In order to avoid these pitfalls, usually I get out of "sentence" mode to "label" mode. For instance: "Directories scanned: 12". Probably not well suited for all cases, but usually good enough for mine, though actually I only have to support pt-BR, es-ES and en-US so maybe that's not saying much.
Exactly. All this work, or just restructure the message. It should be acceptable in most languages, because charts and spreadsheets aren't going to have per cell labels. And it has the benefit of being easier to read and parse.
Also, it's a really terrible style to use first person in an app unless it's actually sentient. Otherwise it's annoyingly like Clippy, or just plain obnoxious and presumptive.
> Also, it's a really terrible style to use first person in an app unless it's actually sentient. Otherwise it's annoyingly like Clippy, or just plain obnoxious and presumptive.
I agree, though I found another nice use case, well demonstrated by Bret Victor[0][1]. I played around with it for a while and I find that describing what something will happen in a normal sentence, parts of which you can tweak, is a pretty good way of doing options pages.
