Poor translation of ‘Review’ on the website

[dcapillae]

Problem

There is a single string to translate ‘Review’ which is used for both book review and merge request review. However, in Spanish (I don't know if in other languages as well), reviewing a book is said differently (reseñar) than reviewing a request (revisar). Could two strings be created to translate ‘Review’ differently in each case?

'Reseñar' and 'Revisar' are words with different meanings in Spanish. ‘Reseñar un libro’ (Review a book) is to write a personal commentary on the book summarising or giving your opinion about it, while ‘Revisar un libro’ would be something like checking or examining what state it is in.

Right now ‘Review’ is translated as ‘Reseñar’. This works well for review a book, but it sounds very strange for reviewing a merge request: ‘Reseñar una petición’ (Review a request) makes no sense in Spanish.

Reproducing the bug

1. Go to Community Edit Requests
2. Open a new tab and go to any page of a book
3. Change the site language to Spanish in both pages
4. Check the translation of ‘Review’

• Expected behavior: Have two different strings to be able to translate ‘Review a book’ and ‘Review a request’ differently in the languages that require it.
• Actual behavior: The Open Library website translation does not support the distinction between ‘Review a book’ and ‘Review a request’.

Context

• Browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc): Firefox
• OS (Windows, Mac, etc): Ubuntu
• Logged in (Y/N): Y
• Environment (prod, dev, local): prod

Breakdown

Requirements Checklist

• [ ]

Related files

Stakeholders

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[mekarpeles]

I think the instances are page specific, so on this page we may be able to add a page-and-language specific translation for Review here.

@cdrini I marked this needs response just because I'd love a second pair of 👀 that I've provided a valid answer (esp. if you happen to know of another case in our translations where someone has manually created a clarification like this, by splitting up a word per file). I assume one just has to split the entry in the .pot file to have two different translations, on a per file basis so...

# Review (a book) = Reseñar
#: merge_request_table/table_row.html type/edition/modal_links.html
msgid "Review"
msgstr "Reseñar"

Becomes:

# Review (a book)
#: type/edition/modal_links.html
msgid "Review"
msgstr "Reseñar"

# Review (someone's work)
#: type/edition/modal_links.html
msgid "Review"
msgstr "Revisar"

Related File(s)
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/master/openlibrary/i18n/es/messages.po#L5500-L5503

[cdrini]

Good thinking, but I'm afraid not; the strings after the # are PO comments, so they don't actually impact anything.

The way to fix this would be to add some non-user-visible text to the id; eg $:_('Review <!-- a book -->'). That'll cause them to be separated. Not sure what the best pattern to use here is!

[mekarpeles]

@dcapillae this would be a super helpful thing to add to our internationalization guide!
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Internationalization

[github-actions]

This issue has been marked "Needs: Review Assignee" since there have been no updates within the past two weeks