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danwent / Perspectives

Perspectives Firefox Extension
http://perspectives-project.org
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Decide on capitalisation of (localised) strings #140

Open bencomp opened 10 years ago

bencomp commented 10 years ago

During translation of some strings (in https://github.com/bencomp/Perspectives/commit/0a473930fd466a8d3c130e701fe9c74afec8875a), I noticed variations in spelling like No Information vs. No information (capital 'I' vs. lower-case 'i') and ... Notaries ... vs. ... notaries ....

If there is a style guideline on the use of upper and lower-case letters, I'd like to know and create a pull request for a better Dutch localisation.

daveschaefer commented 10 years ago

Hey @bencomp good catch! There is no style guide right now, so it seems like a good time to create one! Do you have specific questions or cases?

Pull requests for any kind of fix are quite welcome. Please note I may not be able to merge them until I finish fixing the MD5 situation in #123 .

bencomp commented 10 years ago

Sure, I'm not completely satisfied with my translations yet, so I'll hold before creating a pull request.

I guess my specific question about style is: is "notary" a special name within the Perspectives project, so that it needs a capital 'N'? And can any style guide be applied to the original English strings too? (I'm not in UI or UX design, so it'd probably be good to find some guidance for capitalisation in general before I try to push any style :))

daveschaefer commented 10 years ago

Hey @bencomp good question. So the term 'notary' is somewhat special inside the Perspectives project in that it refers to a particular part of our infrastructure; a particular component of the software. However, I don't think the english language usually capitalizes terms. I have seen capitalization in a few places, such as legal documents ("a Subscriber refers specifically to...") and game rulesets ("a Large creature has the following properties...").

Is it common in Dutch to capitalize certain terms such as nouns? I believe German does that. This wikipedia article has some further information, which is fascinating.

From this wikipedia article I believe the rule would be: 'notary' is a common noun (referring to a class of servers) and not a proper noun, so it should not be capitalized in english localizations. If it's common to do something else in Dutch, however, I'll certainly vote that you do that.

Make sense?

daveschaefer commented 10 years ago

Another thing that came up, that may be useful for a style guide: we should should not begin any messages (error messages or any other kind) with the word "Perspectives:". Several error messages did this, presumably to make it clear to the user what the source of the error was. But we have changed the code so that all messages are wrapped in code that will display "Perspectives:" at the start, so there is no longer any need to do this.