A Finnish translation is incorrect on site although correct in Crowdin

Bug Reports
1

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc): any

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://inaturalist.laji.fi/home

Screenshots of what you are seeing: havaintoa

Description of problem: In the inaturalistweb Crowdin project, the Finnish translation of “Observations” is correctly “Havainnot”. However, on the Finnish live site, the string is incorrectly “Havaintoa” in the navigation tabs (screenshot) and some other places.

I first brought this up in Crowdin but @kueda suggested to report the issue here.

1 Like
2

There’re several strings “Observations”. You need to check all of them. Some are still translated as “Havaintoa”. Search for “Havaintoa” to find what is translated like this:
https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#q=Havaintoa

3

Thanks, the screenshot helps. @exonie’s advice is good in general. That specific case is https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#18898, which was translated by @mikkohei13.

4

The screenshot on https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#18898 shows that this string is used in (at least) two different contexts, which should be translated differently in Finnish:

Title should be “Havainnot” and the green box should be “havaintoa”. Current translation is made for the green box.

I guess there are also other similar cases - Finnish is so different from english and related languages :) To be on the safe side, all the different places / contexts where a word is used, it should be on Crowdin as an independent string. (But that would increase translation work for all those languages that do not need this, I guess?)

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1 Like
5

I think a string for “observations” used as standalone and one for combination with numbers should fix this issue.
There’s already another string for “Observations” that is used only as standalone:
https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#18172

So I suggest the title and tab use this string, instead of the current one and this should fix it. But that needs to be changed in the website code. While the other string should be explicitly described as being used with numbers; perhaps it should be given a variable with the number, too.

1 Like
6

@mikkohei13, if I understand you correctly, it sounds like https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#18898 should be changed to “Havainnot” and the green box on inaturalist.org/observations is poorly-globalized and should be replaced with a properly pluralized form.

7

Yes, this would solve this case.

Here is an example of what I mean about having a separately translatable string for each case / context where a word is used. To have a “perfect” translation, Finnish would need at least these translations for “observation”:

  • havainto = nominative singular
  • havainnot = nominative plural (e.g. the title)
  • havaintoa = partitive singular (e.g. “10 observations”, or “someone commented X’s observation”)
  • havaintoasi = partitive singular + possessive suffix (e.g. “someone commented your observation”)
  • havaintosi = nominative singular + possessive suffix (e.g. “someone identified your observation”)

Currently the translation goes around most of these kinds of issues in different ways. For example:

User A added comment to an observation by user B.

is translated as:

Comment to user A from user B (observation)

…so it only uses nominative singular forms. Somewhat clumsy, but it works.

(As a side note, since translating software to Finnish is often difficult, resulting in clumsy translations, significant number of Finns tend to use English versions of apps. I don’t have objective numbers about this though.)

8

Ok, the green box at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations is now “HAVAINTOA.” You’ll need to change the translation / approval at https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fi#18898 to change it in the title on that page and on the dashboard as depicted in the screenshot in the original post.