Brian Kirsch wrote: > On Jul 19, 2007, at 8:48 PM, Heikki Toivonen wrote: >> Mnemonics will be different with each language. It seems to me like >> Brian is saying that if we have "&Print" in English, then "&Tulosta" >> won't work as Finnish translation because there is no letter P and it >> was not marked as mnemonic. > > Yes, that is what I am saying.
I think there is some misunderstanding here. I just tried this with the Swedish localization, and it works. Here's what I did: I unzipped the sv.egg, Changed translated string in the .po file (&Arkiv for &File menu) and installed it. Pressing Alt+A opens the Arkiv menu just fine, even though the English original &File does not even have letter A. To recap, if we have the English original: &Print...\tCtrl+P this can be translated to the following Finnish entry: &Tulosta...\tCtrl+P The global accelerator is still Ctrl+P (we can use the accel= syntax rather than putting everything in one string of course) and the mnemonic is &P in English and &T in Finnish. By the way, mnemonics may not exist on Mac (?), so this may be causing some confusion... On Linux and Windows mnemonics are typically activated with Alt+<the underlined letter in the UI>, except for submenus where just pressing the underlined letter is enough. So if you have: &File &Print... Then pressing Alt+F opens the file menu, and pressing p will execute the action bound to the &Print... menu entry. > Nope. All changes would get placed back in to the Python code containing > the string keys. However, I would be the only one with commit rights, Mimi > would create the strings, and Philippe would be the reviewer. +1 on this plan, now I understand. >> In general I believe that localizers will be people who will be >> reasonably familiar with Chandler and the concepts to be able to make >> good translations. > > Well that is an assumption based on belief and not proven fact right? > > I think it is a mistake to assume all our translators will also be Chandler > power users. In fact, I think it will be quite the opposite. It is based on assumption, yes, and I didn't necessarily mean power users, just users. I have done a few translations, but only for software that I actually use myself. In other projects where I have participated the translators seem to be people who use the software, as opposed to just some people translating random things (although I am sure there are people like that). >> I am glad you got so many participants for the >> Chandler localization sprint, but I don't think you can draw much >> conclusions about the participants of that sprint and the difficulties >> they faced with Chandler concepts such as Item and Collection. > > Why do you say that? I was referring to the above. > that is not really helpful for the majority of people. What does Overlay > collection mean > to the average user. Instead if it said something like "Clicking this > button allows > the user to view the selected collections together in a single Calendar > view". +1 >> You mentioned that we should use wx stock strings when possible, and I >> agree. However, I found some cases where this did not work, or worked >> only on some platforms, or worked intermittently. >> > Can you give an example. My examples were for OK and Cancel stocks > strings that do work on all platforms. I tried to use stock edit menu entries Cut, Copy and Paste. >> I definitely think "Dashboard" and >> "Triage" need to be translated. > > I disagree and so would the entire localization Sprint team. > > What is a Dashboard? is it the thing on your car or a feature on OS X? > > What is Triage? Go look it up on wiki: These mean something in the English language, something that is related to the original meaning of the word and the function in Chandler. I think localizers need to find reasonable equivalents in their languages for these important terms. If they don't get translated, these things will stand up like a sore thumb in a localized Chandler, and make it harder for people who don't know English to use the application. Let me put it this way: what would you think if your email application had a button that said "Get 汉语/漢語" instead of "Get Mail"? > Dashboard and Triage are overloaded words used in a specific context in > Chandler. > In other languages first there may not be a corresponding word that > correctly describes > the intent of these features, second there may be a number of words none > of which correctly > describe the intent of these features, third the translator may end up > choosing the wrong > word and thus conveying a completely different meaning to the features. That is a problem with all translation. It is not unique to localization of software. >> You mention the need to be consistent with capitalization, but I must >> point out that capitalization depends on context. Still, I am sure there >> are some instances where we can be more consistent. > > Please give some examples. Mine were different capitalizations for > the same feature set "Chandler Hub Sharing" vs "WebDAV sharing". I was being generic, without referring to actual Chandler code. But there are expressions in the English language that you would capitalize all words when in title, but they would all be lower case when in the middle of a sentence, for example. >> Sure, it has been the goal, and >> I did a fair bit of work to make it so. But to get 100% will not happen >> without heavy refactoring in my opinion, and would run the risk of >> placing things in awkward contexts just so that we could maintain >> consistent mnemonics. > > Please explain more about the phrase "awkward context". I do not > see how having consistent mnemonics across the app will be "awkward". Mnemonics are limited to the letters available in the menu entries, and they are further limited in that the same mnemonic can not appear twice in a submenu. So suppose you have a submenu with entries To, Cc, Bcc. You can have t or o be the mnemonic for To, only c the mnemonic for Cc, which leaves only b available for Bcc, which gives you &To, &Cc, &Bcc. Now suppose in some other context you need to give a mnemonic to Bcc, but the mnenomonic b is already taken in that context although c is free. Do you now give c as the mnemonic for the second Bcc, or do you change the text in some awkward way to have more available letters, or do you split things into different/awkward submenus (contexts) to give you more letters to work with? -- Heikki Toivonen
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