Subject: Re: how should we localize locale names?
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sat Mar 10 2001 - 05:54:16 CST
> solution. If the user is in a position to understand this dialog,
> then they probably didn't need the UI translated in the first place.
> While that may not be true in the general case, it's definitely true
> that having everything in the dialog in chinese would make it very
> hard for a russian speaker to select their correct language.
If you do not localise the strings, then in an English interface you
will be only able to display correctly the names of languages that
can be expressed using Latin1; you will not be able to display
correctly the translated equivalents for Czech, Slovak, Russian,
Bulgarian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Serbian, Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, etc. What's worse, most
of these will not even be recognisable. Yes, the Russian user will
not be able to select Russian if the whole dialogue is in Chinese,
but then the Russian user will not see the dialogue in Chinese,
because unless she can read Chinese, she will not be runing under
a Chinese locale, she will be runing under a Russian loacale, and
everything will make perfect sense to her if, *and only if*, the whole
dialogue is in Russian.
If this does not make it clear that we have to localise the names of
the languages, then I give up. Perhaps some of the non-English,
not-latin1 users will pick this up, because their interface is going to
be screwed worst (I think particularly of those who's charsets do
not contain latin characters, because they will not be able even to
display languages like English, German or French), I rest my case,
I have written more emails on this than is healthy.
Tomas
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