On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, Hin-Tak Leung wrote: [...]
- some of the changes are over-eager: i.e. it "improves" on windows
and tried to be more user-friendly, but not exactly how windows does it.
I think there should be a notes on the translation FAQ: one is not looking to be "better than" windows, but bug-for-bug-compatible. Therefore translation is preferably what regional/localized windows (whatever version) does.
20% of the world's population is Chinese, I am sure it is easy enough to do a few screenshots of localized windows (be in traditional or simplied) and show how those behave.
There is a definitive answer (or "definition answers") to most of these translation strings: what localized windows (some version) does. It is not up to individual or group opinions, really. I mean, public libraries, etc have windows in the far east, there is no excuse to be wrong, or on the opposite extreme, "try to improve on windows", even if one does not want to get one's hand dirty and own a windows box.
The dialog labels and error messages are an area where we don't need to and don't want to be word for word identical to Windows.
We should definitely follow the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx
The Windows GUI is certainly be a valuable resource to determine which terms the users are going to be familiar with (e.g. will they more readily understand 'directory' or 'folder'). That said Wine runs on Linux and Mac OS X so Wine's users will likely be somewhat accustomed to the terms used by these platforms too.
But in any case blindly copying all the strings from the Windows GUI would be a very bad idea.