Roundcubemail: Support gender-neutral locales

[baldurmen]

Hi!

Since 1.3.5 I've been maintaining a French gender neutral locale for Roundcube .

I have had a lot of positive feedback from people using and maintaining instances of Roundcube and I would like it to be included in Debian. It seems the easiest way would be to upstream it.

Would it be possible to add a new locale (fr_GN) on Transifex? I'm not sure this is the right place to ask, but I'm don't know where else to :)

I'm already part of the French team.

[alecpl]

I don't see a possibility to add fr_GN on Transifex and we support only localizations from there.

I'm curious, is it a French-specific thing? Couldn't it be fixed in fr_FR or maybe with some en_US changes in core? How much (in percent) of the original localization have you have to modify?

[baldurmen]

I would be really happy if we could make the fr_FR translation gender neutral. If that's what Roundcube as a project decides to do, it would be amazing. Sadly, I'm afraid there would be some pushback since it's a ... contentious ... issue in French.

For example, the translation for username in French, currently nom d'utilisateur (masculine only) would become nom d’utilisatrice ou d’utilisateur (gender neutral). It's significantly longer and some people feel it's not aesthetic.

Folks in the Debian Roundcube team think it would be better to use something like fr_FR@FEM (for féminisée, the French word for Gender Neutral) or fr_FR@GN, a scheme that is supported by GNU gettext. I don't really mind either, nor fr_GN (although it seems that wouldn't be correct).

As for Transifex, their FAQ says, it seems one can ask them to add a new non-standard locale:

If your language isn't in the Languages page and your files appear in a shortened version like ‘xx_YY', then you can help us providing the necessary information in order to add your language into Transifex.

Would it be possible to ask them to see what's their preferred solution for this?

Thanks a lot,

[gagzzz]

Hello,

I also think it would be great to have a gender neutral french translation. My preferred option is to have it in place of the current male-gendered version.
But having it as another translation would be a start.

@baldurmen, "Nom d'utilisateur" can also be "Nom d'utilisateur·ice", which is much shorter and is considered valid in french-speaking Switzerland, with the use of either the dash symbol (-) or the interpunct (·).

If it goes for a new translation branch like fr_FR@, I think should not be FEM for "féminisé", but a reference to "épicène", which means gender neutral language.

Thank you for taking steps on this!

[rlaager]

@baldurmen I used https://www.transifex.com/contact/ to send them the following message. I have an account there to manage translations for Pidgin.

Are you willing to add a language code for French (Gender Neutral), or probably better French (France, Gender Neutral) and French (Canada, Gender Neutral)? I am not a French speaker, but I was advocating for using the @variant syntax for this, with "GN" as the tag ("gender neutral"), which could be used across various languages. So that would be, for example, fr_FR@GN and fr_CA@GN.

Here is some additional discussion:
https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/7065#issuecomment-558360694

which links to my post here:
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-roundcube-maintainers/2019-November/002236.html

[baldurmen]

@baldurmen, "Nom d'utilisateur" can also be "Nom d'utilisateur·ice", which is much shorter and is considered valid in french-speaking Switzerland, with the use of either the dash symbol (-) or the interpunct (·).

It's true for that particular example, but I was more trying to make a point than anything else :) Gender neutral French is also considered "valid French" (whatever that means) by Quebec's Office de la langue française btw :p

I do agree though something more generic like xx_YY@GN like @rlaager proposes would be better than something with "FEM".

[disturbio]

Riseup currently use the French "gender neutral" version as a default for fr_FR (and spanish), no complains about it, but Riseup users wouldn't have problems with it.

The GN version as a default sounds better than an alternative one, but it might be tricky to implement. If it's not possible then the regular fr_FR still should try to use the most GN translated strings as possible so both translations don't divert much.

[micah]

I'd love to see this integrated as well, I think the reasoning above has been already well said, so I wont say more except oui, s'il vous plaît

[alecpl]

I see some technical difficulties:

1. First Transifex needs to support that
2. How web browsers handle that, i.e. do they support such locales?
3. We use the language code with setlocale(), it's not gonna work if the locale does not exist in the system.
4. Too long labels might be a problem.

First is critical, the rest will probably be just a limitation/inconvenience. Point 2. and 3. just means the locale codename should use the "at variant" syntax, so we can match it with system or browser locales.

That being said, I'm not giving this a high prio.

[rlaager]

Transifex replied, and unfortunately, it's not the desired answer:

Regarding your case, I would like to mention that at least for the time being, custom language codes cannot be supported due to technical limitations. We can support only those languages that have officially been recognized by ISO standards.

Please note that Transifex can support languages that adhere to the ISO 639-1 standard of language names and locales. If the language is not covered in 639-1, we might fallback to 639-2 or 639-3. But for this language, no ISO code is available, so I am afraid that we cannot process your request at this point of time. We hope for your understanding.

[baldurmen]

Thanks @rlaager for your efforts :)

@alecpl The only way forward then seems to be to make the default fr_FR locale gender-neutral. I'm happy to work on this if you decide you want to go that way.

If not, I guess this issue can be closed and I'll try to work with the Debian Roundcube Team to add the locale there instead of having it upstreamed.

Cheers!

[gagzzz]

Argl.
Then maybe the official french translation should be gender neutral. But that might need you (roundcube devs) take position on that.
I'd love if it would go this way!

thank you for all the hard work!

[alecpl]

We have much more interesting tickets to work on. This is not gonna happen until we see some code to review.