Subject: Re: how should we localize locale names?
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 08 2001 - 00:27:13 CST
Paul Rohr wrote:
>While it's fun to play games with Babelfish, this certainly seems like it
>could get out of hand pretty rapidly.
Very true, but this is also the case with any translated text, so I don't
see the reason for the fuss here. It just happens that there might be a
better alternative here, which is:
>3. If this isn't desirable, ...
>----------------------------
>... then one alternative I've repeatedly suggested is to just report the
>localized name for that language *in* that language. Thus, you'd have:
>
> English -- United States (en-US)
> Français -- France (fr-FR)
> Deutsch -- Deutschland (du-DE)
>
>The theory is that it's OK to have localized text here, because if you
>don't
>recognize the name of the language *in* that language, you're unlikely to
>be
>using it in your documents.
This is a very good point. There might need to be some trickery done in
platform-specific code to get the names to display correctly in menus and
dialogs, which may or may not be an issue. I just have this horrible feeling
that if we have Chinese or Japanese characters in the menus, my GTK+ build
will draw squares or circles where characters should be drawn.
>Plus which, it makes it far more likely that translations will be
>up-to-date. I doubt that Sioux or Catalan even *have* names for each
>other's languages, and defaulting both to en-US seems unpleasant.
This is also a good point.
>bottom line
>-----------
>I'd like to propose that we add a special case to the existing strings file
>format to include the *name* of that locale *in* that language. Then, when
>initializing the XAP_Language class, we can scan those strings files and
>just pluck out this one description.
This is where I disagree with you. I am very much opposed to any
modification of the strings file format. I don't know about the rest of you,
but I have this overwhelming desire to treat this as almost deprecated. The
overhead for both developers and translators alike is huge. I'm not
necessarily advocating the use of gettext or any other *particular* i18n
mechanism, but I'd prefer to "not beat a dead horse."
Dom
always open to suggestions
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