IANAD (I am not a developer
), just a beta tester and a translator.
I know there are unfortunately still Workbench translations which changed the menu shortcut keys to be different from the English originals.
The translations have been handled by volunteers from (mostly) ATO, or what's left of it, and they are all more or less based on the original translations made by Commodore back in WB 2.1. Unfortunately back then, Commodore made the error themselves of changing the keys - and (as pointed out earlier) recommending this approach. And some of the translation teams have so far preferred to stick with the old key assignments.
I handled the Danish translation; the first non-CBM versions were made by me and three other Danish ATO people during the 3.5 and 3.9 years, and I have since maintained it alone. We did fix the menu keys early on, but not everybody has had the time or inclination to do so with their translations.
In an ideal world, the development team should of course have a policy on this and stipulate the rules for also the volunteering translators, but as things are, we should probably just count ourselves lucky that there is still a will to organize the effort of getting translations updated, collected and beta-tested for each new major CD release.
About xenic's question, are there languages which don't have the letters used in English? Yes, there are; probably not European, or at least not Western European, i.e. everyone using a variant of ISO8859 should be okay. But when we get into cyrillic or arabic or other scripts, it's an entirely different matter, and I agree that rules like these will have to be broken there.
Best regards,
Niels