Big update to the french translation

Hello all and @rafalp,

I took time to read all the Misago french translation strings in transifex, and made a lot of updates, like :

• typographic quotes (« ») and other french-specific syntaxic changes like non-breaking spaces before every double punctuation signs, where appropriate.
• consistancy updates (eg. imperative verb form everywhere appropriate, to avoid infinitive / imperative forms mix, which seems not consistant to me)
• “signatures” related translation strings fixes ; it was translated to « identifiant », which is clearly false (identifiant is the french for login, signature is a no-trans word).
• a lot of phrasing changes in the admin to make the whole admin interface more understandable (some translations were very litteral and not clear, or did not fit the admin location they were used at).
• tiny updates like missing ending dots in looooots of strings, missing spaces around %(trans_string)s variables… Even a tiny fraction of %(var)s were translated to % (var) s (with spaces) and were not picked in the interface, leading to undefined showing up in some locations, notably when 2 users like a post/reply.
• some gramatical changes, depending on the context where the translation strings are used. For example « start thread » was translated to « démarrer le fil » (literraly "start the thread"), which should be really « démarrer un fil » (eg "start a thread") because « demarrer le fil » is pointless or absurd.

I still have some wonderings about the dates-related strings, because the JS interface seems to mix "[…] since %(date)s" and "[…] on %(date)s" dynamically : at some point the dates likes "sept. 3rd" is replaced on the fly by "3 months ago", which makes the wrong translation string displayed to the user. I need to take more time to review this particular point before doing more transifex updates.

At the current time, the whole french l10n data should have gained a lot of quality and polishing. Sorry to not have joined the transifex team before. these changes could have landed in 0.15 but I was waaaaay to busy before now…

Best regards from a heavy user ;-)

You're welcome. Misago really is a f***ing good piece of software. Having played with a lot of forum apps, I'm so glad I've come across it…

I've decided to promote you to coordinator for French translation, so requests for joining translation team for French will go trough you, and you'll also be able to mark translations as reviewed and protect French translation from possible vandalisms or poor submissions.

Cool ! Thanks. I'll do the review job ASAP.

Our dates and times translations are provided by 3rd party library known as moment.js. Its quite an active and popular os project, so it may be worth bringing it to them ;)

Yep, I know moment.js, I already worked with it in 2014-2015.

But I have a mixed feeling that the problem could lie elsewhere : until the JS is fully loaded, datetimes (and their translation strings) are displayed correctly during a brief moment (correctly means “in a consistant and proper way for the final user”). When the JS loads and turns alsolute datetimes into “fancy” ones (eg “an hour ago”), the unchanged translation string (which was good for integrating/displaying absolute datetimes) produces a weird result to the user.

Do you see what I'm trying to explain ?

I'll investigate this by reviewing the interface here on misago-project.org and my own instance.
I think we can find a solution, I've done it before in my own implementation in english & french (back in 2015…).

IMHO only sure-fire way here is to drop fancy sentences building and revert to good old stats lists where each piece of info is displayed separately

This sounds so eighties ;-)

Give me a little time, I'll look into this ASAP.

YUP. WAS J-O-K-I-N-G :-D

I have nothing against eighties :-D

N.O.T.H.I.N.G against. definitely :-D
About eighties pinnacle, did you watch Kung Fury ?

youtu.be/cW6uvnAn2O8

To be precise: "That's super amazing work."

I was surprised about the title of this thread and I decided to spend some time going through your modifications...
I'm glad you found the . or the french quotes. Finding the shortcut ctrl-h has certainly been a way more difficult task, no doubts. Most of the modification you made are cosmetics, I could count the significant ones on my both hands.

This translation work has required many hours in the late evening on my qwerty keyboard. I recruit people in the association I lead to help me doing this task, people that do no know how to code or have your incommensurate knowledge about forum application. Goal was to give birth to misago in french and have a community testing it. It was not intended to be perfect at once.

Who agreed to use inclusive phrasing? Did you tried to discuss any modification with other people? It is your way of collaborating?
Please do not disrespect other people work by also using an adapted semantic. As you implicitly said, words have significance.

I see 'Big' here only your modesty... but hey, thanks for the effort.

Given the remaining of your post, I'm not sure if this is a real compliment, or a sarcasm. Can you make it clear, please ?

I was surprised about the title of this thread and I decided to spend some time going through your modifications...
I'm glad you found the . or the french quotes. Finding the shortcut ctrl-h has certainly been a way more difficult task, no doubts.

I feel you're trying to minimize or make fun of my work. Could you please make clear again, or stop ?

