request to reduce splintering of language translations

[Abel Cheung]

On 4/2/07, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at dhanapalan.com> wrote:
> > The en_GB.po and en_CA.po are just cut & paste copies of the original text,
> > as far as I can tell.  The en_CA looks like a rush job since they even cut
> > and paste one source text into multiple entries in some places.  Perhaps
> > they were looking to game the points/karma system you use.
>
> Like many other languages, English is not immune to dialecticism. In many
> cases, the variants are identical, but there are many, often subtle,
> differences between them.

I can't tell if translators in Rosetta are just playing games, but what Sridhar
said is definitely true. So far we can count en_US, en_GB, en_CA and en_AU
as 4 'variants', with slight subtle differences between each other. When
people in one country start to feel 'uncomfortable' with translation from the
other, they would always have the urge to split, or in their own words,
'correct' it. When it happens just depend on the tolerance of people.

The above quote for Chinese is actually an over-simplification. There should
be 4 major variants as well: zh_CN, zh_TW, zh_HK and zh_SG. But I'm not
sure why I have never came across Chinese people in Singapore who's
active in open source translation, so no zh_SG. I am splitting zh_HK from
zh_TW exactly because I start to feel uncomfortable with zh_TW translation
which doesn't fit the need for Hong Kong people. Different languages, but
the same reasoning.

Abel


>
> The en_GB team has been pushing for hierarchical translations, so that for
> example en_GB can be derived from C, and en_AU can be derived from en_GB. For
> the moment, though, we are left to implement everything manually. The
> unfortunate side effect is that this results in a mountain of duplicate work.
>
>
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>


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Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
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