Comment 10 for bug 311482

Revision history for this message
Steven Sheehy (steven-sheehy) wrote :

I noticed some translated strings did not have an underline (or '_') character to allow for mnemonic acceleration keys. I've added some notes to potential translators in Readme.txt that should help clarify the translation guidelines. There doesn't seem to be any way to add these to the translations page, so I'm pasting the guidelines here as well in the hope that more people see them:

Translating:
------------
To help translate LinuxDC++, visit our translations page on Launchpad at
https://translations.launchpad.net/linuxdcpp. When adding translations for
your language, there are a few guidelines to be aware of. This project uses
boost for its string formatting, so in some strings you will see %1%, %2%, etc.
format specifiers. These indicate the order of the variable in the original
string and are used in case translators need to reorder the variables for their
locale.

Some strings from glade files use special Pango text markup that should not be
removed or modified. For example, in the string "<b>Auto-Drop</b>" the <b> and
</b> is a special Pango markup that indicates the text within should be bold and
thus only the text 'Auto-Drop' should be translated.

Another important note is that some strings contain a '_' or underline character
that indicates the character directly after it is a mnemonic accelerator key.
This means that users can use the keyboard to directly focus that item by
pressing ALT and the mnemonic accelerator key associated with that item. For
example, if the string is "Default _hub encoding:" then 'h' is the mnemonic
accelerator key and can be accessed by pressing ALT+h when that item is
displayed in the GUI. Please try to make sure that all strings that contain a
underline in the English msgid string also contain a corresponding underline in
the translated string.

Another important note with the mnemonic accelerator key is to try to make the
mnemonic accelerator key chosen unique for the part of the GUI in which the
string is displayed, as best as you possibly can. For example, if you have
"_Download Queue" and "Finished _Downloads" both visible in the GUI, then
when the user presses ALT+D it is ambiguous as to which they will select
first since they have the same accelerator key. They may have to press the key
repeatedly to focus on their intended item. Proper use of the mnemonic
accelerator key will help keep LinuxDC++ accessible to people with disabilities
and help speed up navigation for advanced users.