[New-bugs-announce] [issue23109] French quotes in the documentation are often ungrammatical

[Clément]

New submission from Clément:

>From https://docs.python.org/3/howto/unicode.html:

> For a while people just wrote programs that didn’t display accents.
> In the mid-1980s an Apple II BASIC program written by a French 
> speaker might have lines like these:
> 
> PRINT "FICHIER EST COMPLETE."
> PRINT "CARACTERE NON ACCEPTE."
> 
> Those messages should contain accents (completé, caractère, accepté), > and they just look wrong to someone who can read French.

One of the reasons the message looks wrong is that "FICHIER EST COMPLETE" in ungrammatical in French. Google has 16 hits for that query, half of which are from the Python documentation. The second one is better.

I imagine the first one comes from the English "FILE IS COMPLETE", but I'm not even sure what that meant, so it's hard to give a better translation :/ Instead, here are a few examples that could work:

MISE A JOUR TERMINEE (Update completed − missing à and é in terminée)
VEUILLEZ REDEMARRER (Please reboot − missing é in redémarrer)
PARAMETRES ENREGISTRES (Settings saved − missing è in paramètre and é in enregistrés)

Similarly, https://docs.python.org/3/library/email-examples.html#examples-using-the-provisional-api:

> msg['Subject'] = "Ayons asperges pour le déjeuner"

I imagine this comes from the English "Let's have asparagus for lunch!", but the translation reads "Possess asparagus for lunch we". A proper idiomatic French version would be "Ça te dirait de manger des asperges à midi?" (Would you like to eat asparagus for lunch?)

Again further on the same page:

> Cela ressemble à un excellent recipie[1] déjeuner.

Could this mean "This looks like a delicious lunch recipie?" The typo in recipie would have prevented the machine translation from picking up recipie, which survived in the French version? This currently reads "This look like recipie lunch a excellent". A proper French version (adjusted to have accents) might be "J'ai trouvé une recette sympa: [1]" ("I found a nice recipe: [1]").

Not sure why using French is needed though; English already has a few accented words: a message with subject "Résumé attached", and body "Here's my résumé" would probably work just as well, and might not divert the reader's attention as much.

Side note: in the example Pépé writes to Fabrette and Penelope. Aren't they the same character?

Clément.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 233076
nosy: cpitcla, docs at python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: French quotes in the documentation are often ungrammatical
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue23109>
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