Re: Wastebasket woes

[dave cirt net]

Quoting Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>:
> On 26/08/10 16:40, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 15:51 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > So it hardly applies to en_GB :)
> others in the company - most people these days learn American English,
> not British English.

I'd really dispute that - AE is forced onto people thanks to the  
(current) "largeness" of American culture, but the majority of people  
(Europe, China, India) learn an English that is closer to English (I  
refuse to call it British English - English is the language spoken by  
the English people, by definition).

In terms of what do we call the wastebasket. The original problem with  
Ubuntu is pretty much how they do their AE->English translation.  
Unlike the upstream projects, Ubuntu have a "non-American English"  
team, which tries to mangle Canadian, Australian, Asian and English  
together, often leaving them with some clunky workings. "Deleted  
Items" instead of Wastebasket was one of these choices.

I personally don't care what's its called as I always disable it (and  
I wish nautilus made it easier to disable). But in terms of a good  
user interface, we should be consistent: the term should be the same  
with vanilla Gnome, Ubuntu, Fedora, even with KDE.

The other problem is that the US equivalent (trashcan) can be used as  
the verb "to trash" which has no direct equivalent in English ("to  
rubbish" is subtly different). So phrases like "trashed on" (i.e. the  
date something was moved to the wastebasket) need some thinking about,  
e.g. "deleted on" or "marked deleted on". This reminds me of the old  
"ellipsisize" problems again!

To sum up: called it what you will, wastebasket, wastebin, rubbish  
bin, deleted items, sh*tehole (my personal favourite); just keep it  
consistent across environments, avoid obvious Americanisms and the  
translators will need to do some worked around where "trash" is used  
as a verb.