RE: [xliff-users] Best practices for dealing with mnemonics in XLIFF?

["Yves Savourel" <yves@opentag.com>]

Hi Kerstin,

Having the access key like "&File" in the text has some drawbacks (may cause problem with
spell-checking, machine translation, etc.) but many tools can deal with such notation, and
sometime even provide utilities to validate them (e.g. per menu).

There are also the cases of several Asian languages for which, often, the original access
key is included in the translation as an extra part: "&File" becomes "FileInJapanese
(&F)". If the menu item is provided as "File" to the translator they may miss to set the
proper translation with the extra text.

My experience has been that keeping things simple is often the best option. I would just
extract as <source>&amp;File</source>. Maybe standardize the prefix to "&" if another of
your formats uses something else ("_File") so at least you get some normalization.

But overall both ways you described would be fine. There is currently no recommended way
to go about those access-key.

Hope this helps,
-yves