Style Guidelines

Tone

We expect all Evernote clients to reflect the same friendly tone and style as our English-language versions. Of course, we are aware of possible cultural differences, so please employ a style that would be considered polite in your language of choice.

When choosing between sticking to the original wording as much as possible and using your judgement and adapting the tone for a more natural translation, choose the latter.

Try to avoid wordy descriptions and overly technical terminology.

Product Names and Trademarks

Do not translate trademarks held by Evernote or other companies and organizations. Examples include: Microsoft, Windows, Windows Mobile, Apple, Mac OS, iPhone, RIM, BlackBerry, Google, Palm Pre, Evernote, and numerous others. Be sure to observe all trademark usage requirements, which can usually be found on company websites.

When you translate strings in our applications, we try to provide hints near the translatable string listing trademarks found in the string. When it comes to translating the names of Evernote software clients, you only need to translate the 'for' preposition, for example: in German, 'Evernote for Windows' will be translated as 'Evernote für Windows'.

Placeholders and Tags

Our software clients and website are built using different programming languages. Each language has its own placeholder formats used to substitute real values into messages. These placeholders must be preserved unless otherwise indicated. The same applies to HTML tags, which can be found in some strings. When you translate strings in our applications, we give hints about placeholders. Below are some examples of placeholder strings in different clients:

  1. Windows, Windows Mobile, iPhone: %s, %d, %i, %u, %%
  2. Mac: {0}, {1}, ..., @{0}, @{parameterName}
  3. iPhone: %1$i, nf#, s#, u#

Translating Accelerators

When translating captions for UI elements such as buttons, labels and menu items in Windows, Windows Mobile and Windows.Net applications, some characters can be marked as accelerators to ease keyboard navigation. Such characters always have "&" or "_" prefixes before them and will appear underlined in the user interface:

  • Windows and Windows Mobile example: &Cut; C&opy; &Paste will render as Cut, Copy, Paste
  • Sometimes in Windows we use "_" instead of "&": _Cut; C_opy; _Paste will render the same way: Cut, Copy, Paste

When choosing a character as an accelerator in your translated caption, please keep in mind that accelerators must be unique across a menu or submenu or in a dialog (or tab). You can look into other translations for that menu or dialog and see which accelerators are already used.