tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Dec 27 12:45:43 2003

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Klingon UI Questions

...Paul ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

This is probably being carried out on whatever board/mailing list you guys
are discussing the OpenOffice translation, but I'm not on there (yet), and
I thought I'd pose the issue I ran into myself a while back.

Back in '99, I was working at ONElist (we later merged with eGroups and
then got acquired by Yahoo to become Yahoo Groups), and we were developing
our own CGI templating engine (which got re-written in the public domain
as the "ClearSilver" toolkit, see www.clearsilver.net).

Anyway, to test the system, I worked up a Klingon UI, and started
developing a lexicon of terms for use.  I unfortunately did not keep that
lexicon around, which is probably for the best, since, in retrospect, I
was stretching my limits a bit thin.

However, the one thing that I do remember running into constantly were the
UI issues.  We were using a "tabbed page" metaphor, where you had a list
of items on the left hand side of the page, that linked to pages allowing
to edit those items.  (The UI hasn't changed much since its incorporation
into the Yahoo architecture, if you want to check it out for yourself).
Those items were relatively easy to translate; they were nouns, and nouns
work pretty well in Klingon as well as English.

Buttons, on the other hand, or menu items, in English are predominantly
verbs (with one glaring exception, the ubiquitous "File" menu item, which
is a victim of poor planning and mass adoption).  And this is where I
started to get into trouble with Klingon.

I suppose, one could say that Clipped Klingon is the best way to go for
the UI in general; the intent is convey the operation and be done with it.
But it felt really wrong doing that in many cases.  An "Abort" or "Cancel"
button, for example, ended up being "mev", IIRC.  I think I ended up
making most of the verbs imperative, as though the operator was commanding
the computer.  "Cancel" became "yImev", "Edit" became "yIchoHmoH", etc...

What do people conjecture the Klingon UI model of choice would be?  Would
they see computers as a tool (and hence, they would refer to computer
operations as something *the operator* was doing?)  Or would they see
computers as a subordinate, that they would command (lending credence to
the imperative wordsmithing)...?

Other ideas?

...Paul

 **        Have a question that reality just can't answer?        **
  ** Visit Project Galactic Guide http://www.galactic-guide.com/ **
        "I used to be confused, but now I'm just not sure."

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