microsoft has localization style guides for dozens of languages, indicating how specifically to best translate english strings into other languages, but it doesn't seem to have any advice on how to translate status strings describing an ongoing action

in english, these are normally written as "Downloading (file)..." or "Defragmenting C: drive..."

looking at their UI string search page:

russian tends to render these using verbal nouns, so "Downloading" would turn into "Скачивание" or "Загрузка"

german seems to use a passive voice with "...wird/werden heruntergeladen" ("...is/are being downloaded"?)

french also uses a verbal noun, in this case "téléchargement"

but there seems to be no actual rule for why they picked each specific form!

as someone who used windows in russian, i know that they used to be very specific with their terminology, and the lack of "hey, how should people translate strings that are saying 'the program is doing this thing right now'?" kinda concerns me

#i18n #l10n