”(private messages) for private messages.
Examples of usage in portuguese forums:

There is some repulsion to the use of “poste” (a phonetic equivalent of the noun “post”) or “postar” (the verb form) for portuguese-Portugal, due to ambiguities introduced by this new use and the fact it is a direct appropriation of an english term.
Here’s two blog entries by a linguist, appointed by the Portuguese Government to discuss the portuguese language in cyber matters, about these two:

“o verbo postar de post”
(about “postar” (“post” as verb)

a melhor tradução de post
(about the correct translation of “post”)

I propose using:

  • “publicar” (verb) for the act of uploading either a topic or a post (discourse terminology)
  • “publicação” (noun) for referring to either a topic or a post
  • “resposta” (reply) for referring to posts.
  • “mensagem” (message) for referring to discourse messages.

Although not usually found in forums, “publicar”/“publicação” does not introduce ambiguity as “mensagens” does, does not alienate users as “postar”/“poste” would, and is more precise than “entrada”.
This might or might not work with the way strings are set up.
Currently, the pt_PT (portuguese-Portugal) language at transifex uses “mensagens” for posts and private messages.

The pt_PT translation is at roughly 80% in client.yml, and has had no contributions in ~ 1 year.
Therefore I will start implementing these changes, until anyone raises any objections.

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Nice to see someone picking up portuguese translation!

I had a rough time translating post too. Mensagem looks like the best translation, but it isn’t that great.

Boa sorte!

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Hi!
I’m going to start working on this translation and was wondering if there are any portuguese translators/reviewers out there to continue this discussion?

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I believe our main pt translator is @Paracelsus :portugal:

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Thanks Rafael! I’m asking some friends to help out with this translation and would love to get some insights on the decisions that were made so far about formal vs informal translations, so that we continue the translation work in a coherent way.

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Hi, it’s true, I’ve done some of the latest translations to portuguese (from Portugal). I’ve tried to follow some of the logic used before me, but I acknowledge that sometimes it wasn’t my first option.

For instance, I chose to maintain “usuário” instead of “utilizador” for “user”, being both variants acceptable in pt_PT, although usuário is likely more common in Brazil and utilizador more commonly used in Portugal.

For other things, I’ve tried to get away from the more informal variants we see in Brazil and use just strict portuguese from Portugal (so you won’t see a lot of “você” there :sweat_smile:)

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Thanks for the input Paracelsus!
Could you give me your opinion on these translations?

  1. Sorry, there was an error exporting poll results.
    1. Pedimos desculpa mas ocorreu um erro ao exportar os resultados da sondagem
    2. Desculpe, houve um erro ao exportar os resultados da sondagem
  2. You need to be a member of
    1. Precisa de ser um membro de X para votar
    2. Você precisa ser um membro de X para votar

Another doubt that I have is the translation of the word Staff, I’ve seen it translated to Pessoal but on its own (like in the Staff category) it feels more like Personal, but maybe that’s me :smiley:

And more or less on the same topic of english words that are commonly used in portuguese, I found that this key admin.user_fields.field_types.dropdown which relates to a dropdown menu option was translated to Suspenso.

So my question here is where do we draw a line on which words to keep in english instead of translating to something that isn’t used as much as the original word.

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On the first question, definitely not the second alternative. The word “Desculpe” is usually used like “excuse me” and not really “sorry”. But “pedimos desculpa” is also a bit too verbose, like “we did something wrong we shouldn’t have” :sweat_smile:. The best would be:
“Lamentamos, mas ocorreu um erro ao exportar os resultados da sondagem”

On the other one, the first one that begins with “Precisa” is the best one. The other can actually fit portuguese from Portugal and it isn’t wrong or inadequate in any way, but is just a tiny bit less adequate. :laughing:

On “Staff”… that’s not an easy one. The usual translation is actually “Pessoal” (never “Personal”), that’s the word we use in portuguese culture and society, but it can feel a bit awkward in the Internet forum context. “Pessoal” usually refers to employees running a business in the real world. That’s why many times we tend to use “Equipa” (team), “Equipa de Moderação” (Moderation Team) and similar when relating to virtual stuff and not “Pessoal”, since the word also means “Personal” (as in personal message) and can be confusing once you have it as a title/link somewhere.

On that dropdown key, I’ll have to check the context to understand what it means before I can say more.

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That dropdown menu shows up when setting User Fields as in this post:

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Ok. Instead of “Suspenso” should be better with “Lista Pendente”. :wink:

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I honestly had never realized there was a translation for dropdown but lista pendente sounds so wrong… :sweat_smile:

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I know… I would actually choose “dropdown” without translating at any time.

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Got another one, when setting up the Notifications Schedule in the preferences/notifications page we have an option of configuring a schedule for each day of the week where you’ll receive notifications. If you choose None instead of an hour, you’re effectively saying that on that day no notifications will be sent.

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We could translate that None to Nenhuma, but will it be clear what the effect of this setting is?

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The problem I can see here is if the string None is used in other contexts. Nenhuma is a “female pronoun” that fits the portuguese word notification (also female), but if this word is male then the correct form would be Nenhum. The word Nada doesn’t have this issue, although it can feel a bit more awkward in certain situations.

So, I guess you should use Nenhuma if you are fairly sure this string will only be used along with the notification schedule feature.

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Well, in this case that None is linked to the key js.user.notification_schedule.none so it will only affect this key.
And I think our submitted translations are only used for future suggestions, there’s no automatic translation of similar words right?

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Right. :+1: In that case, Nenhuma is the best option.