Hi
Working at translation, a question comes to me: shouldn’t we use the word Share when it comes to talk about the syncthing entity in the GUI that has attributes like Label+ID+Path+List of pairs (+ all Advanced & Ignore patterns), reserving the word Folder or Directory (according to the best english practices and computing conventions) for the name in the file system, only known by the local machine?
Lets not go here. If you like digging in mud, find the old closed issue renaming repositories into folders, and just read the comments there.
Sacastic as usual Audrius?
I read… and saw you proposed peers for devices. I liked the comment where the obarrera guy said : " if a user says ‘Go ahead and delete the folder’, does he mean the repository?". It’s pity we have words and don’t use them. From French wikipedia directory, “Sous Windows 7 le terme « dossier » remplace le terme « répertoire » (le terme « répertoire » a disparu de l’aide de Windows 7).”: [In Windows 7 « folder » replaces « directory » (the word « directory » disappeared from Windows help)]. Shall we let MS dictate our words every time they issue a new release? Digging the mud taught me something, once more.
But this is not my question: whatever we’d choose we’d remain in ambiguity keeping the same word for the file system object and application concept. Okay, Folder (currently=shared directory in ST) may go on doing the job as “Dossier” in french, nicely confusing Windows7+ users with their FS stuff. I’d prefer Share (Partage).
Now what about translation? Should we blindly stick to English usage? You see I can bring arguments to a discussion about language, did I successfully pass my reviewer translator examination 
?
How about Shared Thing or short Sharedthing instead of Folder. “Go ahead and delete the Sharedthing” should be clear then.
But seriously, Share might be technically more correct than Folder, but syncthing is not only targeting people that work in the IT department. A Syncthing Folder is a configuration representation of a filesystem folder/directory/whatever, so it is not that bad. If you want to make sure the correct Folder is deleted, you can add ‘from the configuration’ or ‘in your file manager/explorer’.
Share has also a drawback that Folder doesn’t have: it can also be used as verb. Sentences like ‘Device xyz wants to share Share “abc” with you’ or ‘Share Device ID’ (from syncthing-android) sound strange or are confusing.
I think you should stay with the direct translation of the english name. Otherwise, users might be very confused when reading documentation or asking for support.
Fully agreed with Felix, we would need a very good reason not to stay with direct translation for the basic concepts, and I see none here: French is my primary language, and to me “Dossier” bears the same pros and cons as “Folder”, and the pro/con ratio is better than alternatives, as discussed previously.
As xduugu said, we don’t need a different name for the basic concept, but we might have to be careful when labelling actions like “removing a folder from Syncthing config”.
In the same vein, in the original discussion I linked earlier, I liked this bit:
I agree that a repository is more than a folder, but by the end of the day, the attempt is to sync a set of files within the folder so the thing you care is the folder, not all the internal bits that syncthing holds about the folder.
The only questionable bits I see in French translation are for inconsequential details: see “Éteint” and “Modèles à éviter” for example 
I love it.
We could also go with other non file system analogies - buckets, jars, crates, you name it. Then we could report sync status as the data in the jar being 95% pickled or so.
We might still get the confusion about whether “smash the jar” or “take the jar off the shelf” means just removing it from Syncthing or actually deleting the files as well…
(I’m only slightly kidding, I think there is some merit in cleaning up the vocabulary, and if so we might as well make up our own. It might be cute and memorable.)
I think that was an unfortunate effect of us using the English phrase as the key, and there of course existing many different words in other languages for the same word in English?
The proper solution to that is to not use “Off” as a key but rather something like “ui.dropdown.compression.disabled” and so on which is then unambiguous. We might do that some day. It would make the UI a little bit more cumbersome to develop, but that’s mostly it I guess. Pull requests probably welcome. 
Hi xduugu.
Yes, even in French with 2 different words, partager le partage would be pleonastic. Why not simply ‘Device xyz wants to share “abc” with you’?
Cool Jakob, we’d better kid in these matters as human languages are always ambiguous (but maths, but are they human? ). I loved your buckets and jars. There is barrel too. But why not just Share when it’s the ST very purpose?
Because share is a verb for those who have never used SMB.
Nice, I can hear this. My idea is not to convert any english speaker to any preference. Just prepend a “a” or “the” and append “ing” is the english way. Did “the sharing” exist before SMB? In French too, both the noun and verb share their root. When English etymology of share/sharing is from something that means cut (like in schizo, section… even cut and en/fr chit/chier), french (latin) partager/partage etymology (via ancient Greek and maybe Sanskrit) adds the idea of movement or aim (i.e. different of only divide on-the-spot). The funny thing is it also gave partition (both for en/fr), which when used in IT is a prerequisite to allocate (movement/aim) resources to some purpose (e.g. disk storage to a file system CPU power to an OS (reminds my old AS/400 years)… hummm,… well part of a file system to foreign system.
Okay, my main and single idea is only to differentiate the levels, because simple users need different things are called with different names, above all when these different things are so closely related. I guess ST devs won’t be reluctant if we french speakers go on using “répertoire” (directory) when showing Ignore patterns help “Multi level wildcard (matches multiple directory levels)”, whatever the confusion introduced by MS dropping the term for folder. But when it comes to the ST main concept (maybe same importance as peers/devices), this confusion becomes a problem… and I feel Sharing, or Share although it is a verb are good candidates to disambiguation. There is no shame to use pre-existing words. It is mainly our human fate could say Lacan and few are the happy that successfully offer new words to humanity. (I just mean there I don’t really care English strings use Folder for this thing with Type attribute Normal|Master(1), I ask if you devs would be opposed to if we french speakers would use Partage instead of current Dossier?)
(1)half-kidding, why not read-only?
Machine xyz invites you to share abc / La machine xyz vous invite [à partager|au partage] abc. For English, share being before noun abc, it is a verb. Being after abc, it would be a noun, turning abc into some kind of adjective.
“Modèles à éviter” is just nonsensical. In french it could be construed as (“Caveats” or “Don’t do that”), that is a dreadful word-for-word translation.I am afraid exclusion pattern files (and ample discussion about their correct application) are not going away. It’s not a detail and this particular translation has to go.
Is it OK now with “Masques d’exclusion” ?
I’d say so, yes.
Would you please re-add me as reviewer ? I kicked me off I don’t know how 
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.