[Ubuntu-l10n-eng] Gaim/Pidgin's buddy

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, "Matthew Smith" <smigifer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I translated Gaim into British English a few years ago (I can't
> remember whether I actually submitted the translation to Gaim), and
> had this very same thought. The problem is coming up with a word
> equivilant to 'buddy'. 'Friend' isn't really suitable, as it's a
> weighted word; not everyone on my buddy list is my friend.

Isn't 'buddy' just a colloquialism for 'friend'? In that case, your 
reservation applies equally to both terms.

As an Australian, I have no problems with using 'mate', particularly in a 
casual sense. It doesn't necessarily translate well to other Commonwealth 
variants of English, though.

At the end of the day, all such words have a similar meaning. That is, unless 
you deliberately select a more formal and neutral word like 'contact'. Kopete 
seems to use 'contact' for singular entries and 'meta contact' for an entry 
that includes multiple contacts (e.g. IM, e-mail, Web, phone, fax). However, 
Kaddressbook (which is used by Kontact) calls the meta contacts 
as 'contacts'.

Note that a change in such nomenclature needs to be made consistent throughout 
all similar (e.g. gaim/pidgin, kopete) and related (e.g. evolution, kontact) 
applications. I had never in the past noticed the aforementioned 
inconsistency in KDE, but it is something that we need to be wary of. I would 
think it better to bring up the issue with the KDE and GNOME en-GB teams 
(i.e. upstream) before changing anything in Ubuntu.



-- 
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls 
the past" - George Orwell
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