Strategies for localising keyboard shortcuts

Question

I'm currently involved in a heavily localised WPF application and we've had a bug raised about keyboard shortcuts on menus in non-English languages. The bug referred to modifer key names (Shift, Ctrl, etc.) not being translated, which is easy enough to fix.

However, this got me thinking about the shortcut keys themselves, which are often based on the first letter of the command, except where this isn't feasible due to clashes or convention. When the command names are localised this link between the commands and their respective shortcuts will usually be lost:

• Is this worth worrying about?
• How do existing major applications cope with this problem?
• Are there any other issues to consider in this case?

Although this question was inspired by a WPF app, I'm more interested in the general case.

Answer 1

You should stay away from symbol-keys (such as * and <), since they tend to move around on international keyboards. See Wikipedia: Keyboard layout

If you plan on switching the letters around depending on localization, you should enable the user to choose if he/she wants the English variants instead. It is frustrating if I have to learn two sets of shortcuts depending on the language. (Same goes for cross-platform applications.)

Best would be fully customizable keyboard shortcuts, but that could be more for power-users. See Media Player Classic for an example.

Answer 2

While searching for more info I found an excellent blog post on this exact topic.

To summarise:

• If possible the shortcut is not changed
• If a key is not available on a specific layout we should try to use the same physical position
• There should be no link between application language and keyboard layouts
• It’s a mistake to consider that application language will match the keyboard layout. I’ll give you just an example: in Romania over 95% of the computers are using US keyboard layout and the other 5% are using one of the 4-5 different Romanian keyboard layouts.
• Some people are using multiple keyboard layouts - usually they are power users and we can’t ignore them keyboard layouts can be switched anytime
• Characters are safe to be used only if they are Latin