Redmine

I'm not sure if this is an actual improvement. I'm not a native English speaker either, but the proposed translations sound less natural then the previous ones.

• "I'm watching" or "I watch" is more or less the same here. I have no real preference.
• "...I am watching or involved in" - here, the "am" would have to be repeated for the second part, i.e. "...I am watching or am involved in". Skipping the second "am" feels wrong. Then however, we would repeat the I am" two times in the same short sentence, which again sounds weird. Here, I think the best option is still to retain the previous structure, i.e. "... I watch or I'm involved in".
• I think the general rule for contracting "I am" to "I'm" is that it's (1) used informally) and (2) is only allowed when used with with a phrase noun (e.g. "I'm assigned", "I'm watching"). I think excludes the "I'm assigned to" case as "assigned to" is not a phrase noun.

With that being said, it is definitely a good idea to clarify the terms "involved in" and "owner of" which are not used anywhere else. Maybe the following would be more appropriate?

  label_user_mail_option_only_my_events: "Only for things I'm watching, I created or which I am assigned to" 
  label_user_mail_option_only_assigned: "Only for things I'm watching or which I am assigned to" 
  label_user_mail_option_only_owner: "Only for things I'm watching or which I created" 

We could debate about using an Oxford comma in the translation for label_user_mail_option_only_my_events. Prior usage in Redmine does not use one, although personally I'm a fan of it in general :) As for generally removing the use of "I'm" in favor of "I am", I could also work with that. We do not have any other use of I'm / I am anywhere else. I think the contraction would still work here though, although it it less formal English.

As for the assigned cases: technically we send notifications for all of the following cases here:

• if the user (or one of their groups) is the unchanged assignee
• if the user (or one of their groups) is selected as the new assignee
• if the user (or one of their groups) was the previous assignee and someone has just selected a different (or no) assignee

The possible phrase "I am or was assigned to" would be wrong here as it would imply that a notification is sent if the user was an assignee at any time in the past rather than only just before the current change. As such, I believe this can be legitimately summarized as "I am assigned to" without having to fully explain the exact rules for the previous assignee in the option title.

Finally, some other notification options use the term "any event" / "no event" rather than "thing". While this term is technically correct there, it may be surprising or unclear to people who are not aware of the underlying implementation. It may be a good idea to unify all of the notification options to use the same terms, i.e. either "things" or "events", or even something like "For any event on things I'm watching ..."

In the German translation, the term "Ereignis" / "Änderung" (from English "event" / "change") is used inconsistently in a similar manner. This could be clarified / cleaned up once we have decided on a common English translation.

What do you think?

I completely understand how you feel—I'm not a native English speaker either.
The reason I first wanted to improve this part was simply because I noticed an inconsistency between "I'm" and "I am". I thought at the very least, we should unify that.

As you pointed out, there’s definitely repetition between "be + verb-ing" and "be + past participle", and I spent quite a bit of time debating whether it would be better to use a consistent structure throughout, or intentionally mix them to create contrast (e.g., present active in the first half, passive in the second). Personally, I don’t think either approach is technically wrong. The grammar and structure are both understandable, even if there are minor issues. However, in terms of structural symmetry and readability—especially in a UI context—I felt it would be better to choose one pattern and keep it consistent. So I decided to go with the "be + verb" and "be + past participle" structure.

By the way, I also checked my suggestions with a native speaker of American English, and here’s how they revised them:

• Only for things I am watching or involved in
• Only for things I am watching or assigned to
• Only for things I am watching or were created by me

As for the question about whether "I'm" can only be used before a noun phrase—I asked about that too, and it seems that’s not the case. "Assigned" is a past participle, and "to" just introduces a prepositional phrase indicating the assignee. So something like:

"You are assigned to Group A."
should be perfectly grammatical.

Regarding the labels, I also realized that "owner" isn’t the only vague term—"involved" has the same issue. So thank you very much for pointing that out!

If we want to align everything with the form "Only for things I am watching or assigned to", I thought these might be better:

label_user_mail_option_only_my_events:  "Only for things I’m watching, I created, or I'm assigned to" 
label_user_mail_option_only_assigned:   "Only for things I’m watching or I'm assigned to" 
label_user_mail_option_only_owner:      "Only for things I’m watching or I created" 

Some people told me that it’s totally fine to use the shortened form “I’m” and to omit the second “I am” as in “Only for things I am watching or assigned to”, and I agree it’s valid. But if we want to avoid even small risks of misinterpretation, wouldn’t it be safer to say:

"Only for things I’m watching or I'm assigned to"
...just to be sure?

Looks like we ended up in a rabbit hole with this one...
But I honestly learned a lot! If there are any other native speakers around, I’d love to get their thoughts and suggestions too :)

Thank you for your feedback.

I have talked to our resident native (British-) English speaker too. She basically concurred your reasoning and confirmed your proposed labels:

• Only for things I’m watching, I created, or I'm assigned to
• Only for things I’m watching or I'm assigned to
• Only for things I’m watching or I created

I'm also quite okay with this and it makes the labels much clearer.

With these labels, we would then also need to to adjust the text_user_mail_option:

• For unselected projects, you will only receive notifications for things you're watching, you created, or you're assigned to.

Finally, we may still think about better terms for the "all projects" case which still used the form "for any event on ...". Here, the term "event" may be a bit surprising or unclear, although I can't really think of a nice way to use the above structure here... Thus, I may be fine with keeping the label_user_mail_option_all and label_user_mail_option_selected terms as is for now.

As I mentioned in the forum post, I wanted to also give some input here that has been brewing within the company I work for. I honestly don't really know how I feel personally about these but one thing that has been proposed is to get rid of the "I'm watching" part because that seems implicit in all the options and is a bit redundant.

The other thing was that they want to clarify for the created/assigned options that the opposite is not relevant. I know I'm not making this very clear, so let me just quickly translate these two options from the german proposed version:

• Only for things that I'm assigned to, ownership does not matter (maybe better: is not taken into account)
• Only for things that I've created, assignment does not matter (same here)

I personally find these a bit long, even with the "I'm watching" bit removed.

The suggestion for "all projects" was

"For any event on every project I'm authorised for"

How about something like this:

"For all things on all projects I'm authorized for"

I think, minus the points already discussed in this issue, this is about as much as I can extract from our internal discussion. Feel free to ignore if you think these points don't make sense, I was more or less just tasked with offloading this here and had no hand in the discussion itself.

I'll update my documentation change proposal accordingly when this issue comes to a full conclusion.