Pidgin is string frozen!

[Ambrose LI]

2011/3/9 Mark Doliner <mark at kingant.net>:
> You're not clueless--this is actually intentional.  The code in Pidgin
> that displays these strings automatically prepends an underscore to
> the beginning of the translated version of the string, so that the
> first letter is automatically set as the accelerator key.
>
> Why do we do this, you ask?  The strings in question come from the
> libpurple source code.  libpurple is our UI agnostic backend library
> responsible for connecting to the various IM networks.  Using an
> underscore to signify an accelerator key is a GTK-specific nuance.
> Other UIs, like Finch and Adium, must strip this underscore from the
> string before displaying it, which is a little cumbersome for them.

But wouldn't this cause problems with the Chinese and Japanese
translations? We don't put underscores in the translated strings
inline (because there’s no way to use Chinese characters as
accelerator keys); instead, we almost always enclose accelerator keys
(usually the same accelerator keys as the English version) within
parentheses.

That said, I’ve not seen any problems so far. Maybe the code that add
underscores is automatically detecting non-Latin languages and acting
accordingly?
-- 
cheers,
-ambrose