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David Shenton wondered: <<I'm dealing with a large amount of
translation on software screens and one issue that gives me a headache
is trying to squeeze translated text into a specific size on a button
field.>>
It's not precisely what you're looking for, but many of the same
principles apply, mutatis mutandis. Another key solution is to talk to
your translators (or colleagues in the destination country) to find out
whether the computer industry has developed standard terms for these
functions. Clearly, they must have faced the same problem you have, and
odds are good that they (with their superior knowledge of the target
language) have come up with solutions you could adopt.
<<One solution would be the use of graphics so with that in mind I'm
trying to create a more graphical button list.>>
This _can_ work, but the biggest problem with buttons and icons is that
they are unintuitive to just about everyone until they have been
memorized (e.g., by long experience using the same image in other
software). Moreover, people tend to memorize icon and button locations
more than they memorize the images themselves; you can see this quite
dramatically if you use the Customize function to rearrange a
colleague's toolbar icons in Word while they're off at lunch. Not that
I've ever done this, you understand. <g>
As noted in my article, icons should never be randomly placed in the
toolbar (i.e., the way that keyboard shortcuts were randomly assigned
to F-keys in WordPerfect back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth). They
should be arranged into logical groups based on functionality.
If you adopt the graphical approach, the way to make this humane is to
use tooltips ("what's this?" help) directly in the interface, thereby
eliminating the need to search the entire help file to find the name of
a particular image and providing an instant explanation of what each
image represents. Of course, then you'll need to ensure that the
tooltip interface is defined so that it's sufficiently large to hold
the full text.
You'll also need to ensure that you use identical text in the tooltip
and the documentation; that lets users research a function using the
name that appears in the tooltip rather than having to figure out what
possible synonyms you used in the documentation.
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