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

[kbier@sybase.com]

Thanks a lot, Friedel, Yves and Rodolfo for your comments!

They helped a lot in coming to the conclusion that we'd better keep the mnemonics in the strings.

Thanks again!

Kerstin
Sybase iAnywhere

F Wolff <friedel@translate.org.za> wrote on 01/12/2010 03:08:46 PM:

> 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 (&amp;),
> > 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
>
>
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