On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Dimitriu Petru wrote:
Well words like Cancel or Save or Open or Close can be translated in three ways:
- the first is when you translate them using an imperative just like
you're commanding your computer to do that, like speaking to a person face to face (Renunţă, Salvează, Deschide, Închide, etc which mean (You) cancel, (You) save, (You) open, (You) close etc.)
- the second one is using a noun to define the action that will happen
when pressing the button or the control etc. (Renunţare, Salvare, Deschidere, Închidere)
- the third one is using a verb that denotes that the computer is
proposing you to do something by pressing a button or a control etc. (Renunţă/Renunţaţi, Salvează/Salvaţi, Deschide/Deschideţi, Închide/Închideţi)
I prefer the second way because I don't like speaking to a computer like you speak to your friend or younger brother and I also don't like that the computer speaks to the user like a person. The computer is a machine, it doesn't have a soul, people do have.
In Spanish, they use Aceptar, Cancelar, etc. but I guess that these are the infinitive forms of the verbs. Well in Romanian, verbs can be turned into nouns by adding a suffix and also the verbs can be treated as nouns in some situations.
I always assumed that when I hit the Cancel, Save, etc. buttons, it was equivalent to me commanding the computer to: Cancel what it was doing on my behalf, Save the open file.... so imperatave verbs would be the preferred translation. I can understand that other cultures might have issues with this interpretation, so I would defer to your judgement in this regard. Yes, the machine doesn't have a soul, but in this instance, it could be considered your "servant" (or, at least, it should be... some would say computers are "possessed" and have a mind of their own, but that's another story).
Steve Brown sbrown7@umbc.edu