[sword-devel] Swedish translation for Windows.

[Chris Little]

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> Johannes,
>     Thank you very much!!! This is excellent.  I know some people will 
> tell you that we need to remove the words from the buttons-- and they 
> are mostly correct, I guess :)  BUT we haven't yet, and you did it 
> exactly correct!
> 
>     For those that think we could just remove the text from the buttons 
> and i18n just the text:  What if our magnifying glass looked like a club 
> and was offensive to some people group, or our back arrow was really 
> pointing 'forward' to arabic readers?!  I like entire button replacement :)

Sorry, these are just lame reasons.

What if Search or Back were actually curse words in transliterated 
Arabic?  What if there were a Somali warlord named Search who committed 
genocide and we were offending all members of that ethnic group who 
Search attempted to exterminate?  What if back arrows were a symbol 
associated with evil spirits to Mayans?  Stupid, stupid, and stupid.

The 'arrows to Arabic readers' issue is a good red herring.  However, 
localized versions of Windows will still use the same button directions 
to indicate forward/back in MSIE & Mozilla, I'll bet you.  Arabic is not 
a right to left language, it is bidirectional.  Numerals still go left 
to right.

Read ANY book or guide or tutorial on l10n.  It will tell you never to 
put text that is intended to be read into images.  If you really want 
words on the buttons, there's absolutely no problem with that.  You can 
put localized text beneath an image on a button.  No problem there. 
It's smaller and it's easier to localize.

--Chris