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A few years ago, I was trying to standardise English words in an interface
where, previously, the developers had been allowed to abbreviate any word
any way they liked just so long as it fitted the interface.
One of the things I did was circulate a list of words abbreviated and ask
everyone in my department to write down the first abbreviation that occurred
to them. Some words had as many as five "obvious" abbreviations each - very
few had only one. Three of us then got together and picked the one that
looked "rightest" to us out of the list (with a bias towards "shortest" when
we couldn't decide on "rightest".)
If you have access to a group of people with Italian as a mother tongue, I'd
suggest you circulate a list of the terms in Italian that you want to
abbreviate, and ask them for a similiar consensus on what's an "obvious"
abbreviation. IMHO, nothing substitutes for native intuitions.
Jane Carnall
Technical Writer, Digital Bridges, Scotland
Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine alone.
-----Original Message-----
Does anyone know of a book that provides conventions for abbreviating
foreign terms in an interface? For example, my company is localizing our
product into Italian, and some of the Italian terms for the dialog boxes or
menus are much longer than their English equivalent. Is there a book or
reference guide that provides some conventions for how to abbreviate those
Italian terms in a meaningful way? Or is this more a matter of proper
interface design to handle the longer terms?
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