Re: [Usability]Some UI review bugs filed

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

mån 2002-11-18 klockan 23.09 skrev Reinout van Schouwen:
> > We just have to decide which is more desireable -
> >
> > 		o gman's Home
> > 		o Home Folder
> 
> A better solution of course, is to have $HOME be the Desktop by default
> and be done with it.
> 
> Furthermore, from l10n perspective, I can tell you: neither is desirable.
> If I take Dutch as an example, the translation team eventually went for
> 'persoonlijke map' (lit. 'personal folder') because the association value
> of the home directory with the building you live in just is very small.
> [This also means the icon used for home is bad, l10n-wise. I'd rather see
> the gdm-user photo there, for instance.]

And posessives with an %s where the %s might be any name are, as already
mentioned in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45360 a long time
ago, very bad for localization, since rules for posessives vary between
languages, and in some languages the form of the posessive even depends
on the posessing noun (the owner).

Swedish is an example of the latter. Posessives are written as "<owner>s
<item>", but not when the owner is a word or name that already ends with
an s-like sound. In those cases it is only "<owner> <item>". So
"menthoss hem" is clearly wrong; "menthos hem" would be the correct
form. On the same time, "Gegl hem" is wrong, but "Gegls hem" is correct.
This is of course impossible to get right without some adaptive code
based on automatic on-the-fly word analysis on the %s, and that's of
course not a suitable solution.

Currently, we are using a hack in the Swedish translation so that this
entry only gets translated into the equivalent of "Home Folder" without
the user name, but as this problem affects more languages than Swedish
it would be nice if the original was fixed so that it doesn't use
posessive form.


Christian