Re: Start/Stop volumes and l10n

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 23:25 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> 2009/7/25 Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>:
> >
> > Well, it's not always a good strategy to translate things literally from
> > English, simply because we're working with natural languages here. Anyway,
> > what about wording like "Start working with...", "Begin your work
> > with...", or something similar?
> >
> 
> My concern was not only about translation, but also for english
> version. Start and stop are common action (start application, stop
> loading and so on) in Nautilus and other places of (GNOME) desktop.
> 
> However, it seems that start and stop are also the verbs used for
> RAID, see command line programs raidstart(8) and raidstop(8)
> 
> The man page[1] for those commands reports the following explanation:
>  * raidstart : activates (starts) an existing 'persistent' md device
>  * raidstop : turns off an md device, and unconfigures (stops) it
> 
> To activate seems to me a better term for start action. How about to
> use Activate/Deactivate in UI?
> 
> [1] http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/man_pages/raidstop8.html

Start and stop certainly sounds really strange to me, but I'm
certainly not the target audience.  Two questions (for David,
I suppose):

1) How conditioned is the target audience to the terms start
and stop?  Are they expecting those words?  Would they be
confused by activate and deactivate?

2) How likely is it that somebody outside the target audience
will see these terms?  Do they only appear if you're doing
something special where you're expected to have some domain
knowledge?

Thanks,
Shaun