Localisation of Ubuntu in Piedmontese language

[David Planella]

Bèrto,

I lack the linguistic knowledge of the relationship between
Piedmontese and Italian, but on the technical side I will simply point
out that when political issues arose with regards to the relationship
between the Catalan language and its Valencian dialect, the solution
adopted was to change the general denomination from Catalan to
Catalan-Valencian and define a new locale in the form
ca_ES.UTF-8 at valencia.

That is, we have got the ca_ES.UTF-8 (and its variants depending on
which land it is spoken: ca_FR, ca_IT, ca_AD) and
ca_ES.UTF-8 at valencia, which speakers of the dialect can choose if they
like. We only translate the Catalan language, and the @valencia
dialect translation is done via script. That said, the @valencia is
relatively new, and you will see that for example in the GNOME project
[1], although defined, there are not many translations for this
dialect yet.

I must repeat though, that we were forced to do that due to
«political» rather than linguistic reasons, and that I do not know
whether this applies to your language. I am only mentioning this in
case it can be of any help. In addition of Ubuntu, the people at
Debian might be able to help as well.

Regards,
David.

[1] http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/ca@valencia/gnome-2-24

2008/10/19 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
> Dear Bèrto,
>
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Bèrto ëd Sèra <berto.d.sera at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> FYI, piedmontese is taught in public schools and recognized by the Regional
>> Laws. It is a growing part of the public education scheme and almost 5.000
>> children went through the courses last year, but we obviously need tools for
>> that. There are plans to distribute free hardware to the kids to help them
>> in their learning process and we need a localised OS for that. This is what
>> I'm working for.
>>
>> Yet, if this has to become a "political" issue, I'd rather opt out of Ubuntu
>> immediately. I'm honestly quite tired to be assigned a political view I do
>> not have
>
> First of all, my email was an expression of my own opinion, rather
> than of the Ubuntu project. There isn't any policy about dialects that
> I'm aware of in the project. Secondly, note that I didn't assign any
> political view to you in my email... And my email itself wasn't
> political in nature. I was asking the question of whether it would be
> beneficial to anyone to have Ubuntu localised in a dialect, in
> circumstances where the focus of Italian education is on the national
> language.
>
> There are difficult questions of where to draw the line when it comes
> to languages and dialects. Official recognition, education and whether
> the language has any general written culture are all relevant
> considerations.
>
> The education programme that you've described above sounds very
> interesting: do you have a link to it which describes the initiative?
>
> --
> Matthew East
> http://www.mdke.org
> gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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> ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com
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>