Thread:Talk:LiquidThreads/Redesign/"Discussion" versus "Topic" versus "Thread"/reply (7)

phpbb uses "argomento", but that's not a valid example (they don't have many/good translators to Italian; I was asked to help but I didn't have time). Sometimes "topic" is left untranslated. Yes, translation can be adapted, but if you choose such a "problematic" word as source you can be sure that many translations will either 1) be misleading or incorrect, as "argomento" in Italian, 2) be in some jargon that general public doesn't understand (while your aim is to improve usability), 3) be a loanword (topic itself) or maybe a neologism – and that's even worse.

Anyway, I'm not sure that "topic" is good in English: the "topic" of the talk page is the associated page; there are multiple discussions on several sub-topics (or often on recurring sub-topics). On a forum, you would often use only one thread/topic for such related discussions, and if we borrow this term I'm afraid that people could do the same on wiki. Actually, an analogy is impossible: you can call the thread "topic", then the talk page would be like a "subforum" (or "section" in some forum systems). Even if phpbb3 has unlimited nested levels, you won't find any forum with hundreds of thousands or millions of subforums.

Anyway, I appreciate that you're considering these linguistic problems: obviously, "thread" is even worse in that respect, e.g. in Italian there's no translation at all, apart from a neologism.