/me was stupid enough to send this somewhere else a few hours ago without noticing... ;/ On 5/11/08, ¡ElCheVive! <elchevive68@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all!

A have a question about the capitalization used in menus, etc. Is there any restriction for us, translators, to use our own standard? (eg. without capitalize the first letter - "Save As" -> "Save as"(translated of course)).

I'm asking because I didn't found any recomendation for translators in the openSUSE Style Guide and because we at Brazil are starting a discution wich involve the translators of the major distros/programs (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, openSUSE, Fedora, LDP, etc) about this theme.

I do not think that this is an openSUSE-specific issue. These things tend to be pretty generic, e.g., as you are probably aware, English uses the so-called "headline case", "headline-style capitalization" or "title-style capitalization" for headlines and titles, which is pretty complex ;-), but looks (at least approximately :-)) like this: Leopard Broke Out of FreeBSD Jail, Escaped from Apple Zoo and Killed Several Penguins Along the Way This capitalization was adopted for menu items a long time ago by Apple, MS, &co. and GNU/Linux software (graphical, with menus) just sticks to the rules that have been here before. You can find some of the most important rules here (for example): http://my.opera.com/revised/blog/2006/11/02/revised-intro - pretty complex, is it not? I hope I got it correct. ;-) Yet as the orthography rules for the Earth's languages vary almost as much as their grammars and vocabularies do, this way of writing headlines and titles is of little consequence to other languages than English. On top of that, while the first English-speaking-and-writing UI designers decided to use the headline style of their mother tongue for menu items, there is no reason for me to believe that this is a general case for all languages. Other languages may very well be using different rules for menu items than they have developed for headlines in writing, the latter issue being centuries older. For example, in Czech, we *are* writing menu items in a way that could be considered a "headline-style capitalization", but as this is a rule as simple as "Write the first letter of the first word in uppercase and leave the rest as it is, taking capital letters for proper names (and other important elements that you never write in lowercase) into consideration, of course", it is not too surprising that we have decided on using this for menu items, as we are already using it throughout the whole language: We write sentences with the first letter in uppercase and end them with a full stop, and we write titles the same way, only with the full stop missing. So it is not strictly a rule for headlines. I suggest you take a look at other Brazilian software, especially at software from Apple and Microsoft, as the local branches of these companies tend to closely cooperate with language-responsible institutions of the respective countries. This is the case at least in Czech Republic, where Microsoft, for example, has authored the Czech localization style guide in close and lenghty cooperation with the particular Czech institution that is considered responsible for keeping our language in shape. The result is probably one of the least bug-ridden contributions of Microsoft to our environment :-), as the language guide turns out to be very well accepted among the language experts. You might also be able to find similar documents for Brazilian Portuguese - but I cannot help you with that, your language is hardly my area of expertise. Here, you are one of the few experts on BP, but I wish you good luck. :-) Hope this helps. Best Regards, Jakub Hegenbart --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org