Punctuation is used to indicate various things in program menus e.g.:
And sometimes it is simply there for style.
Want a simple answer to punctuation?
If your language uses similar punctuation symbols to English, follow the English punctuation exactly
Ellipses are usually used to indicate that a dialogue box will appear and the user will be required to give further input. Compare the menu entries Save with Save As…. You’ll notice that ‘Save’ has no ellipse, the computer will immediately save the current file and needs no further input from the user. While ‘Save As…’ has an ellipse indicating that the user will be presented with a dialogue box, this time the Save dialogue box so that they can supply a new filename.
Make sure that you include all ellipses in your translation. You might find that a programmer has used 2 or 4 dots instead of 3: use 3 dots in your translation and report the error to the programmers.
The ellipse always occurs at the end of a message to indicate continuation. Even if you need to change the word order for your language make sure that the ellipses occurs at the end of the sentence.
We all learnt that sentences should always end in a fullstop. However, when translating add a fullstop only if one appears in the English. If you do not see a fullstop then do not add one. The reason for this is simply style, there is a most probably a reason why the fullstops have been left out, it looks better. If during testing you notice that it doesn’t work or that there should be a fullstop then correct appropriately and report the bug. But in the first translations simply follow the English.
Colons are usually followed by a space and are used to indicate that this is a label for the adjacent text input box. Please make sure that you include the colon and the space is required.
It seems to be tradition that the French and Vietnamese place a space between a word and :;!# e.g.:
You will delete all your files !
Name :
French also uses a space before ? – a question mark. Most languages do not follow this style, so be sure to use the accepted punctuation style in your language.
One exception is when the last word is a variable:
Are you sure you want to access %S ?
Which might display as:
Are you sure you want to access http://example.com ?
In this case it is good that the question mark is separate as it ensures that you do not think that the question mark is part of the URL or file name filled into the variable during runtime.
Some languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, sometimes use full-width punctuation marks instead of the ones normally used for other languages. It is also common to not use spaces after such symbols, since the full-width punctuation is usually displayed to be properly spaced. The following table shows some possible examples where the punctuation is changed, and the space is removed after the punctuation mark. The way it displays could be influenced by the fonts used to display this.
| English | Full width |
|---|---|
| word. word | 词语。词语 |
| word; word | 词语；词语 |
| word: word | 词语：词语 |
| word! word | 词语！词语 |
| word? word | 词语？词语 |