UI Text Conventions

UI Text Conventions

Guidelines

The points listed below help you to make sure the text strings presented to the user are easy to handle by interpreters for localized applications. One should basically keep in mind that user interface text strings (enclosed in tr()-calls) are potentially extracted from of the source code in the translation process and thus the interpreter does not necessarily know the source code context of the messages.

• Add linguist comments ( //:) to clarify where appropriate:

• We follow the Capitalization Guidelines of the KDE Project [developer.kde.org]

Capitalization Guides Short Reference

Here is a short summary of the above mentioned Capitalization Guidelines. Two major styles are used, book title and sentence style:

• Example of Book Title Capitalization
• Example of sentence style capitalization

Use book style for:

• Titles (window, dialog, group box, tab, list view columns, and so on)
• Functions (menu items, buttons)
• Selectable items (combobox items, listbox items, tree list items, and so on)

Use sentence style for:

• Labels
• Tool tips
• Descriptive text
• Other non-heading/title text