On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Gil Forcada <gforc...@gnome.org> wrote:
>> I am entirely in favor of filing i18n bugs to promote common-sense >> string conventions when possible (Why have "Zoom in" and Zoom In" and >> 'ZOOM IN" if you can possibly agree on one string), but even then it >> is a matter of getting devs to agree on one convention. > > That's another issue that I would really like to see happening, someone > stepping in and adding some cohesion/consistency to original strings. a > GWOP/GHOPC would be really useful here. Anyone stepping in to do > administrate it? :) Can you define the acronyms GWOP/GHOPC? I am generally interested in cross-project consistency. First, there is the purpose of providing a user experience that enhances package-to-package "transferable skills" learning (as in "Gee, I bet I know what 'Save' does, but I have no idea what this 'Preserve' / 'Retain' / 'Keep' item in the pull-down menu means). Consistency of original string (and its translation) in common pull-down menu items (in particular) is a desirable feature, not always attainable, but worth working towards. It is also a lot easier to look for consistency in translations if there is consistency in the original en_US strings. Subtle, but essentially meaningless, variations in the original (e.g. capitalization, punctuation on short strings, etc.) just makes those larger-scale translation consistency analyses more complex. Secondly, there are the hopefully obvious advantages to localizers in making on-line translation memory efforts more useful (e.g. Amagama, open-trans.eu, etc.), again it helps if the en_US strings have a sensible consistency. There will not always be a one-to-one match from an en_US string to a term in a given language, context is obviously critical, but that is why we have human translations, to include the critical element of judgment. The language universe of computer program UIs is somewhat more limited than the full complexity of human language. There are only so many ways to describe the functions performed by a word processor or a chess game. Voluntarily adopted consistency in terms may seem to be an overly ambitious goal, but I think even incremental progress is worth achieving. We should not even attempt to achieve the level of mandated consistency seen in fields like medical encoding (HL7, MEDRA, ICD-10, etc.), but as a professional user of those sorts of controlled vocabularies and ontologies, there are elements those approaches to knowledge representation that are worth emulating on a smaller scale. cjl _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
