Re: Difficult strings (was: Re[2]: i18n and GNOME hackers)

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 09/06/2005, at 6:00 PM, Funda Wang wrote:

> Thanks. I was thing of it at first. But what is that? Are the LAN  
> cards
> really different from the WAN cards? I've never heard of such a device
> named as "WAN cards", besides ADSL modem, Cable modem, ATM adaptor,  
> etc.

Some adaptors or modems get re-named as "cards", which is sloppy, I  
agree.
> The real problem is that, the developers are creating words which  
> are not
> commonly used, such as spatial mode of Nautilus. Why it is called  
> spatial
> mode, rather than "creating seperated window for every folder"?  
> I've googled
> "spatital mode", and it seems all the results are related to  
> nautilus, which
> means nautilus is naming the most common concept in a different  
> phrase.

It's certainly a problem: sometimes, it seems that marketing people,  
in particular, are trying to make something basic and simple sound  
very complex and impressive (in their view). Quite a lot of computing  
terms have been forcibly (and often unpleasantly) altered to fit some  
specific situation. That makes them difficult to handle even in the  
original language.

"windowing" instead of "managing windows"
"mousing" instead of "moving the mouse"

and "spatial mode", AFAIK, has nothing but its literal meaning, so if  
Nautilus is messing around with it, they need to attach an  
explanation. <sigh> But they don't, and we get stuck trying to make  
sense out of it all.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhÃm  
Viát hÃa phán mám tá do)

Clytie Siddall--Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia

á thÃnh phá Renmark, tái mián sÃng cáa Nam Ãc