GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 60590
Keyboard shortcuts displayed in menus should be translated
Last modified: 2011-02-04 16:09:32 UTC
The keyboard shortcuts that are displayed in application menus, for example "Ctl+V", should have their individual key names translated. The reason is that keys are named differently on different keyboard layouts. For example "Ctl" is named "Strg" on German keyboards, "Shft" should be "Skift" in Swedish, etc. It would be great if all key names could be translated by translators in GTK+, and these translated key names used in the menus of GTK+ applications.
Discussion in: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2001-September/msg00117.html and followups.
There is a real problem here that: - The keyboard layout of the user doesn't necessarily correspond to the locale. - There may be diversity of symbol marking within keyboards for the same locale.
Regarding the first issue, language used not necessarily reflecting the keyboard used, this is indeed a real problem. However, I think this is something that is hard to do anything about. Consider documentation - documentation in the language used will always use the key names on the primary keyboard layout for that language. So should the application interface reflect the key names in the documentation, or the ones on the keyboard layout that happen to be used? I think the former, since that is a lot easier to do, and to the best of my knowledge no other platform that I know about modify the interface like this depending on keyboard layout used (they modify after language only). It seems backwards to try to make this work for non-standard setups, when it adds a lot more complexity with little gain. Regarding the second, I think the problem is minor. Most keyboard layouts and the names of their keys have been standardized for many decades. There are some exceptions where key names differ in the same layout, but they are very few. I only know one (the Enter key on Swedish keyboards sometimes have an arrow and the caption "Enter", and sometimes only the arrow), but it wouldn't be affected by this as I see it.
Wed Feb 27 18:01:03 2002 Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> * gtk/gtkaccellabel.c (gtk_accelerator_name) po/POTFILES.in: Mark Ctrl, Shift, Alt for translation. (#60590)