Thanks. Your explications helped me a lot. Especially that retrievability is a “property of a single card” and a “probability”, but retention a “property of a group of cards” and a sort of “rate”. I’ll try to find an appropriate translation, reflecting these remarks, and translate both terms differently and consistently.
Thanks a lot to you all!
Some remarks about the texts in Anki that contain “Retention” or “Retrievability”:
Retention
We have one string statistics-true-retention-title which is “True Retention”. One could argue, if there is a true retention, is there also a false retention, or are all other retention values false? Maybe “Actual Retention” might be a clearer alternative?
In deck-config-compute-optimal-retention-tooltip3 we have the phrase “You may wish to choose a higher desired retention, if you’re willing to trade more study time for a greater recall rate.” This seems a bit tautological given that “recall rate” IS the retention. Maybe use a shorter phrase like “You may wish to choose a higher desired retention, if in return you’re willing to study more time.”?
Retrievability
It seems that “retrievability” is used quite consistently across the translation files. A minor inconsistency is maybe statistics-card-retrievability-title which used “Card Retrievability” instead of simply “Retrievability”, and just as in the same translation file we also have “Card Easy”, “Card Difficulty” … following the same pattern with a “Card …” prefix. But we have on the other hand “Review Intervals”, “Reviews” … without “Card” in the string. Maybe it would be more consistent to eliminate these "Card " prefixes to follow always the same pattern.