Labeling of fields throughout CiviCRM

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Recently I repeatedly encountered a situation in which the same field is labeled differently depending on the function that I use:

• Source (Contact View); Contact Source (Advanced Search); Source of Contact Data (Search Builder);
• CiviCRM ID (Contact View); Contact ID (Advanced Search); Internal Contact ID (Search Builder/Import Contacts);

Even in English, that can be very confusing. If one uses CiviCRM in another language and the translations are not harmonized it can be even worse. Several of our clients told us of mistakes they made or difficulties they had because of this situation.

As there are probably many other fields with this problem I would like to discuss possible solutions. Of course I could simply go through all the strings and translate them with the same German string. However, this would be a lot of work, only German users would benefit from it and it would not be easily maintainable.

Another approach would be to harmonize the field labels in general - however I do not have a clear picture of the required meassures.

Any suggestions or ideas on how he handle this issue?

[Coleman Watts]

In 4.3 or 4.4 (can't remember which) I took some time to ensure that "CiviCRM ID" and "External ID" were a bit more consistent. However it seems there is more work to do. I agree it should be labelled consistently. For one thing, having a bunch of similar strings that all mean the same thing creates extra work for translators. For another, as you mentioned, it can lead to confusion and errors.
Are you familiar with GitHub? You could submit a pull-request with the needed changes. If not I can walk you through how to do it.

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Hi Coleman,

thanks for the fast reply.

So far, I did not change anything within CiviCRM itself but only in the localization on transifex. Since we are using CiviCRM in German I simply looked for the strings of the different labels (CiviCRM ID, Contact ID, Internal Contact ID) and translated them with an identical German string (CiviCRM ID).

However, that does not really tackle the problem of different labels within CiviCRM. I am not a developer but if I could help in another way (e.g. make a list of different labels for one fiels) please let me know.

Cheers
Fabian

[Coleman Watts]

Yes that list would be helpful.
Can you please post your findings here: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14078
Requires you create a login for JIRA if you don't already have one, but it's easy to do.