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In the Danish translation group we are right now having a discussion about the words Publish and Unpublish. We have a danish translation for the word publish but not for the word Unpublish.

There has been suggestions about using the words active/activate and inactive/deactivate instead of Publish and Unpublish, but does that cover the meaning of the words ? What is the meaning of publish in the english version, can anybody try to give a description?

We have also a suggestion about using the danish word that corresponds to Publish and then to use inactive/deactivate for the word Unpublish.

Comments please....

In Norway we are using Publiser/Avpubliser, would that help you?

In Danish we don't have a word like Avpubliser (do you actually have such a word in the Norwegian dictionary ? ) - how do you translate Publisher ?

Hi,

Nordic conference?

In the Swedish translation (so far) we use "publicera/avpublicera" . In content strings that has the meaning that the article hasn't been published yet, we use "opublicerat". 
"Avpublicera" isn't, as far as I have searched, a word that is in the dictionary but we haven't so far found a better word. It has been used in different kinds of Swedish literatures for Mambo, other CMS etc.

For publisher, we use "publicist"



/Chrille

As Chrille mention, avpublisere is not official listed yet - but still widely used also in Norwegian.
I therefor think you could adopt this to Danish too, as it's "closely" related to Norwegian and Swedish.

Regarding the user groups we did not use direct translation, because we wanted to make the meaning more clear.
You can watch here what we came up with: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... #msg204510

We are having the same problem in spanish. We also do not have a word for "Unpublish". The other thing is that "publish/unpublish" may have different words in spanish depending on the context. "Activate" can be accurate in some of them but not in all of them.

Our word for "unpublish" would be "retirar" (ie. "retirar la publicación"). BTW, unpublish doesn´t exist, at least on askoxford.

Unpublish is most definitely a "computer" speak word and as ibnhafsun says it is not in any mainstream dictionary.

So I suppose provided the meaning or intention is clear, a word could be attributed (made up) in any language by way of translation. I don't know that there are any specific rules against this

Andy

No rules about this but when one word is used in different environments in English it could be only one string, but other tongues may need more, at least one per environment.

@ibn "retirar" (something like "taking off... publishing") can be ok in the articules area or modules area, but a bot should be "activated" or "de-activated" (at list in Spanish ... activar/desactivar  activo/desactivado) but also force you to use a complex sentence instead of a simple word.

But what about this scenario. You use Zoom Media Gallery (or any other gallery component), the component is active no matter what in backend. You can upload pictures e.g., but it is nut published/released to the public via frontend. Won't the words activated/deactivated bring some confussion, and wouldn't it be more precise to use publish no matter if you're talking content, components, bots, and then only find another word for Unpublish.

What does the core team have to say about this ?

I think  basically Atrevidoweb is right..

When speaking functions (like a bot) then it should be activate/deactivate, but when speaking content it should be publish/unpublish - it's making sense to me. 

You might be right, but wouldn't it then be better if it was changed all the way up, from the core team - if they agree ??

Yes, it would be better - and I guess we get some input about it when they see this and have time to respond.

In the very beggining I was translating it with just putting one UN (it's bulgarian equivalent) and of course there was no such word

Currently I am translating both Publish/Unpublish as Start/Stop, which in English sounds weird, but in Bulgarian is much easier to understand and gives the proper meaning

This indeed is a very intressting thread, and I dont know why I havent picked it up earlyer??
Might be because I was waiting for a core Respond on this...

I would also suggest as Atrevidoweb mentioned, it's also not very easy to find the correct word in Swiss Native german.
But translating it into to the sentence of what is behind it makes it almost clear ..

Cheers

Pete

In every day use the words would more accurately be used as:

They will Publish the book tomorrow. | It is Published. | Press the icon to Publish the Article

They will Stop Publishing the book tomorrow. |  It is Not Published. | Press the icon to Stop Publishing the Article. (Even more correctly - Press the icon to Stop the Publication of the article.)

I don't know if this goes any way to helping or I am just making it worse...

I think you could still use Publish in the context of Bots so long as everyone knows the intention. There are many instances in a lot of software where you might think a different word would be better suited to a task than the one in use - activate/deactivate being a good example, but I think (but don't know for sure) that a decision was made to limit the different number of labels/buttons that could form a toolbar otherwise we would finish up with a gallery of different buttons which in itself would be very confusing.

Possible solutions:

1.

How about if we retain the current labelling but ensure that rather than in the context of documentation in particular we adopt a more accurate description of the function:

"Click the Unpublish icon to deactivate the Mambot"

"Click the Publish icon to activate the Component"

"Click the Unpublish icon to stop the publication of the Article" rather than currently "Click the Unpublish icon to unpublish the Article" which is where this thread is coming from.

I would be interested in any thoughts on this. It seems to make sense but it is a bit of a shift from what has gone before.

2)

Ideally it would be nice if we could get the button itself reworded as well to reflect Publish & Stop Publishing and Published & Not Published. Unless someone can come up with an even more appropriate "universal" word?

Andy

I agree about your initial thoughts about this subject.

