“1 personne suivie” would mean that this user follows 1 person.
But this contradict the next sentence “mitch1 ne suit personne”, which means that this user does not follow anybody.
If you mean “1 person follows this user”, then the French translation should be “Suivi par 1 personne” (if the user is a man) or “Suivie par 1 personne” (if the user is a woman). But if you don’t want to worry about the gender, then it could be “1 abonné”.
Thanks for your bug report. Since using iNat I noticed a lot of bad and wrong translations in French … it makes the understanding of the database sometimes tricky. Then I switch to English or German (it’s very interesting to know the names of species in several languages), and then, magic, things get clear.
=> Ex1: in the duration of an ID entry (right side of each ID or comment), like here “25d”:
In English: “25d” for 25 days - in French “25d” instead of “25j”
In English: “1mo” for 1 month - in French “1min” meaning “1 minute”!!!
=> Ex2: the status “Casual” of an obs becomes “Occasionel” … which has nothing to do with Leisure, but means an opportunity.
“Casual” is translated into “occasionel” in the expression “casual work”. This is bad translation without understanding what it’s about …
A more ore adequate translations would be:
Research Grade - Statut Recherche or Grade Recherche
Casual - Statut Loisirs or Grade Loisirs
=> Ex3: upper- and lower cases and wrongly used. For ex, in the combobox for language selection, “french” is a name, not an adjective, so the first letter is upper-case.
I did some translations for the German version of seek, (unfortunately i am still unable to download and install seek as there seems no apk available online). Given that i had not installed seek, translation was kind of a blind flight … very little context is given on crowdin.com and it is often fragments of sentences that have to be translated.
You can always suggest better translations at Crowdin. Yes, context is lacking, but if you need it please just ask. I’m always happy to add context on request, and/or add screenshots. In this case, the “Following X People” text is https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-fr#16984. Please provide better translations for the “one” and “other” forms, and leave an “issue” comment noting that the current translation is wrong. I review all such issues at the beginning of each month.
FWIW, If you see that I am listed as the translator, that generally means the translation came to us from Translatewiki, and open source translation service that we were using prior to this Fall. That just happened because Crowdin lists the person who uploads a pre-existing file of translations as the author of those translations.
Regarding lack of context and bad translations generally, translation is hard, and translating software is even harder. iNat was not internationalized form the start, and much of the website was internationalized by contractors (who were, ironically, French Canadians) who weren’t particularly careful about how they internationalized everything. Since then most of our translations have come from Translatewiki, which those of us on staff (and most translators we talked to) found so hard to use that we basically didn’t, so there wasn’t much communications between translators and those of us who could fix problems that required changes to the code. Now that we’re on Crowdin we’re getting A LOT more feedback and I am personally much more conscious about adding text in a way that is easy to translate, which is great and is, I hope, leading to better translations and a more translatable site, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
If you want to help, the best thing to do is to use Crowdin to provide better translations. I realize it can feel like you’re “flying blind,” but right now it’s the best we’re able to offer. I’m personally trying to be as responsive as time allows, so please don’t hesitate to leave comments asking for context.
