On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 11:40 +0530, Sankar P wrote: > On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 17:33 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote: > > > (The fact that "Plugins" is very hard to translate was brought up by > > a > > > number of people. "Extensions" apparently does not have this problem > > > (comment #8 on the blog): "I vote for Extensions. In Italian you > > can't > > > really translate plugin, thus one has got to let it untraslated. > > Every > > > time I use the word "plugin" I have to spend 5 min explaining it. > > So, > > > besides being very culturally insensitive, it's time consuming as > > > well.") > > > > > Since plugin and extension are effectively synonomous, > > what's to stop the Italian translators for using their > > "extension" word for "plugin"? > > I will vote for continuing the usage of "Plugins" over any new jargon. > Evolution, gedit, rhythmbox, gvim, anjuta all use the word Plugins. > IIRC, Eclipse, Mono-develop, compiz-fusion as well. > > >From my past experience, Using a new jargon may not be so well-received > by users. We changed VFolders in Evolution to "Search Folders". Still > there are a lots of people using both the terms interchangeably. And all > the code refers as vfolders, so developers end-up using VFolders more > frequently than Search-folders.
<off-topic> Well, since you mention working on Evolution, I just can't resist this. Notice the extra ">" preceding "From" at the start of the above paragraph? IIRC, this is used to escape a line starting with "From" in mailbox files, since "From" is used to start a new email. Why doesn't evolution strip this escape when it displays the message to me? </off-topic> > If translation is tough in Italian for the word "Plugins", as Shaun > said, why can't we use the Italian word for "extension" in that place ? > > Changing the term Plugin means, All the dependent user-docs, wiki pages, > developer-docs, FAQ pages, screenshots should also be updated. Some > distros ship plugins as seperate RPMs/packages. So these rpm/package > names should also be changed. IMHO it is too much of an effort with > lesser benefits. Changing terminology is always a bigger undertaking than people think it is, and the end result is usually far less comprehensive than people anticipated. Witness: * We recommend using "folder" over "directory", but the term "directory" is still very prominent. * We changed "shade" to "roll up", but among the shaders I know, none of them ever say "roll up". * We recommend against using "combo box". As if. * We recommend using "point to" instead of "hover". Yet another losing battle. I could go on. In general, I think "extension" is a far better word than "plugin". The question is, is it worth the bound-to-partially-fail effort? (Then again, it seems we're partially failing at maintaining the status quo.) -- Shaun _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
