Re: Wastebasket woes

[Bruce Cowan <bruce bcowan me uk>]

On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 17:44 -0400, dave cirt net wrote:
> 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).

Amusingly I'm Scottish, but that's besides the point.

> 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 can understand that that would be a problem, I've never thought about
it like that.

> 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.

Yes, I'd like to have the same term used in basically every project, but
I suppose GNOME would be a good start (mainly because I'm involved in
it).

> 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!

Yes, that's another problem with wastebasket, which I hadn't actually
realised until fairly recently. I'm sure that "Binned on" would work,
but it does sound a little odd.

> 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.

I personally didn't want to suddenly change the strings in GNOME without
any sort of discussion, that would obviously be wrong. I would like to
get this done for 2.32, as the translations for it will be starting next
week probably.
-- 
Bruce Cowan <bruce bcowan me uk>