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I'm developing an Android/iPhone application. My translator for English localization uses a lot of capitalization. For example, in the app menu, it suggests:

|Export Data to Folder|
|Prevent Screen Lock  |

I would simply use

|Export data to folder|
|Prevent screen lock  |

What is the best choice?

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  • You only capitalise proper nouns.
    – Brendon
    Apr 11, 2014 at 13:36

3 Answers 3

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Android gives the following suggestions:

Use sentence-style capitalization for all UI strings: “Words to live by.” Capitalize all important words in:

  • App names (Calendar, Google Drive)
  • Named features (Android Beam, Face Unlock)
  • Proper nouns (Statue of Liberty, San Francisco Giants)

Be conservative. Don't capitalize words that aren't part of a formal feature name:

  • Sim card lock, Home screen, not Sim Card Lock, Home Screen.

From Apple, with regard to buttons:

Use title-style capitalization. Capitalize every word except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of four or fewer letters.

Consider also looking at Microsoft's User Interface Text guide in MSDN

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To my knowledge, research has shown no difference in readability, legibility, or reading speed between Sentence case and Caption Case.

So this is purely down to style. My personal preference is sentence case.

A few style guides recommend the use of sentence case rather than caption case for captions. See this answer for more.

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  • Nice answer, is there any link that talks about these kind of researches about readability, legibility and reading speed?
    – Seraphim's host
    Apr 11, 2014 at 13:40
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    Can't cite them of the top of my head. But if you look at this answer and search for the Beldie article you should find quick a lot of related articles (the Beldie article is not tightly related to your question, but is referenced from many other research papers dealing with typography and reading speed).
    – Izhaki
    Apr 11, 2014 at 14:10
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App menus are usually capitalized like titles. Here are the rules:

  • Capitalize the first and the last word.
  • Capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions.
  • Lowercase articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions.
  • Lowercase the "to" in an infinitive (I want to play guitar).

Source

Other elements of the app (directions) are capitalized like sentences.

The style is up to you but these are the recommended styles.

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