Re: [Usability]Should "widget" be mentioned in the GUI? (was widget style vs window decoration)

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Hi James,

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, James Ramsey wrote:

> is almost useless. "Control" could be a noun or a
> verb. As a noun in a short phrase, it may not be clear
> what a "control" controls.

> In short, we don't have a substitute for "widget" that
> doesn't involve at least some vagueness or ambiguity.

I'd like to add here that vagueness of GUI texts is a major headache for
translation teams. Translators can and will misinterpret the meaning of
ambiguous words, leading to incomprehensible translated interfaces. I've
seen numerous occasions of that problem. I realise this shouldn't be
the primary concern of GUI designers, but the fact of the matter is that
translators often don't thoroughly test their translations or if they do,
don't know the functionality of an app well enough so they don't notice
the mistranslation.

I'll take Dutch as an example: while there is no "one best" translation
for either "widget" or "control", I'm pretty sure that most translators
would leave "widget" untranslated (jargon) and would translate "control"
as if it were a verb.

my 2 eurocents,

-- 

Reinout van Schouwen			Artificial Intelligence student
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
GPG public key http://www.cs.vu.nl/~reinout/reinout.asc