Menu
An accelerator key is a key on your keyboard that you can press to quicklyaccess a menu or function. It is also sometimes called a hot key, accesskey or mnemonic.
What is an accelerator key and an accelerator marker¶
If you look at the menu bar on any application you will see that the firstletter of each entry in underlined. Notice that F̲ile, E̲dit and V̲iew each havethe first letter underlined. To quickly open the File menu press Alt+F.You will notice that most of the menu entries also have accelerator keys, toaccess O̲pen simply type O after typing Alt+F.
An accelerator marker is the special character we use to mark acceleratorkeys when we translate.
Identifying the accelerator key¶
In translations accelerator keys are shown by various characters:
Application | Marker | Name | Source Text Example | Displays As | Note |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
KDE | & | ampersand | Save &As… | Save A̲s… | |
GNOME | _ | underscore | Save _As… | Save A̲s… | |
OpenOffice.org | ~ | tilde | Save ~As… | Save A̲s… | |
Mozilla | & | ampersand | Save &As… | Save A̲s… | Using moz2po |
Windows Windows RC files | & | ampersand | Save &As… | Save A̲s… |
In all of the above examples pressing A would take you to the Save Asdialogue box.
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What happens if you want to use the & character without making it anaccelerator? In this case the accelerator is usually escaped by using && (forKDE) or & (for Mozilla). E.g. “Mail && News” or “Mail & News”. As atranslator you would be free to drop the & and use the equivalent of “and” inyour language.
Selecting¶
How do you select an accelerator key for your languages? Keep these principlesin mind:
- Try to keep it similar to the English. This makes it easier for users toswitch to localised interfaces.
- Accelerators should not degrade readability too much.
- Avoid duplication. Ideally, in any menu, window or dialogue box, a lettershould only be used as an accelerator for one string. If the letter ‘T’ isused for two menu entries, it is usually not a big problem, but the softwareisn’t as usable as it could be.
- Review accelerators in the running application.
We usually follow these simple rules.
- Try to keep the same position as the original. E.g. “&File” –> “&Ifayile”
- Try to keep the same letter as the original. E.g. “&File” –> “I&fayile”
- Select an uncommon letter. In Xhosa the letter I occurs frequently so we tryto avoid using it too much.
- Avoid adding accelerators under characters with descenders such as lower caseg, p, q or y. The character goes below the base line and could cause thecharacter to look odd and the accelerator not to be immediatelyrecognisable. E.g. in KDE &g would appear as g which looks messy. It isbest to confirm with an actual test, since some rendering systems actuallysupport underlining clearly when the letter contains a descender.
- Try to avoid letter next to a descender for similar reasons as above.
- Avoid narrow letters like i and l.
- Make sure the character is actually available on the user’s keyboard.Accented characters such as ä might or might not be present on a keyboard inthe language.
- If your language uses diacritics under certain letters such as ț, ḓ or ọ,avoid these characters as well, as the underline might run through thediacritic. Avoid letters with diacritics entirely unless you are very surethat they will be usable by the end-users.
- No available character. Usually in Asian languages where a keyboard isWestern. Translate the word into your language and use the original Englishaccelerator. Ie “&File” –> “XXXX(&F)”. In Mozilla you can safely ignoredefining the accelerator in which case it will default to the Englishversion (FIXME: validate this :)
- Non-letters like numbers and punctuation marks can be used if they arepresent on a standard keyboard as is common amongst the speakers of yourlanguage. This will usually only be a relevant choice if it was chosen forthe source text as well.
Accelerator Clashes¶
If we have two accelerator keys using the same letter then we say that we havea clash. Assume that the following list are the top three entries in a menu:
- A̲uthor
- A̲ddress
- Available A̲tions…
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You will notice that all the accelerators use the A key – this is aclash. Fortunately most applications will cycle through the options as youpress A repeatedly. But what would happen if the 3rd item appeared first? (Thethird item uses the ellipses (…) to indicate that a dialogue box will open.This if this appeared first you would never be able to access the other items.
Here is a better choice of accelerators for the same menu:
- A̲uthor
- Ad̲dress
- Available Ac̲tions…
We now use A, d and c – there are no conflicts.
Examples¶
English | Bad | Good | Why? |
---|---|---|---|
X̲ Axis… | K̲hona ya X… | Khona ya X̲… | This accelerator appears nicely on the letter X in the English. The translator slavishly followed the first rule of keeping the accelerator in the same position. Yet the good version, which follows rule 2, is much better as it keeps the same letter and it also works for the next string which is //”__Y__ Axis…”// |
8̲00x600 pixels | d̲ikarolwana tse 800x600 | dikarolwana tse 8̲00x600 | This follows the previous example. The translator has continued to use the first letter of the translation even though the number work well in the translation so there was no need to change the accelerator. It also work with the surrounding translations that cover 1024x768, etc. With the option chosen by the translator all of these translations would use the __d__ as the accelerator which wouldn’t work. |
URL for P̲erl scripts | URL bakeng sa m̲aqephe a Perl | URL bakeng sa maqephe a P̲erl | You will notice that Perl is untranslated this is because in Sotho it was decided not to translate the names of computer languages, they’re really like brand names. So here the accelerator appears in English associated with Perl. Perl appears in the translation and therefore we could simply have transferred it without any worry about accelerator conflicts. |
An ~example | Bad~translation | Good ~translation | This example shows a common error of leaving out a space between words. Because the accelerator sometimes in your mind looks like a space its easy to forget to place the space between words in the translation. |
Checking¶
The pofilter tool has an accelerator test. This will check for missingaccelerators as well as accelerators that shouldn’t be in the translation. Thetool can tell the difference between the various accelerator keys used.
This will check for Mozilla PO style accelerators (&) in the ‘original’directory and output any errors to a new directory called ‘accelerator-errors’
Please check the pofilter documentation for more details on howto use this tool.
Errors¶
What happens if you select the same accelerator key for two differentcomponents? How do you check this?
Firstly, it is not a big problem. Once the application is fully translatedthese conflicts should sort themselves out over time.
Application Specific Notes¶
KDE¶
FIXME There are settings that can be used in KDE to check for acceleratorconflicts. Not sure if any testing is possible in Gnome, OpenOffice orMozilla.
OpenOffice¶
OpenOffice.org seems to have a system that will automatically determine missingaccelerator keys. What would work best with this system is to mark theaccelerators that you would like to remain static and allow the others to beautomatically determined. So keep “File”, “Edit”, “View” accelerators constantbut allow all others to be determined at runtime.
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