Difference between revisions of "Mnemonics Localisation"

Revision as of 11:42, 14 June 2006

Mnemonics Localisation

To try to solve the problem of duplicate or unusual mnemonics in the product the base team has created a testtool script which is able to detect changes in the mnemonics menu entries which may erroneously occur during translation.

The menu items (first level) should have - as far as possible - the same mnemonics for both consistency and usability reasons.

Automating the mnemonic testing it means that initially we would need to invest some time in defining the mnemonics in the various menus. Based on that information the script would be able to tell us if and what has been changed from version to version.

Thorsten has now created text documents containing the menu entries with the mnemonics for

de, en-us, es, fr, hu, it, nl, pl, pt-br, ru, sv

based on the OOC680m0 build.

These documents need to be reviewed and can be edited (with a UTF8 Editor) - in case needed.

Here is an example of the text file for German with comments to help explain it in brackets:

• • • • • • • • • • ~Datei (Title of the menu)

~Neu (1st item) Ö~ffnen... (2nd item) ~Zuletzt benutzte Dokumente (etc)

        (Seperator)

~Assistenten

S~chließen ~Speichern Speichern ~unter... Alles speic~hern

The ~ character before a letter denotes that this is the letter that is the mnemonic. This will be underlined in the build.

Once they are reviewed, I will deliver them back to Thorsten and from that moment on they will serve as reference document to detect future changes - if any - in the mnemonics of the menu entries. This should help us to avoid duplicate or ununusal mnemonics in the future.

How the mnemonics are assigned

There are 2 ways of assigning mnemonics (quote from a mail by Joerg Jahnke)

One is a database job which we have for our translation database. This job can be executed for the CJK languages and will indeed remove existing mnemonics and create new ones with the mnemonic which is used for English.

The second mechanism is an algorithm which is running during the execution of StarOffice and which tries to assign mnemonics automatically if these are not manually set. This algorithm is working for the western languages. (end of quote)

The current situation

only 3 or more strings sharing the same letter are considered as a bug
2 strings sharing the same letter are ok
the bugs are fixed manually in LingTool by placing the '~' character to a different position

Improvements to the current situation

The main suggestion is to split the mnemonics problem in two parts:

1. mnemonics in menus - every menu item should have a unique mnemonic (no duplicates are allowed)