---------- mail transféré ----------
Envoyé: jeudi 12 Novembre 2020 15:23
De : "Afik Souffir"
A : "nvda-translations@groups.io"
Objet : Re: [nvda-translations] About the NVDA's French translation crisis

Hi, i can help with french..

Sent from my Iphone

On 12 Nov 2020, at 15:36, Bachir Benanou <ben_bach@mail.fr> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I hope everything is fine with you.

Just a quick note to let everybody know that the situation within the French team is just the same.

I haven’t had any contact from Michel Such, nor had I any hope of being able to translate NVDA into French again in cooperation with other French team members.

I again, ask for Corentin to be removed from the translation system because of his aggressiveness and his incompetence as far as translation is concerned. I also kindly ask that my Yahoo! Address be put back into the automatic NVDA translation workflow.

I’ll continue to follow this closely.

Thank you.

Have a nice day, all of you and stay safe.

All the best,

Bachir

On 21 October 2020 at 08:33, Michel Such wrote:

Hi Bachir and all,

This wille be my only intervention in this thread, hopefully shorter than yours.

I started working on french translation in 2007, in the early stage of the project, I think I was among the 2 or 3 first to start a translation.
Along the years, several people joined me to do the job, some doing it for a short while (most of us have many other things to do), and others like you stayed longer and we formed a small team.
At the moment, we are only 2 people translating, Corentin and I.
Even if I was the first to do the job, I never pretended to manage things, I prefer when decision are taken aafter discussing with others in an open minded way.

Among the people working on the project, you were probably the best translator.
But, when working in a team, the most important is not to be the best, the most important is to be able to maintain good relation with the other members of the team.
And here is the problem: You are unable to accept ideas of people younger or presumably less experimented than you.
It began with Patrick long ago and began even more difficult when Corentin joined us.
I won't detail all that happened because it is of no interest for the community of translators, but having as only argument "I'm right because I am the more graduated" is not something admissible.

Because I was uncomfortable with this situation, I tried many times to discuss with you to reduice tension with others.
After each conversation, I felt that problems were fixed, but they came back later, even worse.
Some months ago, you told me you did not want to continue working on translation and it was a real relief for me.
But after that, you began to plag Corentin with insulting mails (mails we have kept).
Seeing that, we decided to revoke you from the translation system, because we thought you became able to even destroy our work.

To end with all this, I will say that yes, there was a problem in the french translation team, and this problem was your toxic attitude.

Michel Such

<NVDA Certified Expert.png>

Le 20/10/2020 à 18:49, Bachir Benanou a écrit :

Dear translators, NVDA contributors, and NVAccess Staff,

My name is Bachir BENANOU and I am a member of the NVDA French Translation team since 2010. I am also a former university student with an MA degree in English and an MA degree in computer sciences applied to Technologies and Disabilities. I first heard of NVDA through ACB Radio (The American Council of the Blind Radio Station) back in 2007. I was beginning my studies within the field of Accessibility at that time. I speak Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and I am also an Esperantist. I can read and write Braille grade I and grade II in Arabic, French and English.

I am writing this message to tell you about the problems I am facing within the French Translation Team, particularly beginning 2019. I strongly hope to be as clear as possible, as this is a bit complex to explain.

When Mr. Such, the maintainer of the NVDA French Translation asked for volunteers to help translate NVDA’s ChangeLog and interface, I was very happy to lend a hand, putting all my competence to help the Screen Reader grow. I would have continued like this for many years to come, except that misunderstandings began to arise since 2013, when I joined the Automated Translation System. I began to notice that my corrections and suggestions were not accepted by the youngest French team member at that time, Patrick ZAJDA. When the maintainer asked publicly for help on a French list dedicated to Free and Open-source Accessible Software, (ALLOS), Patrick was the first to object that we have not to be scores and hundreds to correct spelling. That was the first glimpse of the atmosphere. So, I tried as hard as I could to avoid glitches and maintain communication to make things easy for everyone, until I asked for an invitation to Assembla and got an invitation to join in.

