Is "please" overused?

[smo]

The question is the use or, depending on your PoV, overuse of
"please". Specifically it's Thunderbird and Slovenian. But I guess it
applies to any Mozzila application and to any language we've been
supporting.

I know this is a multiple-factors issue, with "cultural" pretty much
at the top. My current decision is to stick to it, but a colleague has
commented the use of "please" in TB as "archaic". I can't simply
ignore his opinion: he's been instrumental for the OpenOffice.org SL
localization for instance, so there's quite some experience behind his
opinion.

I would thus welcome - across languages and environments -your 2c
about it: is "please" turning into an expletive, i.e. into something
our customers should better be spared/exposed to to a lesser degree?

TiA

smo

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 10/2/10 3:35 AM, flod wrote:

> We replace all personalizations as well ("Firefox has blocked a pop-up"->"A
> pop-up was blocked by Firefox", "Check your add-ons"->"Check add-ons"),
> using a formal/impersonal style that's quite far from the original en-US style.

That's interesting. English style guides encourage the active voice and
short sentences whenever possible to make the writing more dynamic, even in
"professional" writing. But we should definitely be following standard
writing styles in various languages.

--BDS

[Zbigniew Braniecki]

In Polish we definitely try to avoid as much of "active voice" as
possible. The computer software is a tool and has no free will so it
doesn't sound good when Firefox "does" things.
We tend to use the phrase like "It has been". So instead of "Firefox has
blocked popups" -> "Popups has been blocked".

We also avoid "please" which is replaced by the "polite form":

"Please, update your browser" -> "Your browser should be updated" (or in
fact, "It is recommended to update a/the browser", "Należy zaktualizować
przeglądarkę")

And we remove a lot of "you", "your" since it sounds redundant and
unnecessary. We instead use something that is between english "a" and
"the" since we know which browser we're talking about, or which
bookmarks, or which computer we just refer to it, without the term "your".

I generally believe that it makes all the sense in the world to go as
far from the original script as needed to make entities sound natural to
people. My mental check during translation process is "how would I say
it to my friend in my language" ignoring how it is written in English
and only then I try to check if I can bring it closer to the original.

The greatest challenge is gender here. We change the form of the name
(like Firefox) depending on the gender and role in the sentence. In
result almost every sentence with the brand name would require us to
hardcode the brand name and morph it into "Firefox", "Firefoksa",
"Firefoksowi", "Thunderbirdem".
What we do there is that we overuse the word "program" and declense it:
"&brandShortName; prevented this page" -> "Program &brandShortName;
uniemożliwił tej stronie".

This allows us to declense the word "program" and make it work with any
gender of brandShortName, but it sounds totally artificial :( That's the
only compromise we make from trying to sound humane and natural.

Cheers,
g.

[Marcelo Poli]

Just like other localizations, es-AR localizators agreed to remove "please".
In spanish, we use the formal "Usted" instead of "Tú". These are two
different ways to say "You" and that's enough to show politeness.

El 02/10/10 04:13, smo escribió:

[Alexandru Szasz]

"Please" is found when the user is asked to do something that he usually
didn't want to do (e.g. an authentication forms appear when he wanted to
access a page, he has to wait for the page to load, etc).
Leaving out "please" in these cases transforms the sentence into a
command. People don't want machines giving them commands, e.g: Try again
(I feel an "or else" coming along) instead of Please try again.
Having that in mind, in most cases I keep the "please" in Romanian.

--
Alexandru Szasz

[Robert Kaiser]

Benjamin Smedberg schrieb:

Even in German, it's not usual to have impersonal things like computers
and applications "doing" stuff in active voice or even use "My Foo"
titles (the L10n team is adapting those as needed) - and that's with a
language that is quite a near relative to English... ;-)

Robert Kaiser

--
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible
arguments that we as a community needs answers to. And most of the time,
I even appreciate irony and fun! :)

[Robert Kaiser]

Zbigniew Braniecki schrieb:

> The greatest challenge is gender here.

And IIRC, we have some work going on to make that accessible as well -
any progress on L20n, actually?

[Gintautas Grigas]

2010-10-04 22:20, Robert Kaiser rašė:
> Zbigniew Braniecki schrieb:
>> The greatest challenge is gender here.
>
> And IIRC, we have some work going on to make that accessible as well -
> any progress on L20n, actually?
>
> Robert Kaiser
>

Another challenge is grammatical case problem, especially in social
networks and chat programs. In syntetic languages, such as Lithuanian,
Polish, Russian, etc. names must be in correct case depending on
context. The problem is when names appears dynamically, e. g. personal
names. That is like plural forms for numbers, but here the problem is
much harder, because the grammatical rules more complicated that those
with numbers.

