[HIG] Localized Guidelines (Was: Button alignment question)

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 01:02:33AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2003-05-30 klockan 00.33 skrev Gregory Merchan:
> > Images 3 and 4 show pathological cases. Most commands are and should be
> > simple imperatives. Translations should follow the same implicit rule
> > for verb selection that English does: use verbs of less than about 7
> > letters.
> 
> For some languages, that's not even remotely possible. Many other
> languages are also more verbose by their nature than English, so even
> "short" imperatives tend to be longer than their English equivalent.
> 
> So even with a translation recommendation of "keep as short as
> possible", the guidelines and design also need to allow for, and work
> with, longer commands and commands with greatly varying lengths.

I miswrote. The translations should follow a rule _like_ "7 or less", but
adjusted for a common verb length. The change could specify a lower limit
as well. The important thing is to keep lengths as similar as possible
In English we have the common odd case of "OK" and "Cancel" - a four
letter difference.

The stock items should already cover most cases; any not covered should
be added. Once we have a list of items, then we should go through look
for actual large variance and eliminate it where possible.

If this proves intractable, altering the guidelines is not necessary.
We have the option of localized guidelines. OPENSTEP supports this with
string and interface files included in bundle localization directories.

Localized guidelines may be necessary already. "OK" as used in English is
suitable for OK/Cancel dialogs, information alerts, and error alerts; though
the meaning is slightly different. I see the Spanish translation is "Aceptar"
and I suspect that this does not always convey the correct meaning.
Grepping for msgstr.*_OK in gtk+/po, I see all of these locales using "OK":
de, el, fi, hu, id, it, ja, mn, ms, nl, nn, no, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, sk,
and sv.

It may even be the case that a word, such as "OK", should not be translated.
"OK" is used by (at least some) native speakers of Spanish and French to
convey the same meaning as the English word. Similarly, though not relevent
to any user interface I've seen, the Italian word "ciao" is recognized as
a salutation and valediction by native speakers of many languages. The
Spanish "salud" also enjoys similar widespread use. I don't know what
bearing this has on UI, but it's something to check.

For all left-to-right-reading languages where common button labels are
of similar size, the label should be centered in the button.
More information is needed about languages not meeting both those criteria.


Cheers,
Greg