Translation of "volume" term to other languages

lassoan
Mon, 24 Jan 2022 23:23:04 +0000
Development

Moving a discussion that we started on crowdin to this forum for better visibility and to include more people.

Opened Jan 22, 2022

Andras Lasso

2 days ago

We have found it difficult to translate “volume” (to Hungarian, but probably the issue is the same for other languages). “Volume” word in Hungarian would just refer to “amount of space in a container”.

The problem is that “volume” is an abbreviation of “image volume” or “volumetric image”. Using a two-word translation would be too long (at some places would not even fit), and in general it would make the user interface (and talking about the user interface) a bit more complicated.

We are considering using just “image” as a basis for translation. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Andrey Fedorov (andrey.fedorov)

4 hours ago

We have the same issue with the Russian translation. The problem with using just “image” is that the English version of “image” is also present in Slicer, and we will end up using the same non-English concept for two different English concepts in the same interface. But I do not have a better idea, other than using “volumetric image”, which will lead to all those issues you summarized.

Andras Lasso

2 hours ago

“Image” is just used at 16 places in Slicer core (maybe a few ten more if we also extract strings from CLI and Python modules). In many of these cases it is used interchangeably with “Volume”. “Image” can be used everywhere instead of “volume”.

I guess your concern is that “volume” may suggest that a multi-slice volume is expected and not a single-slice volume. There are places where this distinction would make things less clear (for example, when you right-click on a slice view then one of the actions is “Copy image”, which gives a hint that it probably copies a 2D image (screenshot) and not the whole volumetric image). However, the number of these special cases are so low that it should be possible to address them by rephrasing the text or adding tooltip.

By the way, I’ve checked a few other software (ITK-Snap, MITK, Weasis, OsiriX) and all of them seem to just use “image” for both 2D and volumetric images. The “volume” term is not used in libraries either - VTK and ITK use “image”, except in some comments or some class documentations. So, probably we should switch to “image” not just in translations but in English, too.

Andrey Fedorov (andrey.fedorov)

2 hours ago

I guess your concern is that “volume” may suggest that a multi-slice volume is expected and not a single-slice volume.

Yes, exactly. My personal preference would be to maintain that distinction.

Andras Lasso

43 minutes ago

We actually don’t rely on this distinction now. In the current Slicer message list of 2600 terms we only use “image” 3 times to refer to a 2D image (in the other 20 or so occurrences, it refers to a volume). Therefore, basically no information would be lost, we could just document that in Slicer, as in most (if not all) other medical image computing software, image may refer to 2D or volumetric images.

18 posts - 6 participants