Re: Recommendations on not expanding acronyms

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 15:18, Christian Rose wrote:
> I recently added a new section to my guidelines (intended for developers
> who wish to produce messages suitable for translation):
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#avoid-expanding-acronyms
> 
> I'm particularily interested to hear from docs people on whether this
> recommendation or others in that document are in conflict with
> recommendations from the docs team.

I see no problems with this recommendation for UI elements.  However, I
think there are times when it's useful to spell out the acronym in the
documentation.  Documentation exists to provide more information than
the UI can reasonably accomodate.

In documentation, translaters have more flexibility in rearranging prose
to make sensible sentences, so I don't think we need to avoid expanding
acronyms entirely in documentation.

--
Shaun