Re: [xliff-users] Best practices for dealing with mnemonics inXLIFF?

[F Wolff <friedel@translate.org.za>]

Op Di, 2010-01-12 om 12:16 +0100 skryf kbier@sybase.com:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I hope this is the right mailing list to ask these questions. 
> 
> We have started looking into providing our 12 (well, likely more :-) 
> different software resource formats as XLIFF for our vendors, which 
> involves writing our own conversion for most of the formats.
> 
> A discussion has come up internally on how to best deal with mnemonics
> in 
> our resources ( not shortcuts but  the mnemonics like the ampersand
> in 
> "&File" that are turned into the underlined characters in the GUI
> etc.)
> 
> We are looking at the two alternatives below. Does anyone have any 
> recommendations on which representation method to choose? 
> Method 1 seems to be the commonly used method, method 2 - proposed by
> our 
> engineer - seems to be rather uncommon. 
> 
> 1. use the standard XML representation as character entity (&),
> e.g. 
> 
> <trans-unit id='58.1' resname='DL_RK_FILE' xml:space='preserve'>
>        <source xml:lang='en'>&amp;File</source>
>        <target xml:lang='de'>&amp;Datei</target>
>   </trans-unit> 
> 
> 2. move the mnemonic letter into a separate trans-unit, e.g.:
> 
>  <trans-unit id='58.1' resname='DL_RK_FILE (mnemonic)' 
> xml:space='preserve'>
>        <source xml:lang='en'>F</source>
>        <target xml:lang='de'>D</target>
>   </trans-unit> 
> 
> 
> THANKS a lot!
> 
> Kerstin
> Sybase iAnywhere

Hallo Kerstin

The second approach is used by the Mozilla products, and have been the
cause of some headaches for me.

It removes the association between the mnemonic and the label, and can
make it harder to translate with. A second important issue, is that you
loose the ability to specify _which_ 'F' or 'D' should be underlined,
which in my opinion is quite a step backwards.  So if the mnemonics are
removed for something like
"Enable _foo"
"Enable _bar"
the 'b' in the second case might be moved to "Ena_ble" which means that
the choice (positioning) of the translator might not be honoured.

Keep well
Friedel
Translate.org.za

--
Recently on my blog:
http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/pootle-empowers-translation-teams