Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The masculine is the neutral gender of the French language, and the question of inclusive writing is increasingly being asked. Some of our clients would like to use an epicene language on their Decidim instance, but the subject is very much discussed in France.
Describe the solution you'd like
So we are wondering what we should do to implement it:
- Adapt the french locale to make it as neutral as possible, and integrate the midpoint
- add a locale in decidim for French in inclusive writing
- make a translation overload in an osp-app.
Funded by
Might be funded by the city of Lausanne.
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11 comments
Conversation with Pierre Mesure
In the Swedish version of Decidim, we already made some choices towards inclusive writing. It's less of a debate here though.
From a technical perspective, it might be interesting to try with another locale in Crowdin? (like Swiss French since Lausanne is asking)
Then you can switch between French French and Swiss French and the various cities have the choice. Hopefully, most will choose inclusive and it can be merged with French French at some point.
I'm not sure how much extra work that would mean to maintain these two translations on Crowdin though. Maybe not worth it.
Inclusive writing is not really an issue with Finnish but they asked very long time ago from Helsinki to create another Finnish locale in Crowdin for "plain Finnish" which is a simplified version of the language easier to understand for example for people with some disabilities (dyslexia, language impairment, ADHD, for instance). I believe you have something similar for Swedish as well (klarspråk?).
The problem had some similarities, as writing everything in "plain Finnish" would probably seem odd to many people but on the other hand, the "normal Finnish" might be difficult to understand to certain people.
Anyways, the point is we asked to add "plain Finnish" to the Crowdin repository and it was kindly added by the maintainers. After that, I believe they found no one to maintain the language, so it's been quite dead since.
So if you add alternative locales, I suggest finding first someone who commits maintaining it too. It's quite a heavy task to maintain two versions of the same language. Your suggestion @pierre actually sounds pretty interesting from this point of view for having Swiss French and French French.
Yes, klarspråk! We haven't had that request yet although many municipalities have issues with some terms used in Decidim. That has led us for example to translate "Processes" to "Dialoger" instead of "Processer".
It would actually be interesting to discuss the perception of the Swedish translation of Decidim in Finland because my understanding is that Finlandssvenska isn't svenska. And when we show Omastadi to Swedish people (especially pages with a lot of text such as terms and conditions), they often find a lot of "mistakes" which are actually differences. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case in the Crowdin text as well.
I think using regional languages makes sense as well because these countries (Switzerland and Québec) have actually integrated more neutral forms in their usual language (sometimes in an official way). So it's not really a hack, it's simply making sure they use their language and not a version from France.
Thank you both for your replies!
I like the option of having Swiss French, but indeed, our main fear with a new language is that it will not be maintained in the future. But as Decidim is taking off in Switzerland, I hope we might be able to find contributors in the long run.
I totally agree with the fact that we should take into account regional languages.
Adding new locales feels like a maintenance nightmare unless a community is dedicated to do it in the long run. it's not the case here, the client just asked for inclusive forms and would be even happy with neutral forms. This last option is the one I'd go for, seems easier to maintain. @Pops Did you look into the feasibility of this approach in French ?
Use of generum masculine in the german translation will be an issue in German-speaking countries as well.
It already is, at least in the German speaking part of Switzerland. I think one strategy we could use for the German part ist to use the gender-neutral form whenever possible. I know i know, it's not really inclusive, but I think using the gender* or gender:, as commonly used symbols, might even cause conflicts with the markup editor. So that might be a solid way to start, and then improve per installation with the term-customizer?
But it all already starts sounding weird with the term "Benutzer" (user). @Romy_GK_austria have you had any further thoughts yet?
@larskaiser, I agree that we could go for a gender-neutral form, which would be the best solution in terms of accessibility. From my point of view it would be ideal to have one well-maintained german translation (no swiss/austrian/gender...) which needs to be as gender-neutral as possible. ;) Some terms will need more thought, such as Benutzer. But I'm optimistic that we would find solutions for the tricky words.
Yes, completely agree. Are you registered for the German translation on crowdin yet? I think we could continue the discussion there while looking at concrete examples.
https://crowdin.com/project/decidim
We propose to take a look at the current documentation (https://docs.decidim.org/en/contribute/translations/#_rules) on the rules we recommend to follow regarding translations. We're open for improvements, and we can also link these guidelines in crowdin in order to make them more visible.
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