E-mail or email

Concerning the discussion on:

Summary:
Some prefer “email”, but it creates problems in languages other than English, being there, the worse option, out of the two, equally valid ways to write it “e-mail” and “email”.

With English being the the reference for translations, to languages wherein only variants of “e-mail” are allowed, this creates errors in translation. At the rate of an 8-fold increase.

Counter-arguments for “email”
-preferred by style guides
This depends on the style guide. A stylistic choice in English, does however not deal with the issue of introducing errors in other languages.
-popular
The dash is omitted for online queries to search-engines. However this is also the case for ones incorrect as a result.
(It should be mentioned here “e-mail” is the popular choice, also by volume, in books.)
It is consistent with Nextcloud use.

Nextcloud use is all over the place, with downstream resources being no better, unless of course translators have seen to it without reporting back on the issue upstream.
With two different main ways employed, we can track how many errors stem from each one.

This patch landed before I could answer, and I was asked to raise the issue here, so here we are.

This may seem as irrelevant as a discussion over however minute the difference are in English, but in other languages it makes a lot of difference, particularly the strict ones.

Wow, what a huge discussion at github regarding this.

Read the whole thing and came to to the conclusion using “Email / email” would be best.

Thanks for all the links.

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Absolutely agree. Wherever I reviewed the text it is »email«.

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That however, isn’t the case.

The breakdown of the 146 strings featuring any variant, is otherwise something like
~ 50% “email” 40% “e-mail” and 10% “mail” 1⅓% “EMail” with EMail and a “E-mail” in the middle of a sentence now gone.

How you agree is the part that is needed for others to understand how you arrived there.

“email” does not deal with the issue. Nor does the translation platform. Changing the latter might be a workable solution to get some level of consistency.

Just to be clear, these are the errors that prop up in translation:
Email > ~email // wrong because other languages require e-
Mail > ~mail // wrong because other languages don’t treat mail as if it has anything to do with e-mail.
// and if it does, you get the wrong type of “mail”, as opposed to “majl” for example.

Having no consistency between e-mail and email is further damaging because it seems as if it is an issue not worth solving where it matters most.

So, what is your recommendation?

Personally I think each translation team (it doesn’t matter which project) should define the translation of email/e-mail.
AFAIK the germans do it by using “E-Mail”. Independant of source string.

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Change to Pootle, for problems like these, solved in ways you couldn’t hope to do by just opting for the least problem-inducing word in English.

This has security-measures in place, it is free software, and unlike Transifex, is quality software.

Weblate would be my second choice.

This is free software, and it works.

It seems most developers want to have an opinion supported by opinion, enough so to avoid being asked to employ good defaults, for reasons they cause less problems, but enough to do something about it, for reasons why their opinion of consistency, isn’t actually supported by a consistent codebase.

So I am not going to change it to “email”, because that causes more problems than it solves. And I can’t change it across the board to “e-mail”, because I can’t have it accepted, and I don’t have access, nor the time in the world to change it for all of downstream.

Hello Allan,

changing to another i18n system is way bigger than my thought about email/e-mail.
That would be a major change and core people should be part of it.

Could we not just stay with our issue.

Yep, in polish the correct form is only “e-mail” and I use it at Nextcloud’s transifex polish files.

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@rakekniven It stopped being my issue when someone else handled it.
I care enough to do the research, and enough not to campaign for it.

Yes, why shouldn’t core people be a part of it? If anything it fixes things silently. Everyone is happy when they can do what they do in a better manner. Prime opportunity to shine some PR-light on a initiative that aligns with Nextcloud.

@Therion7777 I found some errors in the polish resource, see


Repeated myself once there, but the rest should be errors.

Yes, I didn’t check everything yet.