Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Today at 10:54, Paolo Borelli wrote:

> Il giorno ven, 10-12-2004 alle 00:07 +0100, Alexander Larsson ha
> scritto:
>> Advantages with the gettext method:
>> * Filenames as displayed in the UI always display in the current
>>   locale. Even if the translation is later updated or added, or if you
>>   change to another locale.
>
> is this an advantage? as I said before if I have a normal folder named
> "Lavoro" and switch to an en_US locale the normal folder keeps on being
> called "Lavoro", it does not magically change its name... I would find
> confusing having some of my folders change their name automatically and
> others not.

This is both an advantage and disadvantage.  Having fixes propagate to
users is certainly an advantage, but what you stress is a
disadvantage.  Though, see waay below.

> Another problems that come to my mind: I am in a .it locale where, for
> instance, Shared is displayed as "Condivisi" and I try to create a
> normal directory named "Shared". Creation fails... isn't it confusing?
>
> Even worse: at the default installation there is a Shared directory
> which I see as "Condivisi": I delete it. Then at some later point in
> time I create a normal dir named Shared, is it automatically shared? Is
> it automatically translated? why I cretaed a directory named Shared and
> it is not created and istead a directory named "Condivisi" shows up?
>
> Another similar one: what happens if the user creates a directory named
> in the same way as the translation? Do I end up with two dirs which are
> displayed in nautilus with tha same name?

What happens if you do 'mkdir "~/Templates "': "Templates" and
"Templates " (with space at the end) will look exactly the same in
Nautilus.  There are many more such sorts of problems we don't want
to solve, since users will always find a way to push it (note that
users can create such directories from within Nautilus itself).

There's also the question of why wouldn't you be allowed to have two
different folders with the same name?  Nautilus shows them spatially,
which means they can have different emblems, position, looks, etc.

Imagine having this structure:
Vacations
  "Brasil" (emblem: photo)
  "Brasil" (emblem: video)

(instead of having Vacations/Brasil/Photos and Vacations/Brasil/Videos)

Have you never been in a conversation with a couple of people with
the same name? Was it really that hard to communicate?

This restriction is merely an implementation detail, and from that
point of view, above mechanism is simply a partial bug fix.

> It seems to me that translating the name on the fly introduces a lot of
> behavior inconsistencies (cannot be moved, cannot be renamed, they
> change name whe changing locale or are accessed by another user etc)
> between these special folders and normal folders. I fear that this would
> be fairly confusing for a user since these folders are in its ~ and they
> show up in nautilus in the exact same way as his normal folders

We're currently educated that folder names are static.  If the model
around folders was different from the start, i.e. that they have a
property called "prettier display name", we'd learn to use them
through their hierarchical position (spatial, anyone? :) and the
meaning of their name, not the name itself.


Though many seem to indicate that this is a bad approach, I'm not so
sure.  Still, as I already said, I prefer symlink approach for its
flexibility.

Cheers,
Danilo