-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Salam,
Hmm, nice passionate debate ;-) Anyway, I have no specific preference but here's what I think. * When I first met a computer, the GUI was in French... In that language, it happens that all the actions are in the _infinitive_ form. * When I first seen an English interface, I was already biased. In that language, as you know, it happens that the imperative and infinitive forms are not distinguishable. So, for me, English people was using infinitive too :-) * When I finally met an Arabic interface, the interfaces were mainly using masdars (infinitive). So for me, nothing changed really. So, to summarize, I got early to use infinitive (masdars) in interfaces. However, recently, I started to use Imperative forms in translations and I saw imperative forms in GUIs. And I must say that it is not bad at all and one can really get used to it quickly. What I think therefore is that moving to imperative forms should not be an issue in itself. Given some time for people to get used to it, it should become natural. What I want to understand is why, in the first place, we should we prefer imperative form ? ie. Is there any references that talk about this issue ? Are there any links out there that speak about this specific issue (for ex: In English GUIs, strings are in imperative forms and not infinitive etc). Again, I do not prefer any solution really. I just want to have a rationale for us to use something rather than the other. I may be biased, but look, the French (and the Spanish if I'm not mistaken) use infinitive forms in their GUIs (not only the translated ones), so why should _we_ use imperative forms ? Just wanting to understand and make a constructive debate, Salam, - -- Youcef R. Rahal Arabeyes.org http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAOjIPHDRR6Cd0eSYRAiPwAKD8GYJVTFaQO4jniNd6eSuRiKF9gQCfXSDm E8sQkBVH6z3Zt5z44dDafdA= =RdUF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Doc mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/doc
