Comment 6 for bug 531486

Matthew, while I'm not a native English speaker (so I ignore if "switch off" is better for native people), I see the following objective issues in this change:
 * as Milo said, other OS/DE (kde too) are using a different word, you'll have to close many bugs asking to restore "shut down" :)
 * upstream - is this an Ubuntu only change, or are you planning to propose upstream? Unfortunately the GNOME 2.30 string freeze should be yet active, so I fear there not so much time to ask for the change and give positive feedback
 * translations - it could be good announce this change to translators, pointing to all modules affected, in order to help to update localized version in short time (or will have a LST partially translated in a major feature)

As a final, useless, personal note, I disagree on your "in this case it outweighs consistency with other OSes", see
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22shut+down%22&word2=%22switch+off%22
:D