en-US language presumption (was...)

[Matthew East]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Paul Sladen<ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Matthew East wrote:
>> We use American English consistently throughout applications
>
> If this presumption is being made, then it is a bug.  People should be free
> to code their human-readable appliation output in whatever (human) language
> that group of developers feel most collectively comfortable with.

Perhaps I was rash to speak for all Ubuntu developers, but it's
certainly the approach taken by the documentation team[1].

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/StyleGuide/SpellingPunctuationGrammar#Spelling

There isn't a translation team for US English, whereas there is a
translation team for GB, AU and CA [2]. On that basis if there is any
non-US English in the default C locale in applications, then as far as
I know, US English users of Ubuntu will see it in their desktop.

[2] https://translations.launchpad.net/+groups/ubuntu-translators

I personally think that using US English is a pretty reasonable
approach to take. If we don't standardise on a particular language,
then we'll need to create a US English translation team, and that team
will need to scour all the application strings to see what language
they are in, and translate them. By standardising, everyone knows what
approach will be taken and can act consistently. But I'm not an expert
in software development or translation. I think you'd done the right
thing by raising this on ubuntu-devel and I'll look forward to see
what the developers say on this subject.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF