UI Guidelines: Thoughts on i18n

[colin z robertson <c z robertson ndirect co uk>]

Here's what I'm thinking at the moment about the internationalisation
of the UI Guidelines: In short, there should be a table of standard UI
objects with their associated localisation information and a separate
table of common terms and their standard translations. I think this
might actually be quite tricky to do right.

The term "standard UI objects" refers to, for example, the "Open"
option on a "File" menu, or the "Close" button on a dialog. I think
the localisable properties of these objects are limited to labels and
shortcut keys. Am I missing anything? (I'm assuming that text
direction and character set are properties of the locale, rather than
of objects. Is this correct?) Of course, this assumes that shortcut
keys are localisable.

So the UI objects table would be of the form:
unique ID, en_GB label, en_GB shortcut, de_DE label, de_DE shortcut, ...

The table of common terms and their translations may be able to
leverage or to even be entirely delegated to the i18n glossary in CVS
at gnome-i18n/glossary/. I don't think the same can be done with the
UI objects table.

I'm not quite sure what sort of style the guidelines document should
adopt for referring to these tables. In general one refers to objects
by their labels, but since labels change depending on the locale, this
mechanism is non-optimal. The best solution I can think of is to
continue to refer to them by the English label and hyperlink to the
relevant table entry.

I apologise if that's a little incomprehensible.

colin

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  rtnl  http://rational.cjb.net     c z robertson ndirect co uk
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