Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 11:38:32 -0500 From: "[ISO-8859-1] Daniel Díaz" <mrchapp@...155...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> Cc: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net, inkscape-tester@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-tester] [Inkscape-user] New translations we need?
Hello!
On 6/12/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> wrote:
It should be possible to use en_GB for most places (which use British English) except USA, Mexico and Japan (which use American English).
[...]
Huh?
Huh? Not a meaningful question, but I can take a guess at what you might have been asking.
I believe "International English" is another way of saying British English but I'm not quite sure, hard to get a straight answer. British English tends to be taught over American but the cultural influence of the USA is so strong that some countries do tend to just learn American English. How someone spells colour is a good indication (I will often mispell center, label, analog and other words from too much American English in computer so my spelling ends up being all over the place).
As a side note, I'm happy to see the "es_MX" translation file has been dropped, as I requested more than a year ago. It's been outdated for a long time now, and the Spanish translation provided by Lucas et al. is very good.
Most languages have concepts of proper and formal speech as opposed to common usage. Taking care to use them can help reduce the need to create additional localisations. Some spelling changes like Colour and Color are unavoidable but sometimes it is possible to choose a different but equally suitable and neutral phrase which doesn't require localisation. For example Favourites requires localisation but Bookmarks or shortcuts doesn't (and favourites is a terrible description anyway since you often need to keep references to work and other things which certainly aren't your favourites). Trash is not commonly used in British English but Recycle Bin works equally well for both and doens't require localisation. Sometime developers are so comfortable with a phrase they do not even realise it is slang and rarely used elsewhere, I recall an unhelpful error message telling me a "file was bogus" (and my brain automatically added "dude" to the end of the sentence) instead of telling me the file was broken or had formatting errors.
It is only a minor point but although more translations are great, if something can be changed so that additional localisations are not needed it is definately preferable. At the very least it keeps things easier to maintain in the long run.
Sincerely