[sword-devel] Swedish translation for Windows.

[Daniel Glassey]

On 19 May 2004, at 19:05, Chris Little wrote:

> 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.

Agreed, instead of ToolButtons it could be SpeedButtons which have text 
with the image above it. How does that sound?
If you find a reason to use different images for different locales then 
you can still override the default image, so you could leave that 
mechanism in. But has that been needed yet?

Regards,
Daniel