Translation glossary — French & Spanish

The IBA site is published in English, French and Spanish. The FR and ES strings were originally machine-translated, and the tool had no way to know it was reading indoor skydiving / vertical wind tunnel vocabulary. Everyday-word translations of sport terms went out to members:

• currency — in this domain, being current, i.e. qualified to fly. It was read as money: devise / monnaie in French, moneda / divisas in Spanish.
• flyer — a person who flies in the tunnel. It became a leaflet (folleto), a traveller (viajero), a steering wheel (volant) or an aircraft pilot (pilote / piloto).
• IBA — the organisation’s name, which Spanish translated to “OTROS” (“others”) and “SOLO” (“only”).

A French member reported the result as “the Foldable’s Motto”. This page is the fixed vocabulary that prevents it recurring. It was reviewed and signed off by native French and Spanish speakers in August 2026.

This page is for humans. The machine-readable copy that Google Translate ingests lives at api/src/i18n/glossary/ and is loaded into Google as a translation glossary. If you change a term here, change it there too; nothing keeps them in sync automatically.

Canonical terms

Role names: Coach ≠ Trainer ≠ Instructor

These are three distinct IBA roles, and the translations used to collapse them. In Spanish, Coach Currency Status and Trainer Currency Status both rendered as “Estado de moneda del entrenador” — a member could not tell which role an email was about.

Brand and product names keep the English word

flyer → pratiquant / volador when it means the person. Membership and product names don’t translate:

The money exception

Three places genuinely are about money, and devise / moneda is correct there. Do not let a find-and-replace touch them:

• account/fees.json → currency.select, currency.updated, paymentIntro.firstTimeInfo
• response-messages/index.json → paymentNeedToPay (“we accept the following currencies”)

These are the only remaining occurrences of the old terms anywhere in the FR/ES corpus. If a scan reports more than these, something has regressed.

Where the strings live

Two trees, one per deployable. Each holds en/, fr/ and es/ subdirectories with the same file layout — 18 files per locale in api/, 38 in www/, roughly 1,950 distinct English strings.

• api/src/i18n/ — emails, API responses, mobile app strings
• www/src/i18n/ — the public site and member portal

Links below point at the English source; fr/ and es/ are siblings at the same path.

Eleven files exist in both trees. They are byte-identical copies, not a shared module — a fix applied to one is not picked up by the other. Always change both.

Shared — the same file exists in both trees

api/ only

www/ only

Adding or changing a term

1. Add the row to the tables above.
2. Add the matching line to both TSVs in api/src/i18n/glossary/.
3. Re-create the Google glossary resources — they’re immutable, so they are deleted and recreated rather than updated in place.
4. Sweep the existing FR/ES files for the old term, skipping the money exceptions above.

Prefer keeping an English term over inventing a translation for role and product names. Members recognise “Coach Spotter” and “IBA Flyer”; they do not recognise observateur d'entraîneur.

Known gaps

• public/legal.json has no real privacy policy in FR or ES. The English privacyPolicy (info1–info52) and aiDisclaimer (info1–info9) are full GDPR text; the FR and ES versions are placeholder/abridged text, not translations. French- and Spanish-speaking members effectively have no privacy policy. This needs a real translation and legal sign-off — tracked separately from the vocabulary work.
• public/discover.json → info4, “inlet contractor” still reads contratista de entrada (a building contractor), which is wrong. The correct term is an aerodynamics one — probably tobera de entrada — and needs confirming by someone on the engineering side.
• English source bug: www public/tunnels.json → sFirst reads “Privious” in English — a typo, and mislabelled (the “first” control shouldn’t say “previous”). Fix the English so the translations follow.
• Spanish register is mixed between usted and tú across the corpus. Both forms were supplied by the reviewer and applied as given. Worth a normalisation pass.
• ES chart labels are inconsistent — militaryChart is Tabla Militar (reviewer’s wording) while flyerChart / coachChart use Gráfico and instructorChart uses Cuadro.

History

Raised as TUN-655  in February 2026 after a French member reported the currency message. Audited across both i18n trees, reviewed by native speakers, and applied to roughly 420 strings across 72 files in August 2026.