User Interface German – Detail

For the German UI (and maybe other languages as well) the current context menu that comes up on right-clicking and activating an entry is confusing. Keywords for actions sometimes are at the beginning of the menu point (where they should be) and sometimes not.

I came accross this, when showing Zotero to new users, who were confused by Menu entries such as "Ausgewählten Eintrag duplizieren", where the major action "duplizieren", the keyword, that they were looking for, is at the end and not in the beginning. And I recalled that in the beginning I had the problem myself.

New Proposal:

PDF anzeigen
Datei anzeigen
-
Notiz hinzufügen
Anhang hinzufügen
-
Duplizieren
Papierkorb…
-
Exportieren…
Literaturverzeichnis erstellen…
Bericht…


IMHO it is also self-explaining that when activating an entry with right-click, the action refers to the individual entry, so having the word "Eintrag" inconsistently at different positions within each menu point is pointless.

Working a lot with this context menu I also noted, that some of the points might get keybord shortcuts, especially duplicate, export and Literaturverzeichnis.
  • I don't typically teach Zotero in German so I'm not sure what's more likely to cause confusion -- the position of the key term or the lack of "Eintrag"/item (i.e. is it indeed self-explanatory that the menu refers to items?) @zuphilip do you have any view or experience on this?
    Generally shortening the menu entries for German sounds worthwhile to me.
  • In English there are always the verbs at the beginning: show online, add note, duplicate item, move item to trash. That does not work equally in German and therefore we have always the verbs at the end: Online anzeigen, Notiz hinzufügen, Ausgewählter Eintrag duplizieren, Eintrag in Paperkorb verschieben.

    Moreover, there are different labels if you select more than one entry, e.g. Duplicate items = Ausgwählte Einträge duplizieren.

    First, I would say that "ausgewählt" = selected we also don't need in German.

    I would also vote for deleting the "Eintrag/Einträge", but shouldn't we do this first in English labels then? Something like "duplicate" instead of "duplicate item(s)" and "move to trash" instead of "move item(s) to trash". CC @dstillman

    > is it indeed self-explanatory that the menu refers to items?

    I would say yes. Isn't it common that the context menue provides you e.g. "copy" command without indicating that it will copy the currently selected text? Moreover, we already have this for some context menue entries, e.g. show PDF instead of show PDF of the selected entry.

    If we delete "ausgewählter Eintrag" overall, then we are almost at the initial proposal. But the reduction "Papierkorb..." = "Trash..." is too much for me and I would prefer "In Papierkorb verschieben..." = "Move to trash...".
  • Yes, I agree with that -- "Papierkorb" is indeed a bit too reductive, but the rest works.

    I was wondering the same about the English "items" but will leave that for Dan to decide. I'll try to change the German translations over the weekend so they make it into the next Zotero version.
  • I would also vote for deleting the "Eintrag/Einträge", but shouldn't we do this first in English labels then? Something like "duplicate" instead of "duplicate item(s)" and "move to trash" instead of "move item(s) to trash". CC @dstillman
    There's an open PR for that, though I'm still a little conflicted about some of them where it feels a bit more like the name of a specific Zotero action than a general command.
  • Removing “items” and otherwise reducing verbosity of the context menu was the subject of a pull request a while back
  • edited March 3, 2019
    > There's an open PR for that, though I'm still a little conflicted about some of them where it feels a bit more like the name of a specific Zotero action than a general command.

    Possibly some actions like "Create Bibliography" are more Zotero specific, but I don't see that they are unclear when we reduce the labels. Isn't it a general pattern, that the actions in the context menu like "copy", "delete", "open", "compress" will always apply to all the selected things? Here it would be the same: The user selects one or several items and then click on "Create Bibliography" in the context menu, which will create a bibliography on the selected items. Similar for "Generate Report".

    In the edit menue there is already the label "Copy Citation" and "Copy Bibliography" without mentioning the selected items. Moreover, the word plugin also has the label "Add/edit bibliography" without mentioning that it will do that based on the citations used in the current document.
  • Agreed. I don’t think that any of these shortened labels are ambiguous.
  • OK, I think we covered all the ones listed above. I went ahead and removed "Eintrag" in German even if it´s still in the English strings. As per discussion above, "Move to Trash" is "In Papierkorb verschieben". Only other difference to above suggestions is that I used "Bericht erstellen" instead of the suggested "Bericht..." -- this is analogous to the suggested Literaturverzeichnis discussion.
  • Thanks everybody. Looking forward to see the changes.
  • Hi,

    revisiting my original question again, I note that there was a second proposal in it, which I would like to discuss again:

    "Working a lot with this context menu I also noted, that some of the points might get keybord shortcuts, especially duplicate, export and Literaturverzeichnis."

    Would that be possible?

    best Francis
  • You can customize keyboard shortcuts for most Zotero functions with the Zutilo plugin.
  • Thanks for the answer. This may be very much the "philosphy" of Zotero, yet from a User-Perspective I would prefer to have these shortcuts already pre-installed, the same way as I have them for Copy, Past etc.

    Which brings up the question, why "Duplicate" is not under the Edit menu, just in the contextual menu in the first place.
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