Re: Translation of shortcuts

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Hi Cédric,
you computer clock seems wrong, or your mail has been stuck in a mail
server for many months. :)
See below for my answer.


tor 2000-08-10 klockan 16.44 skrev "PINEAU, Cédric":
>     Can someone tell me how to translate 
>  
> "_Next page"  in french ?
>  
> "Page Suivante" can't use the same shortcut, which is a hardcoded thing,
> am I right ?

No.


> Or does "Page _Suivante" leads the app to recognize 's' as the actual
> shortcut ?

Yes.


> In one word, are shortcuts compatible with translation ?

Yes, this type of shortcut is marked for translation for a reason -- so
that it can get translated. Otherwise there wouldn't be much point in
marking it for translation.

The underscore marks the shortcut character (or "access key", as it's
called in the human interface guidelines of GNOME). The character to the
right of it becomes the underlined shortcut key in the GUI; the shortcut
that you can usually use Alt+<shortcut key> to activate. In the "_File"
example, it's so that you can activate the "File" menu from the keyboard
by pressing Alt+F.

When you localize these shortcut keys, it's of course a bonus if you can
use the same as in the English original, but I think you shouldn't focus
on that. After all, it's probably only a minority that switches between
English and localized versions of the interface, so it's more important
to make the shortcuts suitable for those that often uses the localized
version. A good shortcut is easy to remember and should of course not
conflict with other shortcuts.

Some guidelines I typically follow when assigning shortcuts:

* Look if this label or menu is present in other environments localized
into your language and what shortcut character is used there. I.e. if
you don't know what shortcut character to use in your translation of
"_File", then look at GNOME in your language, KDE in your language,
Windows in your language, MacOS in your language, etc., and see what
shortcuts they use for this menu label.

* Use the first character of the word. The first character is easy to
spot and therefore usually also easy to remember. Example:

  msgid "_Edit"
  msgstr "_Redigera"

This is what I use in Swedish for this message. I could have used "e" as
the shortcut here aswell, but "R" is easier to remember in this case.

* Alternatively, use a rare character. If "x" is a very rare character
in your language and the translation of this particular message happens
to have it, go with that. It's probably easy to remember since it's an
"odd" character, and it is less likely to conflict with other shortcuts.
If this translation doesn't have any particularily rare characters, go
with the other rules above.

* If it's a sentence, use a character in the most important word. By
this I mean that if the original message is "The proxy server for your
machine", place the shortcut in "proxy" using one of the rules above,
since "proxy" is the word this message is all about. This helps
remembering the shortcut.

For languages that don't use latin glyphs in their script, it's a common
practice to place the original shortcut character in the message at the
end of the message inside (). Example:

  msgid "_File"
  msgstr "xxxxxx (_F)"

(where "xxxxxx" are non-latin glyphs).


Christian