[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#171177: Back on debconf templates wording

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 07:55:45PM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Steve Langasek (vorlon at debian.org):

> > I continue to object most vehemently to this "sanitizing" of debconf
> > templates to eliminate the second person.  As a native English speaker I
> > find this form of writing altogether contrived.  It is every bit as valid to
> > speak of "your" system as it is to speak of a person missing "their" bus,
> > which they also don't own - your rationale is entirely bogus in English, and
> > I really wish you would restrict this campaign to the French translations.

> I have hard times explaining why I feel that such wording is not
> welcomed...either in English or any other language, indeed.

> I'm entirely convinced that, in any language, implying that the
> machine one is operating on is one's machine is not something that
> should be used in a professional operating system's user interaction
> message.

> When I come on such wording, I always have a bad feeling of
> "amateur"-like style... This is certainly influenced by years of
> professional writing in science, where neutral wording is like a
> religion (both in English and French!), but as I always come on such
> style in any literrature I find, I continue thinking that I'm not
> wrong in this.

I agree that avoiding use of first and second person forms is normative for
English *in the sciences*.  Computer use isn't part of "the sciences", and I
think a significant majority of Debian users don't have a background in the
sciences - to everyone else, this style of language is artificial, and there
are cases where avoiding the use of personal pronouns loses us relevant
information.

FWIW, I just fired up a Windows Server 2003 VM to find examples of personal
pronouns in the system messages.  It didn't take long at all - as soon as
the VM finished booting, it immediately gave me a pop-up using *first*
person, saying that "*We* have created a problem report".  Finding
second-person usage was similarly trivial; the first option I chose from the
"Administrative Tools" menu tells me that:

  Certain features, such as Remote Control and Connect, work only when
  _you_ run this tool from a Terminal Services client session.

And System properties shows:

  Windows uses the following information to identify your computer on the
  network.

You may of course dispute whether Windows 2003 is a "professional" OS, but
the long and short of it is that there's not really any precedent for saying
that this is a characteristic of professional OSes.

And enforcing such a rule is definitely inconsistent with all other uses of
English outside of academia, including those that are most analogous to
computer configuration: customer service interactions, instruction manuals,
web-based feedback forms, etc.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org