GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 70122
Contractions of language confusing
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:19:31 UTC
Contractions used in some dialogs can be very confusing for non native english speaking people. I had a friend over, who was playing around with gedit2. When he was prompted with a dialog "Save And Quit", "Don't Save and Quit" "Cancel", he was confused for a bit, untill i pointed out to him the "Do" and "Do not". I think a lot of other people down here (the netherlands) would make the same mistake, where as "Do Not" is very clear to them. Ps, the UI proposals, actualy sugest the usage of "Don't". This might be worth considering changing? link: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/proposals/dialog.html
I think that, generally, "Don't" is preferrable to "Do not". To a fluent English speaker, "Do not" will sound slightly stilted and unnatural in many contexts. I think people who have trouble with English should use the appropriate localizations instead.
It probably is also a matter of wording. I am a non-native english speaker, and I find the buttons confusing too: "Save And Quit", "Don't Save and Quit" "Cancel"
oh nice for mozilla to submit the form when I was editing it. Argh! Anyway. Read the above comment of mine first. So I dont have problem understanding the "Don't" vs. "Do not", that is clear. But "Don't Save and Quit" makes me wonder what it means. "Do not save, do not quit" or "Do not save, just quit"? On MacOS there is a similar dialog, it reads "Quit without saving" which we probably should use instead, I, the non-native speaker, had no problem understanding it. I dont think the "Don't" is the problem but just unclear wording ("do not and do").
I agree with Tuomas here, the wording is confusing, but not because of the contraction. I don't think contractions are the real problem, and if they are, we need to make sure GNOME gets translated into that locale ;-) Making the English sound weird to accomodate non-native speakers is a sub-optimal hack.
Well the nice thing about a label such as "Quit without saving", is that it solves both problems. One, it doesnt sound weird for native english speakers, and it isnt confusing for not-so-native speakers. So for me wordings like that would be optimal. ps a small note. Though i agree we shouldnt bend the language in such a way that it sounds funny to native-english-speaking people, it is important to realise that in a lot of europian countries english is the default language for computing interfaces.. (this due to the first computers being 100% english, and all major publishing and documentation and newest software releases being in english as well). So if we at any time can avoid confusion for not-so-advanced englishing speaking people, without having to suffer a penalty for other users, that be a Good-Thing(Tm).
This doesnt' seem like a bug. In the example, the contraction isn't the problem, and people who don't understand "don't" should be using translations. Reopen if you can be more convincing.