[Ubuntu-l10n-eng] Trash/Wastebasket/Deleted Items

[Tom Harris]

Honestly, I don't see why this needs to be translated. Trash is
understandable by everyone, and though it is not true British English, it is
not necessarily glaringly American in the way that an untranslated string of
"favorite" might be. the fact is the alternatives to "Trash" aren't very
good. No one actually says wastebin or wastebasket anymore, so those options
are as bad as "trash", in the sense that they are not a locally used term
either. We all know that what people say is "Rubbish Bin" or "Bin" but that
is a poor choice because "bin" is often used for folders on Linux systems
(e.g. /usr/bin), and we don't want to encourage people to start emptying
their /usr/bin folder. "Deleted Items" breaks the metaphor existing in the
user interface and renders the icons useless. It also doubles the amount of
necessary work as "delete" has to be changed to "permanently delete". The
other advantage of "Trash" is that this is the actual name of the folder as
the system sees it (i.e. "trash://" and ".Trash"), so it helps users when
they seek support, particularly on ubuntuforums.org, and makes it easier for
users to guess what the ".Trash" folder is should they discover it.

I also agree, however, that co-operation with upstream is the best way to go
on this, and seeing as how we already have a mess of different terms being
used, it might be best for now to stick with upstream's choice of
Wastebasket.

Just my tuppence worth,

Tom


2009/10/20 Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at dhanapalan.com>

> 2009/10/20 Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at dhanapalan.com>:
> > The problem is that it every really caught on, and instead of
> > harmonising everything we just made it worse by adding another synonym
> > for the rubbish bin.
>
> erm, I had meant to say, "it never really caught on".
>
> Sridhar
>
>
> --
> Bring choice back to your computer.
> http://www.linux.org.au/linux
>
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> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EnglishTranslation
>
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