Hi, I'm on the User Experience team for OpenOffice.org. My name is Elizabeth, but you can call me Liz. Although I'm American, I live in Germany. I came here to study and got married to a German (now a Java developer--small world isn't it!) shortly after I got my degree. I'm fluent in both English and German, so feel free to write to me in either language! (see contact info below) I have been involved in the OOo community from the very beginning and have loved every minute of it.|}
Contact
Mail: elizabeth.matthis AT sun.com
Blog: http://ux.openoffice.org/blog/
Activities
Current Focus
- Wiki Improvement
- Project Renaissance
Previous Focus
- I was the OpenOffice.org/StarOffice User Interface Linguist responsible for German and English text on the UI (up till OOo 2.0).
About Me
I'm American, but I live in Germany.
OpenOffice and Me
I've been working on OOo in some capacity since the founding of the open source project. I started working at Sun in 1999. I'm on the OpenOffice.org User Experience team.
Contributions
From January 2001 up till the release of OOo 2.0 (StarOffice 8), I was the linguist in charge of all German and English UI text. As a member of the User Experience team, I reviewed the strings suggested in every feature specification and issue (regarding English or German) for terminological consistency, grammatical correctness and style as well as for usability. It was always my goal to produce international English that could be understood by everyone all over the world, by native English speakers and non-native speakers. After previous years as a teacher and translator, I also wanted to make the English source text easy to localize and took great pains to educate everyone on the importance of consistent, concise, and unambiguous UI text. To this end, I wrote the UI Text Style Guide.
Contact
elizabeth{dot}matthis{at}sun{dot}com
