[Phpwebsite-developers] French Language, general translation woes !

[Alain F. <al...@va...>]

Hi everyone,


Today I wanted to correct a few mistakes in the french translation of
phpWebSite, but I have stopped quite quickly after I have found a major
problem with the current translation system. The problem I am describing
happens on a lot of different places actually, but to give you an easy to
understand example:

In english, the word "No" can mean:
1. The negative answer to a question, in opposition to 'yes'
2. A quantitative qualifier, like in "there are no news", "there is no one
here"

What seems to have been done with phpWebSite is that the "same" [[No]] was
used for both meanings ! While with this setup, the sentences do make sense
in English, they don't make any sense in french anymore because there are
two (or even many more!) different words to express the two meanings of "no"
in french. For instance, in the admin tool you can read:

Non Category found. (should mean 'No category found')

First of all, there's a missing/wrong translation here, of course. "found"
is not a french word, and it reads "catégorie" in french. But the main
problem is the "non" you see there. NON means "No" as in "No thanks" or "No,
I haven't been there". In this sentence, however, it should be the second
meaning (quantity), as in "None found" --> "Aucune catégorie trouvée", and
not "Non catégorie trouvée".

There are a couple of other places that have the same problem, with
different words / strings. The source of the problem is that the same
english word ('no') can have different meanings, and while in english it's
okay to use the same word for different meanings, you just can't do so in
french (or other languages, for that matter).

What are we going to do about this? A customer of mine is waiting for the
french translation to get ready, and I don't know what I should tell him :)


Anyway, here's what I have corrected/added before stopping:

<-- snip -->
[[I forgot my password]] = [[J'ai oublié mon mot de passe]]

[[Registered user benefits include themes manager, comments configuration,
personal content box on home page, and more]] = [[Les utilisateurs
enregistrés profitent de la gestion des thèmes, de la configuration des
commentaires, de leur boîte de contenu personnelle, et bien plus]]

[[Name of image save]] = [[Nom de l'image sauvegardée]] /* saved =
sauvegardée */

------
Alain Fontaine
Analyst-Programmer
NVision s.à.r.l.