Talk:people's republic

"national" vs. "popular" vs. "people's". The issue here is the translation of народный: The shift from "national" to "people's" can be explained by the fact that народный can translate to "popular" just as well as to "national". But the choice of Romanian populară (and Albanian popullore) makes clear that the intended meaning is "popular" rather than "national". Probably also aided by the fact that "national socialism" had just been done away with in 1946, and whatever kind of "socialism" was proposed by these countries, it certainly wasn't a "national" kind). So, one would think "popular republic". Why the translation "people's"? Perhaps the "popular" didn't sit right with English usage, suggesting that these republics were somehow "popular" in the sense of "well-liked". In any case, the Ukrainian Narodnaya Respublika had been translated as "People's Republic" alongside "National Republic" from 1918, but only rarely as "Popular Republic". --Dbachmann 12:31, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Is there any issue here? Mglovesfun (talk) 12:39, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
 * the issue of explaining the term? Which isn't obvious, or trivial? It's the purpose of a dictionary? --Dbachmann 12:43, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

RFC discussion: May 2017–August 2021
I can't make any sense of the etymology. Maybe someone willing to improve on it? TatCoolBoy (talk) 02:32, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Much better now &mdash; surjection &lang;??&rang; 22:15, 7 August 2021 (UTC)