Re: RFC: Change "spelling checking" tab to "proofing" tab.

On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, Ryan Pavlik wrote:

> J.M. Maurer wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 14:07 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> >
> >> Hi everyone,
> >> It has bothered me for some time that we hide our
> >> preference to enable/disable grammar checking in the "spell Check" tab
> >> or our preference dialog. This is not an obvious name to look for the

Microsoft Word 2000 uses "Spelling & Grammar" which is a bit long (and
even longer in German I'm sure) but in a way a lot simpler and more
straightforward than "Proofing" (even "checking" might be simpler for and
grab users attention than "proofing" but it isn't as formally correct.)
The copy of OpenOffice I have here uses "Spellcheck" in the menus and
"Language settings" in the Options dialog but this may yet change if later
versions include grammar checking. I was hesitant to comment until I dug
up a copy and checked what they use, you probably recall I'm a stickler
for consistency.

Proofing might sound easy enough to us who are native English speakers and
fairly familiar with the subject domain of word processing but I fear it
will only serve to make things confusing for more people. I realise the
idea is to help those who wonder where the grammar settings are but I fear
we will instead get questions like "Where are the settings for Spelling?"

Keep in mind the localisation issues. Also consider how many abiword users
often seem to prefer using software in English rather than translated, so
ideally the English in the user interface would be simple enough for
non-native speakers.

I seem to be the only one dissenting about the change but I would strongly
urge you to ask translators for comments. (I'd guess if you translate
proofing and back translate it to English you'd end up with something a
lot like "checking" or "correction" in most cases, the specific technical
use of words like these often are lost in translation.)

Thanks

Alan
Received on Mon Apr 14 13:16:49 2008