Mr. Mesar Hameed, the developer and maintainer of the Automated Translated workflow very kindly sent Michel SUCH and Patrick a message asking them to coach me through Skype so as I can familiarize myself with the tools to translate. That’s how I found myself cooking in the stew and started translating the ChangeLog and suggesting improvements to the interface, both in conformance with Microsoft Windows terminology and with my knowledge of translation universal rules. I am convinced that for a translator to be efficient, she/he must be able to handle different data aspects and fluently handle ESP, (English for Specific Purposes) as well as ETP (English for Technical Purposes), the latter applies, of course, to NVDA’s interface. The field of linguistics is vast and fascinating.

MR. SUCH explained how to deal with revisions and showed ma how to control information before sending it. Mr. ZAJDA reproached my way of communicating with him publicly arguing that he was not there to teach people nor to make friends but to work. Shortly afterwards, while working on the user’s guide, I received a message from him stating that he’s working on the guide, that if I touch it, he will lock it. So much for the coaching. One day I forgot to remove a BOM from the encoded t2t file and he sent a message to the French team stating that people come around without knowing what they were up to and that this is elementary to remove a BOM. So, from that point on, communication was very difficult with him, mainly because of his sarcasms, his unkind answers and his disrespect mail. I tried to settle things in private for a while until I became convinced that it was no use, back in 2014. One day, Mr. Such asked us what we thought about remapping some keys to facilitate transition from another screen reader to NVDA, proposing a complete scheme. I said it was a good idea, but that this can be problematic for some, adding that the suggestion was good to be considered. Mr. ZAJDA answered that we are JAWS free Edition partisans, that we did not know what we were talking about, that I was a very convincing man, that I have convinced him of course. This irony continued on and on for years, making the cooperation very difficult for me.

On September 2016, we translated the NVDA Remote Add-on into French and we managed to do the job in an acceptable environment and ended the translation with no incident. It was relieving to know that at least communication significantly improved. But after we did this translation, silence fell.

Things went on till beginning 2019. The NVDA French translation team stopped communicating by mail and dialog became inexistent altogether. I guess our goal was to work on the ChangeLog and the interface avoiding conflicts by not communicating. Submissions to NVDA’s interface and ChangeLog went on smoothly despite the problems with the translation system, but no clashes where to be noticed simply because Mr. ZAJDA stopped translating. The SVN logs can prove what I am stating here.

On March the 28^th 2019, a teenager who does not speak English was invited to the translation system. I personally do not know who added him in the first place, I would have said (No), knowing the boy by disrepute on French discussion lists. This boy has many accounts on Assembla: miclchlaus, Oreonan1, Oreonan2, and another account by the name of Corentin. Things being as they were, I sent him a private welcome message inviting him to communicate and exhorting him to cooperate with us. He did not answer.

On July the 24^th at 22:48 I received a message from Corentin the teenager, asking me to stop messing with his work that he wanted to put the symbol % instead of the word percent to translate the string related to the announcement of battery charge, that in his opinion, Michel Such is the only habilitated person to supervise what he does and that if I were to restore the string to its original state, he would put back his translation replacing mine. I replied the next day that the English text is a word and that one has to find a word to translate. When it’s a word, one cannot put a symbol in the translation. Corentin did not reply. By Autumn 2019, I began thinking of contacting NVAccess to inform the staff that NVDA’s French interface was in danger, but I waited hoping for things to straighten out. They didn’t. Things worsened as you will see.

Soon afterwards, I began noticing the use of automatic translation in the ChangeLog and mistakes and omissions attracted my attention, so I corrected all I could correct. For example, Track Changes was translated to Changement de pistes in French. For those who do not speak French, Changement de pistes can mean the change of a musical track. It can also mean a path change for runners. It was none of this, in fact, it was about tracking changes in Microsoft Word. But when I re-translated the sentence, Corentin used the log to protest.

