Subject: Re: how should we localize locale names?
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sat Mar 10 2001 - 03:04:43 CST
> Absolutely!! This is _not_ the way to go... I'll even go so far as to say
> that I will not provide id-ID translations for the names of all of
> AbiWord's supported languages, whatever Owen Stenseth's perl script says.
Why not? Any other localised text you will not provide translations
for? Well, might be we should have English-only interface; imagine
the amount of work the translators would save.
> >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.
>
> Which sounds like a pretty good theory to me.
This is pretty poor theory; localisation has nothing to do with what
features of the interface the user will or will not use; we are just
trying to cut corners for reasons that totaly escape me.
> Dom's other point is also sensible, in that you may not have any fonts on
> your system capable of displaying the names of, eg Nihon go and Mandarin,
> in their native character sets. I suppose the previous argument holds, ie
> if you don't have the right fonts then chances are you're not planning to
> use them in your document. But it would be nice to show off the languages
> we support, and ugly if the language choice dialog shows random gibberish.
> To do that we need not language-localised language names, but
> character-set localised names (in practice, Romanised names would do, I
> think, as in eg "Nihon go" for Japanese). And then some way of detecting
> that we can't display the native names, and using the romanised names
> instead.
You are going into a lot of trouble to produce a third-class interface,
when there is nothing than translating a few words stopping us from
having a first-class one.
> This doesn't seem to fit all that nicely with the existing localisation
> paradigm, nor with any likely paradigm that would be supported by gettext.
> Pity. More thought required, I think.
It does not fit, because it is a very poor idea to start with; I can't
believe that this has been seriously suggested. Just think of it;
even if we one day support 200 languages, we are talking about not
more than extra 400 words for each translator.
Tomas
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