Control-H is of no help to find the EN sentences with a dot && the FR without them. This could in some conditions be searched with regexes, but transifex doesn't provide such advanced search mechanisms.

Idem, knowing that when talking about double punctuation, sometimes there was no space before, sometimes there was a breaking space. Thus, the need to review every single string, for all double punctuation signs. Also, I needed to search for parenthesis, followed by spaces or capital letters.

I cannot remember every case given the time I spent on the review, but I know about the search features. I also know a little of regular expressions, and they were no-help in this review work.

What I did is really a full review of all translation strings, frontend & admin. This is about 2000 string to individualy read and check against typography, syntax, grammar and meaning, given the context the string is located to.

Most of the modification you made are cosmetics, I could count the significant ones on my both hands.

Even if I had made only cosmetic changes, this is still a quality increase.

Besides, respecting native language typographic rules is not cosmetic to me. I updated more or less 1000 strings at this level.

Not even talking about the meaning changes and the grammatical fixes.

It seems that for some unknown reason(s), you are judging my work quite abruptly. Please, define what is cosmetic and what is not.

This translation work has required many hours in the late evening on my qwerty keyboard.

Are you making anyone other than you responsible for your choice of translating to french with a qwerty keyboard ? Or working on your free time ?

You can remap a keyboard temporarily to any other mapping to get accents and other latin-9 goodies like real hyphens, native quotes, middle dot, etc.

You can also keep a character table software (like gucharmap) handy to copy/paste special chars and accentuated letters easily.

Nobody forces you to make your life harder.

Suffering more or unnecessarily won't bring you more gratitude.

This is a known cognition bias (et en français).

I recruit people in the association I lead to help me doing this task,

What's your point here ? Saying again you worked hard ? Or that a lot of people worked hard ?

I'm not denying that. In any way.

I also worked on improving the french translation.

We all did it.

That's the point of iterative peer reviews.

people that do no know how to code or have your incommensurate knowledge about forum application.

Feels like you're sarcastic again. Please make clear.

Translating “signature” to « identifiant » has nothing to do with experience in forum apps.

For the rest of my supposedly alleged knowledge, it's just simple forums experience as a user, and this, which are both freely accessible on the internet with time and will.

Goal was to give birth to misago in french and have a community testing it.

And I don't have anything against this goal. Again.

Regarding the admin translations, it seems (and I cannot be sure about that, but you can {in,con}firm) people didn't lookup the strings in a running interface. They were translated in a so awkward way. (eg « Vous pouvez […] » when talking about a permission attribute, which should be « L'utilisateur peut […] »).

Please understand: I don't blame people. I don't blame you. I don't even blame.

I don't care about who dit what nor why.

I just explained where, why and what I made updates.

Besides that, I also have a misago instance in production, with 40 users testing it, and I don't see your point.

Testing/reviewing is not exclusive to your non-profit organization.

Every misago user is potentially a tester/contributor if he⋅she minds reporting bugs or issues on this very forum.

It was not intended to be perfect at once.

Neither is mine. And I never said that the previous translations were “bad”.

Seems like you are ascribing motives on me.

I just did a review pass, which means :

• it's a review, thus a quite long, manual, ant work. Thus my “big” word in the title, because I read every string, and updated many hundreds of them.

• it's a pass, thus hopefully an increase at the quality level. I already saw after the 0.16 upgrade that I made some mistakes, or some strings are still incorrectly translated, but in another way.

I will review again, and propose some contextual changes to @rafalp (eg. the use of a "context" word in gettext calls).

This will take time, and this is exactly why we need more than one translator and more than one language to translate. There are specialties in each language that an english developer cannot know.

Who agreed to use inclusive phrasing?

No one. Taking my blame on this. I was not thinking of doing any bad. Do you mind ?

Do you disagree having a less sexist interface ? in 2018 ?

My forum has to be as neutral as possible, and inclusive sentences are meant for that. I think every app should be less sexist/racist, not assuming cis-white-straight-etc. This has done enough harm.

If you have anything against, I'll be glad to hear any argument.

Did you tried to discuss any modification with other people? It is your way of collaborating?

I. Did. A. FULL. Review.

I contributed.

Did I need to ask for your permission before fixing translations ?

Again, a review is meant to increase quality, by having more eyes and other point of view on translation strings, and making adaptations and fixes, not changing the whole thing deeply.

If you want to discuss, I'm available. I can PM you my mail / skype / whatever. We can also meet on freenode.

Please do not disrespect other people work by also using an adapted semantic.

I don't understand this sentence : “by also using an adapted semantic”. What do you mean ?