By December 2019, I could not handle the situation any longer. Oreonan2, (Corentin) began playing with the log and posting unkind comments. One day I woke up to find an e-mail generated by SVN entitled: (Go to correct my work). So, I began asking for help. I contacted the maintainer on December 9^th I wrote Mr. Such for advice. He replied that if it is about the ping pong match between me and Corentin, he didn’t want to arbiter our quarrels. Next, I contacted Joseph Lee. We had a nice long discussion about the overall French translation quality and what can be done to improve the situation, emphasizing that if the teenager does not want to cooperate, Joseph would have a talk with him, which he kindly did on April 9^th 2020. Joseph tried to talk to the teenager and encourage dialog again by telling him to talk to his fellow translators.

I also contacted the NVAccess staff and sent them a copy of the interface for safeguard purposes. Mr. Curran answered that globally contributors are doing very well together, but that NVAccess is taking note of what is happening within the French team, adding that if the teenager does not speak English, he did not mind him being removed.

Shortly before that, On March 4^th 2020 Patrick ZAJDA wrote the nvda-translations to complain that I am against hard spaces in documents, asking whether these were disallowed in the ChangeLog. I can assure you it was a false problem. Can you imagine a team where we can’t even agree in non-breaking spaces or hard spaces or no break spaces and the like? Come on! This is absolute dribble! When I read what Patrick ZAJDA wrote, I wrote to Mesar the same day a message entitled (It’s not hard spacing, It’s lack of communication) Here is an excerpt: “In short, it's not about hard spaces or non-breaking spaces as they are sometimes called, it is about a child, OreoNan who doesn't accept any correction or spelling fix made by someone else. Patrick who is twenty-five, I think, protects him.) end of excerpt. I sincerely think that these people want me to go away. They don’t want me to be around and that’s all they want. Strangely, they seemed to forget that NotePad++ just does not generate these signs as one writes.

When Oronan2 –Corentin) started arbitrarily changing the interface hotkeys, I tried to explain to him that we have spent years designing these, that users might have trouble learning NVDA if shortcuts were to change too often. I spent an hour and a half on April 9^th 2020 to try and make myself clear. All to no avail. By the Middle of June, I was completely discouraged. So I wrote Mr. Such to thank him for the help he provided since 2010. I also wrote him that I am forced to stop, that the atmosphere within the French translation team was unbearable. He kindly answered that as far as he’s concerned my suggestions are welcome.

But today, I think I will come back to safeguard NVDA and contribute translation again. I downloaded NVDA 2020.3 and saw that many changes were made to the interface: not only the hotkeys were changed again without any consultation, but the strings were re-translated to Corentin’s liking. Please, please, help. NVDA’s French interface is being tampered with.

A few days ago I went to GitHub to see what is going on with NVDA’s development. I noticed that my mail address was removed. I do not know what caused this, but it was surprising. So, yesterday, October 19^th, 2020 I asked Patrick ZAJDA and Corentin three questions:

What logic are they applying when they changed the hotkeys and why?

Why are they using TeamTalk to hold meeting without informing me they did so.

I have been contributing to NVDA since 2010. Why is Patrick protecting Corentin against me despite our cooperation all these years?

I gave them 24 hours to answer, but they did not, so I decided to write this message to inform the community of what is going on.

Ladies and gentlemen, as I am writing this, I am feeling ashamed of what is going on, but I’d like to emphasize the fact that the level degraded to such an extent no cooperation with Patrick ZAJDA and Corentin Bacqué-Cazenave is possible. I, therefore, hereby, ask publicly that all the accounts belonging to Corentin be removed from Assembla.

I’d like to thank you all for reading this long message and I strongly hope that NVAccess will take the appropriate measures to prevent further conflict that can damage NVDA.

Thank you and, long live NVDA!

Sincerely,

Bachir BENANOU

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