Suggestion: Awkward Chinese translation for "Parent notebook"

Features
1

Hi team,

I'm a Chinese user and I really love Joplin! However, I noticed a very awkward and funny translation in the app when creating a new notebook.

Currently, "Parent notebook" is translated literally as "父笔记本" (which literally means "Father notebook" in Chinese). It sounds like the notebooks have family relationships, which is very weird for UI design. :joy:

In standard Chinese software UI, a much more natural and professional translation would be:

上级笔记本 (Upper-level notebook)

or

所属笔记本 (Belonging notebook)

It would be great if this could be updated in future releases to improve the UX for Chinese users.

Thank you for your great work!

2

Out of curiosity, how would you describe the relationships in something like HTML, if you're familiar with it?

In English, we do use family relationships to describe a lot of structures like HTML, like "Father Node", "Child Node", "Grandchildren nodes". In operating systems, processes have "parent" and "child" processes, etc.

If it comes off to a native as awkwardly worded then it's probably worth changing, but as a literal translation, it seems mostly 1:1 :slight_smile:, without checking the app, "Parent Notebook" would feel natural, and match conceptually "Upper-Level Notebook" in intention.

3

I think the same is likely true for many other languages, e.g. in Polish the "parent notebook" is translated as "upper notebook". Parent-child naming in general sounds weird when it comes to non-living objects :sweat_smile:.

4

Hi Tomasz, thank you for sharing that! It's great to know that the Polish translation team already uses "Upper notebook". That is exactly the UI standard I am proposing here! Using spatial relationships makes so much more sense than family metaphors for non-living objects.

5

Hi James, thanks for your curiosity! But there is a huge linguistic misunderstanding here.

First, a quick technical correction: in standard English programming (like HTML W3C DOM), we strictly use parentNode, parentElement, or parent process (which are all gender-neutral). We never officially use "Father Node".

Second, the Chinese translation is NOT a 1:1 literal translation.
In English, "Parent" is gender-neutral. But the Chinese word "父" means strictly and exclusively "Male Father".
If we wanted a true 1:1 literal translation, it should be "父母" or "双亲" (Parents). But calling it a "Parents Notebook" sounds absolutely absurd in Chinese.

What happened decades ago was that early Chinese male programmers defaulted to patriarchal naming conventions, forcing the neutral "Parent" into the male-centric "Father" (父) when localizing tech terms. It is an outdated legacy of gender bias in the tech industry, not an accurate translation.

Therefore, following the Polish team's approach mentioned by Tomasz—avoiding family metaphors entirely and using spatial relationships like "上级" (Upper-level)—is not only the standard practice in modern Chinese UI design but also eliminates this awkward gender bias.

6

Thanks for the insight :slight_smile:

As a native English speaker; I wouldn't generally say "father" as the first choice and would use "parent". However, "father" doesn't sound unnatural either.

Ignoring grammatical gender (I don't think English has grammatical gender? versus Polish with three for example), I think for a sibling node relationship, for myself personally, I'm more matriarchal, I would almost certainly say "sister nodes" over "sibling nodes", the word sibling feels less natural even if its more accurate and doesn't come up in everyday conversation that often. Even though nodes wouldn't have human gender, personally, I think "brother" is less natural than "sister". Maybe that's just me specifically

It sounds like 上级 is ideal here.

Would there be a translation of "root notebook" that would make sense? I'm wondering how you'd describe a second-level or sub-notebook, would 上级 always imply the highest ranking notebook in the hierarchy? Or is it relative to the note itself and one relative layer up?

Speaking of Polish, I confused a lot of people last year saying "Jestem Angielski", "I am English [Language]" until somebody finally corrected me... several days later... after saying it a lot :slight_smile:

7

Thanks for your understanding!

Actually, the main reason I created this post was my absolute confusion: how did the gender-neutral "parent notebook" become strictly a "father notebook" (父) when localized into Chinese?

If we really wanted a literal translation, shouldn't it be "parents" (父母) ? Of course, a direct translation like "Parents notebook" (父母笔记本) would be hilarious in Chinese, because native speakers would immediately interpret it as "a physical notebook belonging to my mom and dad" :joy:.

I completely agree with you that nodes don't have human genders. But if we must use one, I also lean towards matriarchal translations. For example, in Chinese literature/art, "motif" is very elegantly translated as "母题" (Mother-theme).

Regarding "Root notebook", it definitely sounds much more neutral and genderless than "parent".

To answer your question about "上级" (Upper-level): In Chinese, it does NOT mean the absolute highest ranking. It is a relative term. It usually refers to the layer just one step above, or it can be a general term for all layers above it.

If a structure only has two levels, we usually use "主" (Main/Primary) and "次" (Sub/Secondary).

Honestly, for notebook hierarchies, native Chinese speakers simply don't use family or strict tree metaphors at all—it's just too awkward and unnatural. If we were to design a native Chinese UI for this, we wouldn't try to translate "Parent/Root" directly. Instead, we would just use functional logic, such as:

所属分类 / 放入... (Belonging to / Place into...) instead of "Parent".

Hope this helps explain the cultural and linguistic gap! Cheers!

8

Are you familiar with submitting patches via Github? If not, could you let me know the full text of these two strings below and I'll try submit it for you later:

Simplified Chinese/Mainland China (I think? Explicitly, zh_CN)

msgid "Create a new notebook under a parent notebook."
msgstr "在父笔记本下创建新笔记本。"

msgid "Select parent notebook"
msgstr "选择父笔记本"

Traditional Chinese / Taiwan (I think? Explicitly, zh_TW)

msgid "Create a new notebook under a parent notebook."
msgstr "在父記事本下創建一個新的記事本。"

msgid "Select parent notebook"
msgstr "选择父笔记本"
9

Thank you so much for offering to help!

I'm not very familiar with submitting patches via GitHub, so I would really appreciate it if you could help me submit these!

After thinking about the actual UI context, I've refined the translations to be the most natural for Chinese users. Here is the full text:

Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

Plaintext

msgid "Create a new notebook under a parent notebook."
msgstr "在该笔记本下创建新笔记本。"

msgid "Select parent notebook"
msgstr "选择所属笔记本"

Traditional Chinese (zh_TW) (Note: I used the same logic but adjusted the vocabulary to match Taiwan's UI standard, where "notebook" is "記事本" and "create" is "建立".)

Plaintext

msgid "Create a new notebook under a parent notebook."
msgstr "在該記事本下建立新的記事本。"

msgid "Select parent notebook"
msgstr "選擇所屬記事本"

Thanks again for your patience and for taking the time to help make the community better! Cheers!

10

:slight_smile:

11

​I saw the GitHub PR.thank you so much for taking the time to submit this for me. I really appreciate your help in making this translation update happen.

​Looking forward to seeing the new translations in the upcoming releases.

Have a great day!