Do you really think I would enter as a newcomer and disrespect other people work ? Again, this is making assumptions on my intentions, or misinterpretation of my post. I think I never wrote anything like this anywhere.

Or please, pinpoint them to me, I will apologize and rephrase if you find anything offensing.

As you implicitly said, words have significance.

Please stop making me say things “implicitely”, that I didn't say or write. You're making assumptions on my intentions, again, probably based on your personnal opinion or feelings, I don't know, and this is not acceptable here.

I see 'Big' here only your modesty... but hey, thanks for the effort.

Sarcasm, again. You're beiing rude.

Please.

Would you mind keeping cool and discussing ?

regards,

What do you expect with such verboseness? There is no points in dismembering my opinion other than undermining its global meaning and persuading yourself. Talking about bias ...

Please do not mistake me,

Its less the modifications you made than how you did it, imposing it without consultation, and in a presumptuous way.

Discussing, always when possible. Keeping cool would depends of your next actions.

   "Alone we go faster, together we go further"

What do you expect with such verboseness? There is no points in dismembering my opinion other than undermining its global meaning and persuading yourself. Talking about bias ...

@Palimpseste I expected at least answers and clarity, as I explicitely asked for them. You gave me none.

There is nothing I need to persuade myself, these are facts: you ignored what I wrote and what I asked.

Ignoring people's explicit questions is not what I call a good relationship start.

Please do not mistake me,

How ? You stay deeply confuse. You are implying, expecting something that's still totally invisible after two messages.

Its less the modifications you made than how you did it, imposing it without consultation, and in a presumptuous way.

Judgement, again. And contradiction with yourself. Previously you wrote my work was shit without any argument, now you write my work is OK, but my ways are shit.

You are beiing rude and offensing.

Who are you to judge me like that ?

Please, again: breathe, calm down, talk about your emotions if you need it, use Nonviolent Communication as a medium to explicit your respect of others, and come discuss with arguments, questions, not opinions and abrupt closed sentences.

If you want or need something, ask for it.
If you mean something, say it.

Discussing, always when possible. Keeping cool would depends of your next actions.

Seriously ? You must be kiding. Even my boss doesn't talk to me like that.

It seems you're not willing to discuss at all; you're just waiting for a good reason to shoot me like a sniper if I do something that doesn't fit you, without even defining what you want or need. And you already shooted at me twice.

This is not exactly the kind of behavior I expect from someone I would like to work with.

"Alone we go faster, together we go further"

Please stop with your cis-white-male-tech-capitalist falsely attributed african wisdom, a rickety cultural reappropriation.

Quotes are not an argument. You're no way into logic and rational discussion. Besides, this one seems so cool and positive, but it's really so confusing.

From the project point of view, I increased the quality of the current french translation, which is exactly the way a bunch of projects already work, which in turn matches perfectly your quote: I joined the translators, polished the work already done by previous people, which made Misago go further. Exactly what you seem to mean. Team work. Iterations.

If you mean anything other, please stop beating around the bush. Come with a first precise argument or a first question, instead of beiing condescendant. In two messages you just spitted on everything I did and wrote.

Curiously enough, you are doing exactly what you blame me about, except I didn't ignore nor insult anyone, but you do.

@rafalp, sorry for beiing so angry, it's too much for me.

I'll continue fixing the translations (the work I started is not finished) and making the interface more consistant on the french side, asking for questions or adjustments in the interface if relevant.

Having a consistant / polished and nonsexist/neutral interface is not an option for me.

Sorry if this appears offensing or presomptuous in any way, but I do have some level of requirements on this side, and I'm willing to bring it into the main project.

If that's not possible because @Palimpseste and I cannot work together, I will fork the project and maintain my own set of translations locally, merging new versions manually.

Best regards,

If I may, @Karmak23 speaks about gender-neutral language. Instead of assuming one's gender, it sort of concatenates both. As an example, Policeman-women (or with a dot, or a middot (which is the best option to me), ... ). The goal is to restore some balance against the important masculinization of the french language that have been operated over the last, maybe three, centuries (Therefore fight against its consequences). One major drawback I see is that it may become difficult to read if used extensively and also add length ('Users' in the top bar could become 'Utilisateur-trice-s'). Even if I do believe that this is not sufficient and that we should deeper refound our language, starting by removing the rule 'male win over female' and create neutral nouns, I am not necessarily opposed to its use in Misago.

But if we do, we should do it everywhere, not only for the past forms. Also, as it's an intense debate in France and likely will remain, we should have asked all french active users/translators about it.

Seeking for some agreement,

French is a language that 'inflate' quite rapidely. We should have a reflection on this matter.