505697 - [fr] Misleading French translation of "Last week"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: fr / French, defect)

Description

[John Wilcock]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; fr; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1 GTB5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; fr; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Thunderbird/3.0b3

When messages are grouped by sort criterion Date, they are categorised as "Old mail", "Two weeks ago", "Last week", "Yesterday", etc.

The "Last week" category actually corresponds to the six-day period between (seven days ago) and (the day before yesterday). In other words, the English is shorthand for "Messages received during the *last one-week period* (excluding yesterday)".

In French this has been translated as "La semaine dernière", which is intuitively understood as "Messages received during the preceding calendar week", i.e. between last Monday and last Sunday (assuming, as is customary in France, that weeks start on a Monday). 

A better translation would be "La dernière semaine". 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Using a French localisation of Thunderbird, sort messages by date then group by sort. Make sure there are messages dated during the period between one week ago and the day before yesterday
2.
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Comment 1

[Benoit]

I agree that the label may be misleading, but I don't think the proposed replacement is an improvement; plus it sounds awkward (it implies the last week of a series).

Maybe something like "Les 7 derniers jours", although "Il y a deux semaines" may have to be changed as well.

Comment 2

[John Wilcock]

I thought of suggesting "Les 7 jours précédents", but then remembered that there may not be any messages dated yesterday and/or today so there would be nothing to be preceded. Each category has to stand on its own, and what's more it has to make sense whether the sort is ascending or descending. 

For that matter, I think that Last calendar week would be a more useful classification, not to mention being much easier to translate correctly, but that's beyond the scope of a l10n bug!

Comment 3

[Benoit]

We could still use "Dernière semaine calendrier" in French.

For reference, in Firefox we have "Les 7 derniers jours" in the History panel. We could use that in Thunderbird too. Or, to be perfectly correct, "Datant de 2 à 7 jours" (since Today and Yesterday are not included).

Comment 4

[John Wilcock]

Yes, but Firefox doesn't have the two weeks old category; instead it goes from "Les 7 derniers jours" to "Ce mois-ci". 

"Datant de 2 à 7 jours" and "Datant de 8 à 14 jours" would certainly work, but would probably be seen as rather pedantic and stilted. Replacing "Datant" with "Il y a" might do the trick though.

Do other locales have the same semantic problem, whereby a week more commonly refers to a calendar week than to a 7-day period? If so, might it be worth filing an enhancement bug to change the categories to be based on calendar weeks and months, noting the l10n impact?

Comment 5

[Cédric Corazza]

Benoit, any final suggestions on how to fix this?
I'm currently cleaning the French bug queue.

Comment 6

[Benoit]

I'd say "Les 7 derniers jours" (for last week) and "Les 14 derniers jours" (for two weeks ago). 

That's not very specific but always correct, as opposed to the current situation.

Only by fixing Bug #505981 would we have something natural, correct and useful at the same time.

Comment 7

[Cédric Corazza]

In fact, we already fixed this on the 29 August 2010…
http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/fr/rev/5a6a1368dbcf.
Marking fixed.