Flavours of French

  • steph · Member ·

    I’ve been loosely involved in localization effort for many years now, and as a Swiss French speaker, I’m usually pretty happy with the .org translation, but much more disappointed in the wp.com one. There are different flavours of French, and translations in the French wp.com often get overridden with words like “blogue” and “courriel” which are not those we use here (and are sometimes even not understandable for part of the population).

    What would it take to be able to “branch off” fr-ch, fr-qc, fr-be etc from fr-fr?

    I spent a lot of time going through the old translation interface over the last years to correct mistakes etc, but I guess that as I was only loosely involved it ended up being very frustrating (I didn’t have any contact with the other French speakers with whom I had “vocabulary disagreements”).

    What would you suggest to resolve this situation? If there is a fr-ch translation branched off fr-fr, I’d be happy to be in charge of it.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • zefontainhas · Member ·

    Et bien, pas de problème du tout :)

    We support language variations (as in pt_PT, pt_BR, es_ES, es_AR, es_VE, es_MX) already.

    I’ll add fr_CH for you, is that ok?

  • steph · Member ·

    Sounds nice… and easy! How will the relationship to fr_FR work out? I see two potential problems and not sure how to work around them:

    – if we “branch” only once from fr_FR, when there are updates to fr_FR (new strings, etc) then fr_CH will need to duplicate the work (or is there a way to say “copy empty strings over from fr_FR”?)

    – if (as I think I saw it explained) for each major update the French strings are overridden by the community translations, any strings diverging from fr_FR will need to be “re-corrected” each time

    How will it work? Am I right to be worried about these issues?

    Thanks :-)

  • zefontainhas · Member ·

    It’s really up to you. What we can do is preload fr_CH with fr_FR’s strings so that you only have to adapt instead of beginning from square one.

    Also, even though major .org languages overwrite .com, they always overwrite only the same language. From the moment fr_CH exists, it is, for all purposes, another language.

    Does it help?

  • zefontainhas · Member ·

    fr_CH is now active, at http://translate.wordpress.com/projects/wpcom/fr-ch/default .

    You (steph) were added as a validator and we preloaded the locale with the existing (standard) French translations.

    Thanks and sorry for the delay.

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