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.
enough to be able to catch these issues.
