On 26/06/2008, at 5:25 PM, Zhu Lihua wrote:
Hi,This wizard converts documents in OOo-dev format and Microsoft Office documents to new Opendocument format.
Yes, that's what it does. That's why I'm confused about it saying "StarOffice" instead of "OpenOffice.org".
Why say it in that way? I'm not a native speaker of English, I feel its a bit incomprehensible at first. Are there any mistakes in the following expressions?This wizard converts documents in OOo-dev format and Microsoft Office format to [the] new Open[D]ocument format.This wizard converts documents in OOo-dev format and documents in Microsoft Office format to [the] new Open[D]ocument format.This wizard converts OOo-dev documents and Microsoft Office documents to [the] new Open[D]ocument format.Seems none of the OOo business. But language ability is often needed in our work, so I ask here, maybe I can learn something.
All three sentences are valid English, apart from the minor errors in the last clause. As you evidently know, in English you can abbreviate a longer adjectival clause (in OpenOffice.org format) to the name itself, using a hyphen:
1. documents in OpenOffice.org format = OOo-format documents but this doesn't work with more than one item in the descriptive clause.In a longer form, you can apply more than one adjectival clause to the same a noun:
2. OOo documents and Microsoft Office documents = documents in OOo format and Microsoft Office format
You can even combine the adjectives within the clause, again applying them to the same noun, by making it a plural noun:
3. documents in OOo format and documents in Microsoft Office format = documents in OOo and Microsoft Office formats
I hope this helps. :)from Clytie, who teaches English as a Second Language, so she enjoys these questions :)
Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n
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