localizing gerunds? (was: Writing English for Translation)

["Monique Semp" <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

So this thread is reminding me of a topic that seemingly confronts me every 
time I write things that are to be localized: whether to use gerunds.

So I'd welcome a general discussion: do you strongly advocate using gerunds, 
avoiding gerunds, it depends (on what?), or it just doesn't matter?

Procedure writing advice seems pretty unanimous in recommending that gerunds 
be used, but localization advice seems to come out strongly against them.

Well, mostly.  In Leah Guren's presentation in the recent User Assistance 
conference, we discussed this and her experience has been that localization 
vendors haven't had any problems with properly translating her procedure's 
gerunds into the target languages.

So, Iâm wondering, is it that there are different best practices depending 
on what the original authoring language and the target localization 
languages are, or is there any way to meld the different best practices (for 
English authoring vs. localization requirements)?

I recently read a rather old blog post about this: 
http://idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/11/are-gerunds-in-topic-titles-problematic-in-search-results/. 
The blog post itself is quite short, but there are a lot of interesting 
comments.

-Monique 

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