elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Daniel Foré <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hmm, I'd say typically we should avoid referencing the user directly and state things in the third person. One example is "You don't have any music" as compared to "BeatBox can't find your music". In this case, we circumvent formal and informal cases of "You" by putting the focus (and the "blame") on the software. 

But yes, in general we've been talking about more extensive guidelines for language in our apps and our docs.   

Best Regards,
Daniel Foré

www.elementaryos.org

On Dec 1, 2011, at 9:34 AM, Christian Dywan <christian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Am 01.12.2011 18:17, schrieb David Gomes:
>> I said "use formal German, it's more professional", but perhaps we
>> need more specific language guidelines.
>> 
>> What do you think?
> 
> The topic is very language specific. To me it doesn't make sense to define at the level of the platform. Language teams should handle it.
> 
> Consider that German has syntactically analogous words for "you" and "though" as French. But for example in email context you don't use the formal pronouns in the same context. Now think of Japanese or Korean which have even more fine-grained semantics.
> 
> Another point is that if you actually wanted to define use of formality, you'd have to review and replace localizations in all packages shipped.
> 
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