Special characters

Pootle can display clickable characters which might be difficult to type or unavailable to the translator on their keyboard. These appear below the translation widget as we see below for Afrikaans.

../_images/special_chars_widget.png

Clicking on any of the ëïêôûáéíóúý characters will insert that character into the translation.

Many languages, e.g. those using the Latin script with diacritics, will find this very helpful, especially where keyboard layouts are not readily available.

Adding or altering special characters

Anyone with admin rights for Pootle or for a specific language can adjust the special characters.

To adjust the characters open the Special characters page accesssed via the admin dropdown in the navigation bar.

../_images/special_chars_access.png

Adjust the needed characters by adding and deleting characters.

../_images/special_chars_adjust.png

When to use special characters

Special characters do not solve the input needs for all languages, but has been a very useful help for many languages, especially in translate@thons.

For people using non-Latin scripts, consider if it will be useful to perhaps include things that can’t be easily typed by translators in your language. You will probably need to limit the number of characters, but hopefully you can find a reasonable compromise that will help many people.