Rename Users to People

[rudzainy (Rudzainy Rahman)]

@griffin

A bit philosophical, I realize, but hopefully helpful.

Getting positive re-affirmation from a total stranger is always my favourite thing about the internet

@omarfilip

No need to do any hacking as Discourse lends itself to easy customization of any text. Simply find the specific instances of user and users you want to change.

Ah yes. I have considered this for one particular use case – I need other people to be able to start their own communities using my custom Discourse instance (also via Docker, maybe) that already has localisation configured. Those localised configurations would include UX improvements, which includes renaming Users to something like People, among other things. I imagine using the built in text customisation feature would solve this use case. However, my main concern about using this feature is that it doesn’t actually change the word itself, therefore it would not translate properly into other languages, right?

To illustrate my point (values in the table below are direct translations without context):

English (EN)		Malay (MY)		Chinese (ZH)
User		Pengguna		用户
People		Orang		人们

Allow me to add more context to my original post:

My site will cater to a broad audience within a very specific geographical region ie. people from Malaysia. Unfortunately for me, Malaysia contains speakers of 137 living languages. Although I don’t plan to support all 137 languages myself, I am kick starting the effort with Malay translation (as I speak and write both English and Malay natively) and hopefullay I can crowdsource a few other common languages used here in Malaysia. I hope to pave the way for other native speakers in Malaysia to also start the effort to translate the site in their respective mother tongues, and in turn, will help the site to be more accessible to more Malaysians.

@hellekin

This is a small semantic shift but it means a lot, and in languages that can make a difference between users/utilisateurs (what is using the program) and people/usagers (who the program is made to serve), it can very meaningful to make the effort from an intersectional perspective.

I want to make the language tone in my site as pleasing and as inviting as I can. Other than using the admin replace text feature, I can only think of creating alternate locale files. I don’t want to override the default locale files in Discourse, hence I thought of creating an alternate English locale file, which later anyone can base their translations from.

I am approaching this problem from a UX point of view.
Q: How can I help reduce frictions for non-tech savvy people to set up their own online community?
A: Do what Discourse has been doing – pre-configure the software out of the box

Q: How can I help reduce frictions for non-tech savvy people to add custom language to their site?
A: Erm… upload YML file via plugin?