ubuntu-l10n-te team mailing list archive

[Arjuna Rao Chavala <arjunaraoc@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Thank for identifying inconsistency in Telugu translation in your email.
Telugu community has not produced a standard style guide for translation.
Few volunteers who contributed to translations might have used what they
have seen already as a precedent.

Whether to produce accelerator before ellipses or after ellipses is more an
usability concern, as the accelerators consist of English characters for
most indic languages.

My sense is that most people use mouse to select menu items when working in
native language, as otherwise, they have to change the input mode to English
if they have to use keyboard for menu selections.

Putting the English accelerator letters after ellipses and a space character
is more user friendly in my view.

One more point is that menus are disappearing (Chrome, Ubuntu Unity
interface application) and even need for hard keyboards are disappearing as
well with availability of touch interface on tablets. In such a case
dropping the accelerator keys may be more meaningful for indic languages.

Hope the above explanation helps
Cheers
Arjun


2011/8/30 Francois Gouget <fgouget@xxxxxxx>

>
> Hi,
>
> I apologize for bothering you. I am not a Telugu translator but I am
> working on the Wine project po files and I noticed something strange. So
> I looked for guidance in the Telugu translations on Launchpad and that's
> why I am now contacting you.
>
> So the issue at hand has to do with the relative placement of the
> accelerators and the ellipsis in Telugu translations. For instance in
> Wine we have:
>
> English:          &Font...
> Telugu:           ఫాంట్... (&F)
> Chinese (PRC):    字体(&F)...
> Chinese (Taiwan): 字型(&F)...
> Hindi:            फ़ॉन्ट (&F)...
> Japanese:         フォント(&F)...
> Korean:           글꼴(&F)...
> Oriya:            ଅକ୍ଷରରୂପ (&F)...
> Panjabi:          ਫੌਂਟ(&F)...
> (the above may have been mangled in the email so I'm attaching a
> text file with the same lines)
>
> Notice how in every language except Telugu the accelerator key is put
> before the ellipsis, sometimes with a separating space, sometimes not.
> But for Wine as well as for the Telugu translations on Launchpad the
> accelerator key comes after the ellipsis (which got pofilter to complain
> the ellipsis was missing, but then pofilter has a lot of false
> positives).
>
> Actually, after giving a second look to this, it seems the accelerator
> placement is not 100% standard on Launchpad either:
>
>
> https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/+source/gedit/+pots/gedit/te/+translate?batch=10&show=all&search=.
> ..
>
>
> So, is the placement difference just random or is this a strict
> language-specific convention? Is it the other languages that are getting
> this wrong?
>
> I also looked at Launchpad's guide on handling accelerators but it does
> not discuss this specific case.
>
> https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/Guide#Menu%20accelerators%20/%20shortcuts
>
>
> --
> Francois Gouget <fgouget@xxxxxxx>