I started using the French translation recently for a native French forum, and I found some of the translated strings confusing at best. Some are gendered, which looks bad when addressed to a non-male person – this is probably a recurrent issue in other gendered languages.
In the confusing department, I stumbled upon:
English
French
username
Pseudo
name
Nom d’utilisateur
As you can see, this is exactly the reverse in any other software! A username is usually translated by nom d’utilisateur, whereas the name would be translated as nom. I wonder how we can coordinate these translations and ensure we don’t step on each other’s toes (which did happen in the past).
A friend of mine suggested to replace “You earned <badge>” with “You discovered <badge>” since it sounds more game-like. See Translated strings cannot be customized.
I would be happy to make the Discourse experience in French as smooth as it is in English, but right now I feel that I must stick to the English version if I want to understand what’s going on… Thoughts?
I would think @j.jaffeux and @zogstrip, who are native French speakers on our team, would let us know if there were serious problems with our French translation?
It’s been a long while since I’ve used Discourse in enough to be able to catch these issues.
I’ve set both meta & dev in and will keep it for a week to see if there’s anything baaaad.
@hellekin I don’t think we need a group per locale, and I’m fine with having a topic dedicated to French translations where people are free to speak in either English or French.
As for the username/name translation, I think “Nom d’utilisateur” for “name” is definitely wrong.
We could either go with Pseudo/Nom or Nom d’utilisateur/Nom. “Pseudo” is nice since it’s completely different from “Nom,” but I don’t know if Mme Michoux knows what a “Pseudo” is.
Regarding the badges, I prefer “obtenu” over “découvert.”
Same I use it mostly in English lately, I used to have meta in French and our internal board in English. Guess it changed with some testing one day, I should do this again.
I have an incentive to use French interface, although I usually prefer English with computers, so I’ll keep an eye on the French translations and review the strings on Transifex. But I’d really prefer that we agree among translators to use a style…
I personally think that ‘Nom d’utilisateur’ would be misleading if used as username, even if it is the strictly literal translation. I don’t have a problem with pseudo/nom d’utilisateur, but I could go with pseudo/Nom if it really matters. Pseudo is better, closer to ‘login’ : Mme Michoux certainly wouldn’t understand why she can’t have ‘Mme Michoux’ as her nom d’utilisateur, given that it is her name.
None of my French-speaking users have ever really complained about translations, so I suspect that once people have found their way around they don’t really read labels much anyway.
As for gender, you can do it if you want to, it just makes stuff less readable to me.
We have found something which is not baaaad but pretty confusing. On the groups page, in English, you can filter by “My Groups” ( js.groups.index.my_groups) or “Groups I own” (js.groups.index.owner_groups).
In French both of these are called “Mes groupes”.
I don’t have a better solution to suggest (non-native speaker) but hopefully someone else does?
I don’t mean to be nasty here, or even to say that there is a serious issue. But it is important that the Discourse team knows where it stands when it comes to French translations (and maybe others).
French translations are far from being at the level of standard commercial software products. Half of it sounds like automatic translation, the other half sounds like translation by young techies. If a forum targets young techies, they probably won’t notice (they won’t read the lengthy texts anyway - which are the worst). But older and more literate users will.
As an experiment, I’ve just read the Confidentiality page: I’ve found 10 serious typos and felt like half of the text should be reformulated, being weird, word for word translation.
Again, maybe that’s not a real issue. But it’s better to know the truth.
Yes, all the translations, with the exception of the English locales, are from the community. That means the quality varies a lot.
But one of the best thing about Discourse being open source is that you can contribute and make the project better. Every little contribution is appreciated.
Hmm… I still find that confusing. A regular user might think this is a (or several) group(s) for owners, rather than a list of groups of which they themselves are an owner. Right?
@zogstrip, you’re right in principle, but in practice it is not easy. The Discourse team is knowledgeable in coding and responsible for integrating proposed code in Discourse. But what about translations? Who validates them and why? I don’t think there’ is an easy solution to this.
Anyway, I second @hellekin’s proposal: a French group could collectively review French translations globally and try to get something more consistent and of higher quality.
I guess it’s pretty easy to have “too long” translations in French. It’s more difficult to have good very short ones.
Suggestions: “Groups I’m a member of”, “Groups I’m a member”, “My groups (member)”.
We might not like “joined groups” too much, but in short form, it remains good and fully understandable. It’s not easy to do as well in such a short space. Or should we just use “My groups” for this? (That’s actually what’s done in English.)
“Managed Groups” has the potential advantage of being shorter than “administered” (otherwise “controlled”, “supervised”, “created”? Are we necessarily the creator? I don’t think so, but it remains understandable).
If we want to keep the notion of owner/owner (that seems quite weak to me): “Groups I own”, “Groups (owner)”, “Groups (owner)” [“Groups held or possessed”, but I don’t like that too much].
Like @gh_irina, I find that hard to understand. Something like just “joined” would seem OK. It’s already more difficult for the second one (“administered” alone could, for example, make one wonder what an “administered group” is, as if it were a particular type of group. With “managed”, it still works). For the other three lines, it would indeed work well.
Doesn’t seem that complicated to me. Translations can be discussed and at one point, a consensus should be reached (if not, maybe some kind of vote can be done). Then, the Discourse Team would have the “last say” by implementing them or not (ideally they can participate in the discussions and/or say why ultimately a proposed translation isn’t good to implement according to them)
“Groups” is a good example of a difficult translation. One could use “affiliations,” which would be more accurate but ambiguous. The solution proposed by @zogstrip seems like a good compromise, although the notion of “group owner” appears to convey a universe that is not necessarily desired: I would prefer to speak of a “group moderator” rather than evoking an imagery of slavery or liberalism; here the concept of responsibility takes precedence over that of ownership. “Responsible” seems more appropriate than “owner.”
enough to be able to catch these issues.
