On the home page of a Discourse installation configured in Dutch, users are confronted with two sidebar buttons with the exact same text. Namely “Mijn berichten” (My posts) and “Mijn berichten” (My messages). This is, of course, quite confusing.
How I understand it, a post is one contribution to a topic, and a message is one contribution to a private conversation. I have two suggestions to distinguish the two:
“Posts” are renamed to “Posts”, and “Messages” stay “Berichten”
“Posts” stay “Berichten”, and “Messages” are renamed to “Privéberichten” or “Persoonlijke berichten”
Personally, I would have a preference to option 1. While ‘post’ is not a native Dutch word, it has become a widely used word in the age of social media. A ‘bericht’ has a more personal connotation, to me at least, which does not fit nicely with the concept of a public post. I am of course open to other suggestions!
I am open to contributing on translate.discourse.org myself, but seeing as this might be a more fundamental discussion and would require changing many strings, I wanted to open this topic first.
Indeed. Could the latter be changed to something like “my personal messages”? PMs are intentionally called personal instead of private messages because that highlights a little more that these aren’t private. Admins can always visit your inbox and read them.
I’m not sure how consistently this has been implemented in the Dutch translation so far. I get the impression that the translation is mixed. The term is the glossary seems to be “persoonlijk bericht”, but still some translations use “privébericht” instead
Most of the texts are already approved, so in order for your proposal to bring about change, this status would have to be revoked or your suggestion would have to be approved. The proofreading of the Dutch translation is handled by the translation agency. I don’t think they read along on Meta, so maybe you start with a comment on one or both of the texts in Crowdin that link to this discussion?
I know it’s also possible to replace a term in all translations, but there can be unintended side effects. For example, in German “Gemeinschaft” was replaced by “Community,” but this didn’t work well because the adjective “gemeinschaftlich” also became “communitylich” which doesn’t exist. This could be a problem for replacing “Berichten” too.
