new language team

[Erdal Ronahi]

Hi,

On 1/4/07, Carlos Perelló Marín <carlos.perello at canonical.com> wrote:
> Is there any way to get current Kurdish translations and convert them
> automatically into Arabishche Alphabet?
>
> If that's the case, perhaps we should prepare a script to do it when we
> generate language packs so you don't need to translate it twice.

While conversion of scripts is possible in principle, it is not only a
script issue. Our friends want to translate to a different dialect
which is called "Central Kurdish", "Southern Kurmanji" or "Sorani".
The ISO 639-1 code is ku, the ISO 639-2 code is kur for both dialects.
In ISO 639-3 they will take a different attitude, they call Kurdish a
"Macrolanguage". See
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=kur for details.

While this is fine, in practical use there may be no need for such a
differentiation into several languages. ku and ku at arabic may be fine.
There are dozens of projects now, an not one of them uses the ISO
639-3 codes until now. In the end, both are Kurdish and call themself
Kurdish.

> If the automatic conversion cannot be done, then you will need to create
> a team in launchpad called: 'ubuntu-l10n-LANGCODE' where LANGCODE is the
> language code for Kurdish with Arabish Alphabet. Once you have that,
> tell us it and we will add your team.

I see three possibilities:
1. ckb
2. ku_ckb
3. ku_IQ

ckb is the ISO-639-3 code for Central Kurdish. Another possible
solution is ku_IQ for Iraq/Southern Kurdistan for Kurdish with arabic
script. This is the solution that OpenOffice.org favours. This is not
ideal, because the division is between dialects, not between
countries. Kurdish as used in Iran (ku_IR) will be identical to ku_IQ,
while the Latin Kurdish is used in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

What is Launchpad's policy on that?

Regards,
Erdal