Request: Kurdish locale / Ispell

[Erdal Ronahi]

Hi everyone,

the Kurdish translation team is interested in learning how we can get 
better support for the Kurdish language into Ubuntu. At the moment our 
main problem is the missing locale.

Our team is happy about the resources that Ubuntu and canonical provide
with Rosetta, mainly for two reasons:

1. Rosetta now gives the opportunity to display an alternative language
beside English. Unlike me, most of our translators prefer translating
from Turkish to Kurdish, and Rosetta makes this very easy. Also, up- and
downloading are very easy. In fact, we use Rosetta also as a kind of
repository for translations that have been done offline.

2. Ubuntu comes with installable language packs which are
promised to be frequently updated. That is important for a team which is
just starting, like ours, to see some results early.

Our problems concern the locale. Ubuntu does not yet support
the locale ku_TR (Kurdish in Turkey), which is the most important locale
for us. That makes it impossible to choose Kurdish as a sistemwide
default in the language-selector, which in turn makes the Kurdish
language pack almost useless. On one of the three computers I installed 
Breezy on,
however, belocs-locales was installed instead of locales, and there I
did succeed to choose Kurdish from the language selector. But installing
the language pack does break belocs-locales and installs locales again,
so this isn’t ideal. However, the directory

usr/share/locale/locale-langpacks/ku/LC_MESSAGES 

is created, so we are able to test our translations by copying mo-files
there. This doesn’t work however for some GNOME applications, or it
works in some unpredictable way.

The best way to solve this would be to get the locale ku_TR officially
into Ubuntu. We have translated the Debian-Installer stage 1, filed a
lot of bugs everywhere from glibc to ubuntu, but didn’t succeed yet to
get the locale. There is, however a working locale in Mandriva, which
has been used for two years now. So it should be possible in Ubuntu (and
subsequently Debian) too, I think. Could someone explain to me the 
necessary
steps?

Another issue is the fact that a Kurdish Ispell/Aspell/MySpell package
exists. It works in OpenOffice, Abiword and other programs and can be
included at once into Ubuntu. If necessary I can file a bug for this issue.

I hope someone can answer my questions or point me to
some place where they might be answered.

You guys at Ubuntu are doing a fabulous job, and our team is struggling
to make Ubuntu the number one distribution for Kurdish-speaking users, too.

Regards,
Erdal