Subject: Re: how should we localize locale names?
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 10 2001 - 06:03:16 CST
On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 11:54:16AM -0000, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> > 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.
Yes, these are serious problems, and anyone who thinks they are easy
is deluding themselves. I don't know what we should do about this
problem. I'm just pointing out that localizing everything doesn't
work for all cases either. So, we either have to choose a non-optimal
solution, or come up with something else.
sam th --- sam@uchicago.edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
OpenPGP Key: CABD33FC --- http://samth.dyndns.org/key
DeCSS: http://samth.dynds.org/decss
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Mar 10 2001 - 05:57:36 CST