[ mailman-Bugs-1999387 ] Misleading question in Subscribe WWW form.

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Bugs item #1999387, was opened at 2008-06-21 13:27
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by keinstein
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Category: (un)subscribing
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Tobias Schlemmer (keinstein)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Misleading question in Subscribe WWW form.

Initial Comment:
Hi,

At least the German translation is misleading on the subscription confirmation page of Mailman 2.1.5 as I have seen the same should be true in current trunk revison.

The problem is that the Question 

"Nachrichtensammlungen abonnieren?  Nein   Ja"

doesn't contain any information, that this setting is the delivery mode. It could be interpreted as "Yes, I really want to recieve emails from the list."

I think the text of the default is much better to understand and would less likely loose so much information in any translation. So I suggest to change the message 


"Receive digests? No Yes"
(in German: "Nachrichtensammlungen abonnieren?  Nein   Ja")

to

"Which delivery mode shall be used? Regular Digest"
(in German "Welcher Auslieferungsmodus wird gewnscht? Normal Nachrichtensammlung")


Btw.: The term "Nachrichtensammlung" just tells that it's a collection of messages, but nothing that it is deliverend as one Email containing the collection. I'd prefer to emphasize that its one email containing a collection, in German: "Sammelnachricht". That this collection will be a collection of messages shuld be easy to understand, since we are in a context of mailing lists.

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>Comment By: Tobias Schlemmer (keinstein)
Date: 2008-06-21 18:18

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=831067
Originator: YES

The problem is: Even the English translation leaves too much room for
misinterpretations. The "exclusive or" is not expressed. In fact it can be
interpreted as "Recieve digests, too". 

So your answer sounds to me as the answer of a technician. But the end
user needs another solution. There should be some consolidation, anyhow. At
the moment even in the english translation the same feature is described at
different locations in at least three different ways. This makes the
communication between the everage user and administrators problematic. Most
end users don't know about digest modes (or any other feature). So if the
admin uses term A and the end user reads term B he won't be able to combine
them, regardless the language.

The best way would be to use the same terms for all the interfaces (user,
admin defaults, registration). Unfortunately the user configuration pages
are stored as a monolithic HTML page in the .po file. Maybe it is possible
to store the strings seperately? Or field wise and generate the appropriate
pages according to the settings, if either the admin changes them (if the
page was not modified manually) or on explicit request?

What about the following solution: Consolidate the messages in the
development branch, breaking the languages. This must be possible in any
software project. 

In the stable branch, just change the english text to be more explicit and
use the old translations in any language. Some of them are already more
descriptive. This should be possible using a simple sed script. The
language maintainers should be informed about that and can decide if they
have already a good translation or if they want to change anything. 

Two examples (as far as I can read them) with English and German
translation:

Polish: Grupowa listy w paczki?
English: Group messages in digests?
German: Post in Sammelnachrichten gruppieren?

Czech: Dostvat pspvky jako digest?
English: Deliver messages as digests?
German: Post als Sammelnachrichten zustellen?

Both are formulated as yes/no questions, but the "or" answers "Regular"
and "Digest" are also valid answers. I'd prefer the latter two as they
provide some synonymic redundance, which makes it easier to understand the
question in the right way.

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Comment By: Mark Sapiro (msapiro)
Date: 2008-06-21 16:55

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=1123998
Originator: NO

Thanks for your input.

There are a couple of problems for your suggestion at least as it pertains
to the 2.1.x branch (the translation is the same in 2.1.11rc1).

The text "Receive digests? No Yes" is actually three strings - "Receive
digests?", "No" and "Yes" which are translated separately. Changing the
English to "Which delivery mode shall be used? Regular Digest" would
require translation of the three strings "Which delivery mode shall be
used?", "Regular" and "Digest".

It happens that "Regular" and "Digest" are already translated (German =
"Normal" and "Nachrichtensammlung"), but "Which delivery mode shall be
used?" or anything similar is not. Thus if the English were changed 34
other translations (not counting German) would be broken. Thus, I won't
change the English at this point.

Given that, if you can suggest a better German translation of "Receive
digests?" that would be answered "Nein" or "Ja", I will update the German
translation of "Receive digests?"

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