Translations conflate "Change" and "Edit" terminology

Follow-up to #9113. We have translations currently using the same terms for Wagtail’s “Edit” and “Change” concepts – which denote similar concepts in English, but in Wagtail are technically different.

From what I understand, “Change” is our name for the change permission coming from Django. In Wagtail,

• “Edit” is what we consistently use to refer to the “Update” functionality from CRUD.
• “Change” means the user can access Wagtail’s “Edit” functionality for content they don’t own themselves.

Even if both terms don’t appear side-by-side like on #9113, it’s still problematic that translations conflate both under the same name, while we don’t in English. Either we should stop using the vague “Change” denomination in English too, or we should update translations to use different terms.

[thibaudcolas]

@gasman I’d like to keep this opened until we’ve had a chance to discuss this if that’s ok with you. Since this is about translations, I’d like to get input on this from people who work on translations in particular. And specifically those who work with languages where the same terms are used for both concepts. Doesn’t have to be me having those discussions if others want to take this on, but I’d like to see some consensus before this gets closed.

I agree it’s not a big deal and not all languages might want to express the difference between two very similar terms, but then that means the concepts can’t be distinguished from one-another by end users. That’s a clear UX issue to me. And there are clear ways to improve upon this that won’t take much effort:

• Get the translations changed for languages that can convey the difference
• Add extra context, either as a longer label, or tooltip, or help text, so the concepts can be distinguished even when using the same terms (“Change (includes all state modifications)”)

On “Change” in particular, if it does convey special meaning to people familiar with Django, then adding that extra context in the UI would likely be very beneficial to all users in all languages, as lots of people who set permissions in the CMS won’t have any understanding of why we use “Change” for object permissions and “Edit” elsewhere.

[gasman]

I don’t think any changes are necessary here. From a quick scan of the codebase for strings like "Change, it does appear that the only place we use the word “change” in the context of performing edits is the heading for the “object permissions” table in the groups admin. This directly corresponds to the name used by the Django permission system, and using something different here would obfuscate things for people familiar with Django’s convention. (Incidentally, the Django admin is fairly consistent in using “Change” rather than “Edit” - but I think “Edit” is pretty well established in Wagtail terminology by now, and changing that would be quite disruptive.)

More abstractly, I think there’s a case to be made that a “Change” permission is conceptually distinct from Edit as an action. When you grant or revoke that permission, your concern is with the outcome - whether any state changes to an object can happen as a result of that user’s actions. The “Edit” view is the most obvious place for those state changes to happen, but not necessarily the only one - if an object has a concept of (say) locking, or workflow status changes, then those are not “Edit” actions but still come under the category of “changes”. It is a subtle distinction, though, and I don’t think it’s a big deal if that distinction is reflected in our English language terminology but not translations - it’s just the nature of languages that some of them will place their dividing lines in different places.