Re: access keys

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sÃn 2005-02-27 klockan 00:18 +0800 skrev Funda Wang:
> Nikos> I speak for translated text : in greek _Open=_Anigma _Copy=_Antigrafi
> Nikos> so you can see the conflict only in Greek text (if you follow english
> Nikos> positioning).
>
> As a recommend though non-user-friendly solution, the accelerators
> should be the same as source text. i.e.
> msgid "_Open"
> msgstr "Anigma(_O)"
> 
> msgid "_Copy"
> msgstr "Antigrafi(_C)"

I would strongly recommend *not* doing it like that in the general case.
Access keys are there for the user, and are supposed to be natural and
easy to remember. Therefore, my recommendation is to pick a character in
the translation that is easy to remember. If in doubt, use the same
access key as Windows or MacOS does for those menu items. Look at how
they solve it and what access keys they use for common menu items.
Consistency is often a good thing, it helps if people move from one
platform to the other.

Trying to use the same access key as the original is bad in many ways:
1) It makes the access key unnatural to the users of the translation.
"How does 'O' relate to 'Anigma'?"
2) Unnatural access keys are often more difficult to remember.
3) In many cases, such as the ones above, the character used for the
English access key doesn't even exist in the translation, so adding it
is a bad (and maybe even ugly) solution to the problem.

Of course, if you're translating into a non-latin script, you still
might wan't to consider using latin characters as access keys, in case
the native characters are more difficult to input and use as access keys
for this reason. In such cases, using the English access key in
paranthesis after the translation is probably the best solution. E.g. 

	msgid "_File"
	msgstr "æä (_F)".

But if you're using a script where you expect it will be as easy to
input native characters as English ones, you should use easy-to-remember
characters that are part of the translation. E.g.:

	msgid "_Edit"
	msgstr "_Redigera"


Christian