Re: Translation and Keyboard Accelerators

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On Wed, 29 May 2002, Damien Donlon - Sun Microsystems Ireland - Solaris Software - Software Engineer wrote:
> Is there a general policy on translation of keyboard accelerators
> in Gnome or is policy on a per language basis e.g

I don't think there is a general policy for translation of access keys
(the term that the HIG uses for this type of accelerators).

My personal policy (which I think is more or less the same with what the
Swedish team uses) is that we use access keys that fit well with the
translation, rather than try to use the same access keys as the English
original. So different access keys in the msgid and msgstr are very
common. Our philosophy is that access keys should be easy to recognize,
easy to remember and have other qualities that are more important to
the vast majority of users of localized versions, than being identical to
the English version. The latter only benefits users of both English and
localized versions, and usually causes drawbacks in all other qualities of
the access key. Plus often it isn't even possible to use the same, because
the English character isn't even part of the localized message.
So for Swedish, you usually see this:

  msgid "_Edit"
  msgstr "_Redigera"

With non-latin scripts it may be a different issue. According to my
understanding, these scripts typically use the English shortcut character
as you described it:

  msgid "_Quit"
  msgstr "translation (_Q)"

Whether there are policies on this for these locales, I don't know, but I
don't think there is a gnome-wide one. Maybe one should be created?


> BTW - it would be very handy if a separate space on Gnome CVS
> could be made available to us to putback our translations
> for community review. Is this possible?

As Carlos already pointed out, a suitably named subdirectory in the
gnome-i18n module can probably be used.


Christian