Incorrect German labels for elements

🆘 Support
1

I noticed an issue with the German labels used when creating new elements.

It looks like DatoCMS uses the neuter form “Neues” by default when generating these labels, regardless of the grammatical gender of the element name. This leads to grammatically incorrect labels when the element name is masculine (and potentially also when it is feminine).

For example, we currently see:

  • Neues Pflanzen-Steckbrief → should be Neuer Pflanzen-Steckbrief
  • Neues Link → should be Neuer Link
  • Neues Anker → should be Neuer Anker

I’ve attached screenshots showing some examples.

Is there a way to configure the grammatical gender of an element name, or otherwise customize the generated “New [element]” label?

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2

@natalia,

Thanks for pointing this out!

Unfortunately, our current UI translation system doesn’t allow customers to specify, on a per-model basis, the gender of an adjective or other word (like neues/neuer)… it’s just a hardcoded string :frowning:

Instead, is there maybe a way to express the same idea using a different, gender-neutral construction? Like would “{itemType} hinzufügen” or “{itemType} erstellen” or simply “Neu: {itemType}” be acceptable, without requiring a per-model user setting? Do any of those sound natural enough to you?

Looking at our current German UI strings, it looks like we’ve made similar errors in several places, and it would be good to do a consistency pass over all of them when we address this…

Edit: Older thread addressing this same issue: Simple Wording Improvement for German Instances

4

@roger ,

Thanks for the explanation!

Yes, I think “{itemType} hinzufügen” would be a good and natural solution in German. It avoids the grammatical gender issue entirely and works well in this context.

And yes, I think doing a consistency pass over the other German UI strings would be great, especially if the same pattern is used in several places.

Thanks for looking into this!

5

Thank you @natalia. I’ve reported this in detail to the devs, and we’ll try to address it soon.

6

@natalia

This should be fixed now, using the “{itemType} hinzufügen” format for that particular example. We also did a pass and fixed several other gender agreement issues across German and 9 other locales, fixing 42 instances in total. Hopefully that makes the CMS sound more natural.

If you notice any more strange-sounding terms like that, please let us know!

7

@roger

Thank you so much for fixing this and for taking the time to go through the other locales as well! We really appreciate the extra effort :blush: Hopefully this will make things much smoother. Thanks again!