Translation Guidelines (Template)

This is a template, use it to start your own guidelines document. Also update it with improvements you make in your document.

Capitalisation

Title Case

Title Case if where you make the first letter of each word capital except words like: is, are, a, an.

This is Title Case This is sentence case

If you see something in title case do you change it so sentence case?

Plurals

Gettext Plural Header

What should your gettext plural header be set to?

English style text based plurals

English style plurals are where the text uses both the singular and plural:

Please enter the author(s) name. Document(s)

In some languages if you had to use the same bracketed construct it looks ugly. In Nguni based languages we convert such sentences to only use the plural form, as we feel the singular is inferred and using the bracketed construct in ugly.

Punctuation

French Style

Some sentence appear with spaces before end punctuation:

I am a french style sentence ! Are you sure ?

We call this French style punctuation, should translators keep this style or convert it to a normal style?

Brand Names

Should you translate brandnames?

Do not translate these brands

  • OpenOffice.org * - OpenOffice.org, Writer, Calc, Impress * + Math, Chart

Where + means yes and - means no. You might want to supply the valid translations for all of these.

Glossaries

List the glossaries that the translator should use.