Translation problems (Russian)

I can’t find on Crowdin where exactly it can be fixed, but notification about added identification looks like this now:
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Words in this notification aren’t in correct declination, it should be “X добавил идентификацию к наблюдению Y”. I also added on Crowdin that more correct translation of identification would be “определение” which would not change in a discussed case “X добавил определение к наблюдению Y”.
There’s also a little issue in that each user is referred as male, this could be avided if the word “пользователь” (user) was added before the name of ider.
Same with added comment notification:
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It should be “X добавил комментарий к наблюдению Y”.

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I guess, the issue exists for every language where nouns inflect for cases. And as far as I know, it can’t be fixed just by editing translation on Crowdin.

Added to my weekly report.

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I’m assuming that text means “malisaspring added an identification to an observation by giuliana08” which is this translation… and which is probably impossible to translate properly into every language due to the excessive amount of variables. We have a long-stalled plan to change notifications, and as part of that I would like to replace keys like this with ones more like “%{user} added an identification to an observation by %{by}” which I’m hoping would be easier to translate.

I am not seeing your suggestion at https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#17310

We don’t know the gender of our users, so there’s probably no way to translate this perfectly, but you could suggest a change to this translation. Sounds like you’re suggesting пользователь %{user} добавил %{x} к %{noun} %{by} might be more gender-neutral?

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Yes, but this is more about changing nouns, I know it’s hard to do, but there should be a way to add it for languages that need it, it’s not an often occurance where it’s needed, so maybe it’s possible to make that part custom for notifications?

I added it here now, can’t find that page again, this website is very confusing for me.

Yes, I suggest making a “user” the subject of the sentence, that way yes, verb will be allined with it no matter who the user is, so gender of verb doesn’t need to change.

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It’s possible, it’s just quite difficult to change they way we handle text in our current notifications system, and since we’re planning on changing it all anyway, we’re waiting for that to happen before messing with these translations.

Crowdin takes some getting used to, but I haven’t seen a translation platform that isn’t confusing. Translation is hard. I see now that suggested translation in the Glossary. The Glossary is there to provide guidance to translators, but none of the terms there actually get used in the software. It’s supposed to be a place where people decide how to translate commonly-used terms or jargon like “identification” or “maverick”.

Great! Please suggest that on Crowdin: https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#26207

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I’d be great if it was added in the new system, even if it’ll be not soon!

Going to add that one now!

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My opinion about @littlemouse969’s suggestion…
These terms are close, but in our case the term “идентификация” is more appropriate. I’ll give you some examples:

Our website https://translate.yandex.ru/ gives:

taxon identification=идентификация таксона
and vice versa:
определение таксона=definition of a taxon

And really “определение” is closer in meaning to “definition”.

For our website built on the principles of “citizen science”, we must remember that it is not only site citizens but still are website for scientists.

I will give a few definitions of the term “identification” that I found, they are fully consistent with my understanding:

“Identification is a procedure for recognizing a subject by its identifier. During the registration process, the subject presents its identifier to the information system, which checks its presence in its database (LDAP directory).”

from ru.wikipedia.org:
Идентифика́ция (от лат. identifico «отождествлять»):
Идентификация — установление тождественности неизвестного объекта известному на основании совпадения признаков; распознание.
i.e
Identification (from Lat. identifico “identify”):
Identification — establishing the identity of an unknown object to a known one based on the coincidence of features; recognition.

When it comes to terms, “identification” is more close to russian “отождествление”, by the way, both translators, Google and Yandex, both translators translate it like that.

It is quite possible that the term “определение” was used among Russian-speaking scientists, but I assumed that this was a California site. And the abbreviation ID available in the English version is also very important (if we talk about the brevity of the text).
And I don’t think the word “идентификация” is jarring, it also exists in the Russian-speaking environment, is a full-fledged term and is widely used.

All these years I have been trying to translate interfaces in the same style and verified both the texts of both the website and mobile applications, as much as possible, I don’t think it will be easy to change everything now, but most importantly, I don’t see that it has grounds

It’s a widely used old term in scientific and near-scientific community, has close words like “определитель”-“guide(book)” while “идентификация” is not used in this context at all, harder to pronounce, longer word that takes more space. I don’t see how origins of the website has to do with which word is used in a language that’s not commonly used in California. You can ask many users of the site which word they use in their speech, what people ask you “определите птицу, пожалуйста” or “идентифицируйте птицу, пожалуйста”? Last one is not it. I also don’t see how ID abbreviation can change that as you can’t translate it to Russian and if you’re going to use it it will be in latin letters.

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Why would you assume that?
Many iNatters live in the rest of world.

Now it got even worse?
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Why observation got the male gender suddenly, it’s “it”, not “he”. “ваш наблюдение” sounds amazingly bad. I don’t see why that string can’t get a proper translation that would just be one for all such notifications, also neutral in sex of user who did it, now all users are males for the system.
The old issue is still there too.

If you want to suggest alternative, you can at https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#71071

Will this string be used anywhere else? If it get changed, will it be only for notifications of favs?
To make it sound correct it should be something “пользователь %{user} добавил к фаворитам вашe %{noun}”, but it depends on what the noun is. So if you want me to add I want to be sure.

I added that string.

Also, what is wrong with time for journal posts?
Compare for the same post, where’s the “:”?
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(Утро is in caps and actually exsessive, if it’s 00:00 format you don’t need to say what part of day it is, though for English it might be similar? Let it be there, just not shouting.)

Right now you can only fave observations, so %{user} faved %{noun} by you will become “kueda faved an observation by you”, so %{user} gets replaced by a username like “kueda” and %{noun} gets replaced by “an observation”. The annoying part here is that article / noun combination, which gets controlled by this complicated key, which is currently translated without the article in Russian (not sure why, maybe because in some circumstance the article or the noun need to change based on context that isn’t available there, maybe because the @gender inflection is confusing… it’s a mess).

Anyway, if you translate that as пользователь %{user} добавил к фаворитам вашe %{noun} without making other changes, you should end up with “пользователь kueda добавил к фаворитам вашe наблюдение” if nothing else changes. It’s not really the way we intended it to work because the article isn’t supposed to be included, but I think it should work in this case.

I guess I should really just change the translatable text to %{user} faved an observation by you.

That’s coming from https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#71095, which replaced an even less-translatable construction where translators couldn’t control the position of “by”. The format of the date/time is controlled by https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#24504

Sorry, I don’t quite get the article part as there’re no articles in Russian.
What most nouns in notifications need are changable endings depending on grammatical cases.
image
Should be “добавил индентификацию к наблюдению”, cause first is in accusative case and second is in dative case.
So most cases stem from form having static nouns. Is it realistic to be added or sentences should be rewritten so all nouns are in nominative?

If you wish you can get “пользователь” out, it doesn’t matter as much, I added it to avoid gender confusion as “добавил” is a male form, so it needs a male noun and not all users behind usernames are males.

I suggested a change to make it look like this image
Would that be ok?

It’s looking good, though it should be февраля, not sure if that is changeable?

Unfortunately, it’s not. The same goes for “наблюдение”, “идентификация”, etc.