Romanian translation

[Steve Brown]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Dimitriu Petru wrote:

> Well words like Cancel or Save or Open or Close can be translated in three ways:
> - the first is when you translate them using an imperative just like
> you're commanding your computer to do that, like speaking to a person
> face to face (Renunţă, Salvează, Deschide, Închide, etc which mean
> (You) cancel, (You) save, (You) open, (You) close etc.)
> - the second one is using a noun to define the action that will happen
> when pressing the button or the control etc. (Renunţare, Salvare,
> Deschidere, Închidere)
> - the third one is using a verb that denotes that the computer is
> proposing you to do something by pressing a button or a control etc.
> (Renunţă/Renunţaţi, Salvează/Salvaţi, Deschide/Deschideţi,
> Închide/Închideţi)
>
> I prefer the second way because I don't like speaking to a computer
> like you speak to your friend or younger brother and I also don't like
> that the computer speaks to the user like a person. The computer is a
> machine, it doesn't have a soul, people do have.
>
> In Spanish, they use Aceptar, Cancelar, etc. but I guess that these
> are the infinitive forms of the verbs. Well in Romanian, verbs can be
> turned into nouns by adding a suffix and also the verbs can be treated
> as nouns in some situations.

I always assumed that when I hit the Cancel, Save, etc. buttons, it was 
equivalent to me commanding the computer to: Cancel what it was doing on 
my behalf, Save the open file.... so imperatave verbs would be the 
preferred translation.  I can understand that other cultures might have 
issues with this interpretation, so I would defer to your judgement in 
this regard.  Yes, the machine doesn't have a soul, but in this instance, 
it could be considered your "servant" (or, at least, it should be... some 
would say computers are "possessed" and have a mind of their own, but 
that's another story).


Steve Brown
sbrown7 at umbc.edu