I like a number of contrib modules whose default user interface text strings English is mediocre to very bad; this mediocre or bad English reflects very poorly on all who use the module, and on the entire Drupal community, in fact.

I believe this issue needs to be spoken about Drupal-wide, and I am in favor of an "English Board" (and then other language boards when thay are ready and volunteers can be gathered to people them) which all contrib modules should submit their user interface code to - that is whatever text a user will see in their browser - which Board will improve their English wherever necessary, and to which contrib module authors MUST defer. It's just too inane not to do this.

I mean this in all earnestness and proper respect to the contrib module authors. What does the Drupal community have against putting decent English into contrib module text string defaults? We have, in our organization, a former English teacher with over 20 years of experience teaching English, who we will gladly put to work improving all English text strings for contrib modules which will be seen in the browser. I bet other individuals and groups will offer to do this for other languages, etc... and all of a sudden the entire Drupal experience can look (and be) much more professional. Will anyone support this effort, which I believe will only work if contrib module authors are required to defer to the language board's improved text string - whose "improvement" should ONLY cover spelling and grammatial errors, and NEVER contextual or meaning or "fun with words" types of text strings.

Can we start a Drupal-wide discussion on seriously improving the outward-facing appearance of drupal 7 and 8 sites by improving the default language text strings whenever and wherever they need improving?

Best regards,

ed
NetFast

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Upon further thought, I think it is possible to have language boards in as many languages as their are volunteers to run them, and it could be optional for contrib modules - as to whether or not they agree to accept the language boards' decision as to an improved default language string for any text the browser will display in the modules' default language.

It's clear that contrib modules will be able to define a language other than English to be their default language in the future, so we should start adding a default language tag to all contrib modules for Drupal 8 and on. This default language would refer to the language of the browser-displayed text for that module.

This would require 2 additional fields per contrib module:

1) language code for user interface (browser-displayed) default language of the module
2) a boolean that indicates whether the contrib module will adhere to the language board's proof or edit of their submitted language string.

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quietone’s picture

Project: Drupal core » Drupal core ideas
Version: 8.9.x-dev »
Component: user interface text » Idea
Issue tags: -default text, -text, -english, -good English, -User interface

This seems better suited to the ideas queue.