Quick drop object shortcuts in English, is this an issue?

[Babel]

Hi to everyone in the Quick Drop Enthusiasts community! 

I have a quick request for feedback from the community.  As you know, object shortcuts often have an association with the name of the object in ENGLISH (so "ra" is short for Reverse Array). So I have these questions for our users of the localized version of LabVIEW:

• Is it hard to remember these object shortcuts because of that relation with the English object name?
• Would you want NI to consider localizing (translating) the object shortcuts for the French or the German versions of LabVIEW or do you prefer that the object shortcuts remain the same across languages?  
• What about users of the Asian versions of LabVIEW?

Thank you!

Michel Farhi-Chevillard

National Instruments Localization Manager

[whitenoiz]

Salut Michel,

your request is definitively not quickly answered and it's only a decent workload that keeps me from rambling philosophical here. When it comes to usability I think there is a total disconnect between the established user base (like those not using Auto Tool) and the new users NI imagines to reach. As a bilingual (de/en) I already find it unnerving when global players' IT departments force localized LabVIEW versions into labs and test-stands as many if not most of the translations may sound technical but are pure LabVIEW lingo hardly anyone without previous LabVIEW experience can make any sense of.

Adding to that, I hardly know any engineers here in Germany working with LabVIEW, that would invest time in memorizing these textual object shortcuts let alone function names. I know engineers with years of LabVIEW experience who never came across any of QD CTRL-R or QD CTRL-I or even QD CTRL-P by the way.

Any approach to "improve" QD by adding localized object shortcuts/mnemonics will only add to the confusion as long as you don't immediately get a For-Loop when typing 'fo' in a German LabVIEW QD in the first place (and you certainly don't plan on translating these keywords, are you?)

To answer your questions: Yes, it takes effort to remember those shortcuts no matter what language and no matter if full object name or shortcut. Wasn't that actually one of the challenges LabVIEW as a graphical programming environment was supposed to tackle after all!? And yes, considering all that, I'd prefer object shortcuts to stay the same across all (western) languages (if I ever get around learning them).

Best regards
Markus