Our (the Danish team) trouble starts with the word "Unpublish" - it doesn-t exist in our language (and many others). This means that your second suggestion would be the best solution. If we just could get rid of the word "unpublish" it would help. We do have a danish translation of the word publish. Publisher would have to be translated to another word, but it would work.

It would still be nice if someone from the core team could comment on this :-)

Hm.. but this could be done in the translation anyway. It's noting stopping us from translating it into t.ex. Stopp publisering (Stop Publishing), but the problem would maybe be lack of space..

You're right. But if it was changed in generel there would be a chance that an eventual space-problem could be solved to.

A long text under an icon will never be solved in a good way, only thing who could help was split it into two lines - but personally I prefer using Avpubliser then!

Hi

One question that has struck me - and not being a coder nor indeed a translator - do the translations include the words used in the core code?
Or are we talking "simply" (I know it is not simple tho) about, for example,  the visual displays, buttons, menus, text?

What about the word "Unarchive" this too has similar issues, or do you have an easy work around to this one?

Andy

If I read you correct the answer is no, only the visual displays are translated.



That one is even worse, and to be honest I don't know if we have something to use on that - it could turn into a sentence. 

EDIT: Checked our repos, and it seems like we has solved the "Unarchive" isue by using "Restore" instead.

Great that is what I had hoped



My thoughts on this one would include "Recover" or even more appropriately "Retrieve".
But hey we can add it to the mix and if this small discussion makes a big difference all the better.
Andy

PS are there any other words that cause an issue - we might as well try to beat them all out in one go to save returning to this again in the future?

Hi Everyone,

Thanks to Andy for pointing this thread out to me.

We seem to have two issues here.  The first is that there may well be occasions when a single English word used in two different contexts requires two different words in the target language.  The English word "free" translates to two different words in French depending on the context, for example.  So the word "Publish" in the context of publishing an article is subtly different to "Publish" in the context of a plugin and that might require different words in translation.  Question: is that technically possible with Joomla! (1.5) at the moment, or will it require a code change to make it work?  Does anyone know (save me looking at the code)?

The second issue is the use of specific words in English that are difficult to translate because they are "synthetic".  Translation teams are, of course, free to choose words that are more appropriate in the target language; a completely literal translation is not necessary.  But it does raise the question as to whether the English words used are actually the best and most appropriate anyway.  Specifically, we have the words "Unpublish" and "Unarchive" that seem to be causing problems.  Even though these words are not in the dictionary their meaning is quite apparent in English, but perhaps there are "better" words available.  If you can think of any then please suggest them.

Bear in mind that there are length restrictions on these words.  "Stop publishing" is likely to be rejected on the grounds that it is simply too long to fit under the toolbar icon.  If memory serves, it is quite easy to have the same icon used on different screens with different text.  So it should be possible, for example, to have "Publish" for articles and "Activate" for plugins, but using the same icon.  So we don't necessarily have proliferation of new icons.

As Andy has suggested, descriptions (in tooltips, help screens and documentation, for example) can go some way to alleviating this problem.  But if we can improve the original English (and make it easier for translators) then please make your suggestions here.

Regards,
Chris.

Just some early thoughts on possible alternatives - although I am concerned that their meaning might not lead to instant User association with their function:

Unpublish | Withdraw | Remove

Unpublished | Withdrawn | Removed

Activated and Deactivated work fine
Activate and Deactivate work fine

Andy

In the past i had identified one case with regard to the first issue mentioned by Chris: "A single English word used in two different contexts requires two different words in the target language".

Example: "Archive" used as verb and noun (translation to Spanish => verb: "Archivar" | noun: "Archivo"). If we look into the Administration we can found two screens using this word:

- Article Manager => In this screen "Archive" is used as verb.
- Add Menu Item => In this screen "Archive" is used as noun.

In this case we can find a specific key for the word "Archive" in the "en-GB.com_content.ini" file and in the "en-GB.com_menus.ini" file, so we could place a specific translation of the word in each file. However there is a problem, at present the key for "Archive" in the "Add Menu Item" screen is taken from the "en-GB.com_content.ini" file, not from "en-GB.com_menus.ini". This is due to the "Menu Type Tree" functioning (the keys are taken from the specific component language files, and there are several useless keys at "en-GB.com_menus.ini"). Not sure if is possible a solution.

Note: I think this is the only example for the first issue in Spanish. Maybe in another languages could affect to another keys.

A lot of issues were arising in 1.5 regarding new functions, that I am not really sure, how should be translated.

Main issues were coming with the LDAP bot actually.

Just a clarifying question. The words publish and unpublish are only regarding something related to the frontend... publishing an article on frontend, publishing a bot on frontend, unpublishing a component on frontend and so on. The words have actually nothing to do with functionallity in the backend. Is this right

Yes, that's correct.

To "publish" an article in this context means to make it visible or accessible to site visitors.  To publish a plugin means that the plugin code will be executed whenever it is triggered by a site visitor's activities.  If a plugin is "unpublished" it will not be triggered under any circumstances.

Regards,
Chris.

You can also "publish/unpublish" modules in the back end.