Mastodon: French translation should be usual and common French

[trebmuh]

It looks like the French translation of Mastodon is managed by people who are wanting to promote/enforce the "gender-neutral" thing. Despite some people may feel hurt by this, the "gender neutral" form isn't an official one. At all.

I understand here that some people are wanting to promote/enforce this way of practicing the language for "the good" but it's definitely not a right way of doing so. At the top of that, Mastodon deserve to be readable/usuable by any French reader, not only the "I'm OK with gender-neutral reading" French readers. And the reverse is right too, any French reader deserves to be able to use Mastodon in French, not only the "I'm OK with gender-neutral reading".

My proposition is: make the basic French translation, the common and usual one (ie: no gender-neutral), and allow people who want it to have a "gender-neutral" version if they want to (like it exists for some software with English, English-American, English-Australian, Simple-English,...).

A bit of background here: #9405 which has avoided a bunch of fixes for the French translation, which is bad in my opinion, because those were relevant.

[Cassolotl]

The proportion of queer, trans and nonbinary people is much higher on Mastodon. By making "official" French the default you'd be making a lot of people feel alienated and unwelcome - people who have been heavily involved in building community on Mastodon and who have been contributing to code since the early days, and who have a harder time finding comfortable and welcoming spaces anywhere in the world, including online.

Plus, the fediverse in general is pretty counter-cultural, and "official" French is one of the cultures folks are countering, presumably?

[Miaourt]

Also, there is lot of officials papers that are written in "inclusive French" now, instead of putting the feminine in parenthesis.
While I would alway by okay in reducing the use of median points when possible (ugly necessary hack of the language I would say).

I honestly don't see improvements in using, say, "abonné(e)s" instead of "abonné•e•s".

[ThibG]

As far as I know, the French translation is indeed, and has always been “managed” by people who want to promote gender-neutral language, and I do not think that is an issue.

I think the current state of the translation manages to be especially concise and readable while being consistently gender-neutral.

It is possible that some part of the translation could be changed to replace some uses of the “·e” form by simpler gender-neutral nouns or adjectives. I think such changes would be welcome, but giving up on gender-neutral language would not be.

As for having multiple variants of the French translation, I do not think this would be worthwhile, and, should that happen anyway, I see no reason not to have the gender-neutral variant be the default.

[0xa]

• That a handful of purists refuse to consider it the official form is not relevant to whether or not we should use it.
• I don't think it's actually any less accessible than a "no gender-neutral" version, that's mostly your own bias and you shouldn't believe it's a general rule until properly proven.
• Keeping the old behavior as the default would expose people less to the neutral form, by requiring an explicit action to select it, which will not help getting them used to it. It's like saying if we want to be considered in the language used we have to go change an obscure setting. Why, when you can make it neutral and move on.

[nighteyesfool]

Just to add on to this, if we never expose people to more inclusive forms of writing, how can you expect the norm to evolve?

[goofy-mdn]

Hi trebmuh
I would suggest to reverse your proposition

make the basic _gender-neutral_ French translation, and
allow people who want it to have a gender-neutral _official_ version if they want to

and as things are you are perfectly allowed to propose academic French in your instance, it is just a bunch of files to browse and edit here and there.
Fediverse is a new experience, I feel this is a pretty good occasion to push slowly the norm to evolve. I don’t feel it would hurt anyone so cruelly not to find strict standard French in this environment.

[nclm]

I am too very strongly against switching to a non-inclusive variant of French.

What we can certainly do, is improve the way the inclusiveness is done, notably by replacing some of the “⋅e” by épicène words, as suggested earlier by ThibG. For instance in #8401, I made a trial of using “membre” instead “utilisateur⋅rice” and “pseudonyme” instead of “nom d’utilisateur⋅rice”. Those were examples, but along these lines we can certainly reduce a little the number of middle dots. The locale should certainly read nicely, but it doesn’t intrinsically have to do with inclusive writing.

In the worst case if there’s a feeling that some people might not accept it, we can indeed have an optional variant French translation, something like “Français (classique)” or “Français (traditionel)”, as goofy-mdn is suggesting. (@Gargron: is it possible for a locale to be a variant of another, so that when strings are missing it fallbacks to the other locale, rather than to English?). I’m not convinced it is needed, but if others are like trebmuh and prefer it, that can be a workaround.

[trebmuh]

Well... I didn't know that gender-neutral writing form was that much of an ideology for some. Crazyness.

Just answering one for all:

I don't think it's actually any less accessible than a "no gender-neutral" version, that's mostly your own bias and you shouldn't believe it's a general rule until properly proven.

... French dictionaries, French languages for the last few centuries, ...etc but "_there is no more blind person that the one who doesn't want to see_".

Honestly I don't care about what people are doing with their mucous membrane, or how do they feel themselves in their minds, and I feel here that using the so-called "gender-neutral" language for the own need of a few bunch of people is really not welcoming for all the others who are the vast majority of the world. That makes Mastodon, a self-centered community. Too bad, I thought it was open.

Have a nice fake-revolution people, see you on earth one day maybe.

[AirDur]

, French languages for the last few centuries, ...etc but "_there is no more blind person that the one who doesn't want to see_".

The new Académie française's new dictionnary will have 28 000 more words than the last one, released on 1935.
For the last few centuries, french evolved a lot, and very quickly. It's not an ideology, a "fake-revolution" (what the hell is it ?), it's a fact.
Source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_l%27Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#Neuvi%C3%A8me_%C3%A9dition

You should check the concept of Modern Language. French isn't Latin. It's not a dead language.

[trebmuh]

Thank you all for taking the time to talk to me in a way which is that much respectful of me and the suggestion I was making here. This undoubtedly tends to be proving that this is such an open community. My un-luck is probably just about thinking of other people that the ones in this "_community_".

[AirDur]

What you did is a fallacy of composition. You're taking a behavior from a part of Mastodon (in fact, it's probably max 4 peoples) for the behavior of all Mastodon. It's a common sophism. (https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/88/Fallacy-of-Composition)

Moreover, talking about respect - while i didn't insult, aggress or harass you - is a passive-aggressive method to illegitimate my argument. I hope you'll reconsider this and you'll think about what I said, and not how I said.

Have a good day.