Spanish Edition feedback processes and content improvements

2019-Oct-14

This is likely to be an ongoing discussion as we refine the process over time.

Some initial topics for discussion are:

1. The divergence in capitalization status between translations that use initial capitals in every description versus those that only use uppercase when appropriate. Depending on what the current status of the similar discussions in the International Edition are, we need to consider future steps to complete alignment to an updated editorial policy that takes into account Editions that didn't use compulsive capitalization at the start of the term.

2. The long term need to extend the size of the term column to accommodate larger descriptions that are becoming frequent with the remodeling of the product hierarchy. There were a few dozen descriptions in the October 2019 Spanish Edition release that exceeded 255 bytes, and so needed to be abbreviated (mostly, measurement units in FSNs) to avoid extending the size of the field without advance notice and consultation.

Comments

Matt Cordell

Oct 25, 2019

Capitalization

I've always understood (and agreed) that sentence case convention has been because that's the typical application UI style and minimises any burden on implementers to make SCT look nice in their application. Applications with lower case UI elements are very rare. Some might use Title Case for some elements. But generally, Sentence case dominates, especially for dropdowns, search boxes, radio buttons etc. All the places SCT is likely encountered on a UI.

There's possibly a guide that says otherwise, but I didn't find one. The "caseSensitivity" value, provides a flag for developers who don't want the "standard style". Automated term generation in authoring tooling being an obvious candidate. But also something like a dynamic post coordination / free text like data entry system, (maybe like cliniclue?) - but such applications are in the minority.

AMT doesn't use sentence case. That's a legacy thing, that I'd like to address, but I there are some local obstacles to resolve first.

I can only comment as an English speaker. Other languages might have different conventions and preferences and style guides.

Term Length

AMT has a much longer term length too, for the same reasons. We've got descriptions approaching 2000 characters! Typical offenders are multi-ingredient products like vaccines, multivitamins, allergy things. Also, note: AMT uses mostly abbreviations for units too, mostly in the FSN. (You're going to use up 100 characters just on units, with 10 ingredients measured in milligram). We've currently set the term length (in description format refset) to 4096.