Yesterday, I’ve pulled latest changes to discourse and found that the quality of russian translation has decreased significantly. I suppose this has to do with the introduction of translation agency.
Let me start by saying that the quality of translation before was amazing. Discourse was really the only non-Russian software I’ve ever seen to have a language that doesn’t feel like it was translated: it felt like it was written in the Russian in the first place.
Sadly, this has changed.
js.user.summary.title became “Спойлер” (literal transliteration of Spoiler). I’m sorry, what? I can’t even find a reason to make this change, this really seems like a mistake. I don’t recall what it used to be, but “Сводка” is a nice option.
js.badges.title used to be “Награды” (something close to “Awards” and “Rewards”), now it became “Значки” (literal translation of Badges). This is definitely more of a judgement call, and it seemed more appropriate when that judgment call was made by crowd of people, who actually use the software. “Значки” may be the correct literal translation, but it doesn’t convey as much information as “Награды” did. I suppose “Badges” may work for English users because of connotation that this word bears, but in Russian nowadays this word is first and foremost associated with “graphical icon”, then with something worn by politicians/government/military.
js.about.simple_title used to be “О форуме” (meaning “About this forum”) and became “Информация” (literal translation of the word “Information”). The word “Информация” on its own bears 0 meaning. The user is left to ponder “Information about what?” and doesn’t know the answer until he clicks. “О форуме” in contrast, is much more descriptive.
js.review.title used to be “Пре-модерация” (meaning “pre-moderation”) and became “Очередь проверки” (meaning “Queue for Testing/Verification/Validation/Review”) which again bears much less information because the word “проверка” has much broader meaning than “review” when we include connotation and typical use into account. If we want to translate “Review” literally, we’d have to do something like “На рассмотрении” which will be close to “Pending review”, but again, “Pre-moderation” is much richer and bears the connotation of reviewing reports.
js.posts used to be “Сообщения” and became “Записи” leading to absurd things like “запись написана” in profile summary. The question of how to translate “Posts” to Russian is a tough one – there’s no one-to-one mapping. “Сообщения” is probably closer to “Messages” while “Записи” is closer to either “Recording” (yes, can you imagine) or “Note” (more reasonable), and especially nowadays the word “Запись” is used much more often in the former meaning.
“Сообщения” (Messages) may not be ideal but it’s been used pretty much in all forums I’ve ever seen (not just Discourse ones). Facebook translates “posts” as “публикации” (“publications”) which is definitely better than “Записи” but for forums “Сообщения” looks better.
I also notice that they’re just getting started to make this change as some things are still “Сообщения” while others are already “Записи”. This is confusing.
I hope I’m not alone in this sentiment because ideally I’d like @team to reconsider whether they really need the translation agency for Russian language.
The state of “translation business” in Russia is not ideal. Crowdsourced translations may be better than those made by people with diplomas from highly respected universities.
