Subject: Re: how should we localize locale names?
From: Tim Allen (tim@proximity.com.au)
Date: Sun Mar 11 2001 - 22:38:44 CST
Oops, see what happens when you go offline for a weekend :-).
Thanks, Sam, for applying the fire hose. Apologies for being too
prescriptive in my earlier statement. I should know better than to go
dogmatically refusing to do things, especially before there is a clear
consensus. I realise it probably sounded as though I was trying to dictate
how we should do it, which is clearly not possible in a collaborative
project (especially from one whose contributions are as modest as mine).
Thanks, Tomas, for calming down. I back off from refusing to provide said
translations, I shall revise my position to mere extreme lack of
enthusiasm.
On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> > I think you are needlessly criticizing Tim here, Tomas. At the
> > moment, there's no need for translations of all the names of the
> > various different languages. If people need to choose a language,
> > they will want to have their language presented in their language.
>
> > I'm sure that if there was some other reason to have the names of
> > different supported languages, Tim would be willing to do the
> > translations.
> >
> My appologies to Tim, I have got carried away there. However, I
> believe very strongly that there is a need to have these translated.
> The languages in UT_Language are not for people to choose their
> own language, they are for people to set the lang property of text in
> the document so that the spellchecker would use the correct
> dictionary. The interface should be consistent; if the user choses
> Czech interface he should get Czech interface, not a mixture of the
> languages of the world. Quite apart from the fact that this, IMO,
> makes the best sense as an overall localisation strategy, it is also
> the simplest thing to do technically, and unless we do this we will
> ultimately endup with a sub-standard user interface.
I've tried to catch up on this thread, and now I'm confused. I suspect
Tomas has a point, but I'm not sure what we want to do about it. To
summarise: I believed (and still do) that if you plan to use a particular
language, then you should definitely be able to recognise the name of that
language as used by the speakers of that language. I don't think that is
an unreasonable assumption. I gather Tomas is not so keen on this notion,
though this doesn't seem to be the part that really upsets him.
Now, if you are going to try to display the names of all the other
languages in their own localised names, you have a character set problem,
because your system may not be able to display the correct character sets
for all the other languages. My proposal was to use romanised names in
that case, so that, for example, if I use AbiWord in en_US (or even
en_AU), I'd see options like Bahasa Indonesia, Deutche, Francais, Nihon
go, Sinhalawa... The reason for this proposal is that the examples I could
think of (Japanese, Thai, various Indian and related languages) all have
well-defined romanisation schemes that are well-known to most native
speakers. So if you send a letter to someone in Japan, for example, you
don't need to worry whether the postman there can read the address that
you have written using Latin-1 characters, because he will be able to.
If I understand Tomas correctly, he is telling us that this is not the
case for Eastern European languages and, additionally, there is the
problem that the character set in use may not actually have Roman
characters available, so we may not have the option of romanisation, even
if the users were able to cope with it. This is the problem that
particularly perturbs Tomas, if I understand correctly, and I can't see an
easy answer to it. I'm definitely not keen on the idea that AbiWord should
provide the translated names of every language in the world, translated
into every supported language... I wonder whether any of our OS's already
have this knowledge built in? It is a large body of knowledge for a mere
word processor to carry around...
> Tomas
Tim
-- ----------------------------------------------- Tim Allen tim@proximity.com.au Proximity Pty Ltd http://www.proximity.com.au/ http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/
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