Angolan and Cape Verdean users

[Matthew East]

Taking back on list.

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 07:22 +0000, Og Maciel wrote:
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> Matthew East wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 09:51 -0500, Og Maciel wrote:
> >> I have just started 2 brand (non-official yet) new teams for
> >> translators from Angola and Cape (or Cabo) Verde.  These 2 countries
> >> speak their "version" of the portuguese language but with their
> >> respective nuances...  I'd like to ask users from both countries to
> >> either contact me directly or to register at the respective teams so
> >> we can get packages set up for translation, mailing lists, etc. 

> > How big are the nuances? Out of interest, because I have never been able
> > to understand why people who speak the same language don't want to
> > combine their translation efforts and produce one fully translated
> > locale, rather than several partly translated locales.

> It would definitely be great if we could assume that pt_* were similar
> enough to combine forces...  and maybe the nuances correspond to no more
> than a 5% difference... but the truth is that each country added its own
> "flavor" to their language and sentences translated for pt_BR may "sound
> weird" to someone from Angola, for instance.  In the same token, we have
> en_* groups and I'm sure they were created for a valid reason...

Well, that's a matter of opinion. Some may be, some may not be. It will
depend on the degree of "nuance" in the individual case. The key balance
is between available resources (because obviously if resources are low
then it makes sense to combine efforts and try and get at least one
translated version of pt, en, etc), and on the other hand, the degree of
difference between the languages/dialects/etc. In the case of en, the
standard locale is normally fully translated, so the variants are on top
of that. And if I run en_XYZ, and something isn't translated, it will
still appear in en, and I can understand it. Presumably it is the same
for pt, so this isn't such a big issue, unless the resources available
for pt are limited themselves.

Taking a completely neutral example, imagine we have locale "ab", and a
variant "ab_CD". If "ab" isn't 100% translated, it seems to me that it
would be worth while ensuring that this gets done first, before
translating "ab_CD". If "ab_CD" is significantly different to "ab", then
that argument doesn't seem to me to apply, BUT I would have thought that
in that case, the language should have its own code.

No doubt this argument is ridiculously over-simplistic, given that there
are infinite degrees of variety between all these positions. Still, it's
always been something that has interested me.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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