Gintautas Grigas

[Robert Kaiser]

Gintautas Grigas schrieb:

One more thing that L20n is actually fixing! Still wonder why I asked
about it? ;-)

[Axel Hecht]

On 05.10.10 21:39, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Gintautas Grigas schrieb:
>> 2010-10-04 22:20, Robert Kaiser rašė:
>>> Zbigniew Braniecki schrieb:
>>>> The greatest challenge is gender here.
>>>
>>> And IIRC, we have some work going on to make that accessible as well -
>>> any progress on L20n, actually?
>>>
>>> Robert Kaiser
>>>
>> Another challenge is grammatical case problem, especially in social
>> networks and chat programs. In syntetic languages, such as Lithuanian,
>> Polish, Russian, etc. names must be in correct case depending on
>> context. The problem is when names appears dynamically, e. g. personal
>> names. That is like plural forms for numbers, but here the problem is
>> much harder, because the grammatical rules more complicated that those
>> with numbers.
>
> One more thing that L20n is actually fixing! Still wonder why I asked
> about it? ;-)

Actually, names are really tricky, as those aren't exposed to localizers
in the common use cases, but stored in dbs. Now, that db would need to
be adapted by locale. nosql might be able to deal with that, but sql is
gonna suffer badly.

In particular if there are names for which the rules don't really work,
but that are just exceptions to them. I bet there are some out there.

Axel

[Robert Kaiser]

Axel Hecht schrieb:

> Actually, names are really tricky, as those aren't exposed to localizers
> in the common use cases, but stored in dbs. Now, that db would need to
> be adapted by locale. nosql might be able to deal with that, but sql is
> gonna suffer badly.
>
> In particular if there are names for which the rules don't really work,
> but that are just exceptions to them. I bet there are some out there.

Uh, OK, right, thing from DBs are indeed complicated.

[smo]

All comments very much appreciated - let me mention explicitely
Gandalf and Alexandru Szasz.

Now that I have you listening (g): one other issue, where I get flak
from fellow localizers, is my way of localizing "...<doing>..."
instances, for example "...searching...", "...deleting messages..."
etc. These segments are meant as a shorthand for present continuous
("...<somebody is/I am doing>..."), and not for a gerund ("...<the
doing>..."), so I consistently localized to the equivalent of "...<I
am doing>...": for instance "...iščem..." and not "...iskanje..." for
the "...searching..." example above.

Of course the comments were to the tune of "You make the program talk
to the user, that's ridiculous", but I think, having the gerund, i.e.
substantivized verb, in places, where something is happening, is even
more ridiculous.

Of course these instances just come and go, usually pretty fast. so
practically speaking, probably no big deal anyhow. But it would be
unprofessional if I did not try to do the best I can. There's quite a
few of such cases sprinkled through the material, but I would not mind
if I had to switch. I would just need some good arguments to change.

Thanks in advance

PS: I guess one could use "...the program searches..." prototype...
smo

[flod]

Il 09/10/10 05.58, smo ha scritto:

> Now that I have you listening (g): one other issue, where I get flak
> from fellow localizers, is my way of localizing "...<doing>..."
> instances, for example "...searching...", "...deleting messages..."
> etc. These segments are meant as a shorthand for present continuous
> ("...<somebody is/I am doing>..."), and not for a gerund ("...<the
> doing>..."), so I consistently localized to the equivalent of "...<I
> am doing>...": for instance "...iščem..." and not "...iskanje..." for
> the "...searching..." example above.

In Italian all "-ing…" are localized as "X in progress…" (where X is the
matching noun, not the verb): e.g. "searching…" becomes "search in
progress…". If there are width problems, we remove "in progress" leaving
only the noun (e.g. "search...").

Francesco

[Alexandru Szasz]

Those who first start to translate in Romanian, always fall in this trap
and translate things like "starting" with "I am starting".
That's not true, because there's no I. There's a bunch of code that
triggers another code and so on.
Everything starts with the user commanding, like pressing the power
button and expecting to see a working desktop environment after all
these processes.

Another approach is to substantivize, which is worse.

In Romanian this is solved really easy, but I'm not sure how to put it
in English right.
We're using a pronoun that's reflexive, passive and impersonal, „se”.

en: The page is loading.
ro: Se încarcă pagina. (you don't know who's loading the page, there's
no person involved); probably the closest translation would be "Page is
being loaded" (don't know by who, it's just being done).

I see something that looks similar in Catalan: S'està carregant… maybe
someone can confirm.
This form is used a lot in real life in Romanian whenever you're saying
that an action is being done in the news like: "work is being done on
the freeway/se muncește la autostradă"

--
Alexandru Szasz

[Toni Hermoso Pulido]

Al 09/10/10 11:47, En/na Alexandru Szasz ha escrit:

> Pe 09.10.2010 06:58, smo a scris:

> Those who first start to translate in Romanian, always fall in this trap
> and translate things like "starting" with "I am starting".
> That's not true, because there's no I. There's a bunch of code that
> triggers another code and so on.
> Everything starts with the user commanding, like pressing the power
> button and expecting to see a working desktop environment after all
> these processes.
>
> Another approach is to substantivize, which is worse.
>
>
> In Romanian this is solved really easy, but I'm not sure how to put it
> in English right.
> We're using a pronoun that's reflexive, passive and impersonal, „se”.
>
> en: The page is loading.
> ro: Se încarcă pagina. (you don't know who's loading the page, there's
> no person involved); probably the closest translation would be "Page is
> being loaded" (don't know by who, it's just being done).
>
> I see something that looks similar in Catalan: S'està carregant… maybe
> someone can confirm.
> This form is used a lot in real life in Romanian whenever you're saying
> that an action is being done in the news like: "work is being done on
> the freeway/se muncește la autostradă"
>

Bună Alexandru,

yes. The reflexive pronoun is the same. The Catalan solution is a bit
different, though. I think «Se încarcă pagina» would be roughly
translated as «Es carrega la pàgina». This would be used more in
dependent clauses (more usual in long texts: explanations or
documentation):
"Whereas page is loaded, you can continue browsing…"
«Mentre es carrega la pàgina, podeu continuar navegant…»

You can look up how we handle most normal cases of English gerunds here:
http://www.softcatala.org/wiki/Guia_d%27estil/Guia_2010/Aspectes_ling%C3%BC%C3%ADstics#Gerundi

As Eduard commented some threads before, the current version of the
style guide we use:
http://www.softcatala.org/wiki/Guia_d%27estil/Guia_2010

My 2 cents,
--
Toni Hermoso Pulido
http://www.cau.cat

[Julen]

lr., 2010.eko urrren 09a 11:47(e)an, Alexandru Szasz(e)k idatzi zuen:

>
> In Romanian this is solved really easy, but I'm not sure how to put it
> in English right.
> We're using a pronoun that's reflexive, passive and impersonal, „se”.
>
> en: The page is loading.
> ro: Se încarcă pagina. (you don't know who's loading the page, there's
> no person involved); probably the closest translation would be "Page is
> being loaded" (don't know by who, it's just being done).
>
> I see something that looks similar in Catalan: S'està carregant… maybe
> someone can confirm.

That would be "It's being loaded…" AFAIK, without explicitly mentioning
the word "page".

In Basque we use the impersonal form "Orrialdea kargatzen…". The verb
"ari da" ("Orrialdea kargatzen ari da…") is implicitly implied. This
translates to "Loading page…".

In Spanish this would be "Cargando página…", which I think it's used
rather than other forms such as "La página se está cargando…" ("The page
is being loaded…") or "Se está cargando…", which is the form that the
Catalan language is using.

But of course, these things are really language-specific, so although
it's cool to see how other languages work and treat different cases, I
won't take these comments as suggestions.

As an off-topic, the problem I see translating those "-ing" ending
words/sentences is that you don't always know if it's a verb or a noun.
The ellipsis denotes a verb, but this isn't always used.

This also happens with more words that can act as a noun or verb
depending on the context (e.g. "view"). So for these situations we
definitely *need* developer comments.

Julen.

[Toni Hermoso Pulido]

Al 09/10/10 12:50, En/na Julen ha escrit:

> As an off-topic, the problem I see translating those "-ing" ending
> words/sentences is that you don't always know if it's a verb or a noun.
> The ellipsis denotes a verb, but this isn't always used.
>
> This also happens with more words that can act as a noun or verb
> depending on the context (e.g. "view"). So for these situations we
> definitely *need* developer comments.
>

+1
The context is always really useful. However, I must say that often you
can learn it from the keys (.label, .title, for instance).
I guess we should make a list of cases when this is not clear in order
to see what could be done for improving it.

[Robert Kaiser]

smo wrote:
> PS: I guess one could use "...the program searches..." prototype...

What we're trying to do in German where possible is to use something
like "The page is being loaded", "Messages are being deleted", or
"Search is in progress" in those places.
I'm not sure if we're consistent in doing that everywhere right now, but
it's the most fitting way and we're trying to do it whenever such
instances come up again.