On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Adam Weinberger wrote:
David Lodge wrote:
Quoting Danilo Å egan <danilo gnome org>:
I don't think we have a policy of using American English in the
msgid.
We discussed this before, and I proposed to have a more thorough
discussion at the Guadec meeting in Krisiansand, but there was no
meeting on this in Kristiansand. Maybe next time. My suggestion is
that
we continue to use English English, as it is more used around the
world.
and needs less modifications when going from one version of
English to
another.
So, it is recommended for at least documentation.
OTOH, we already have all the code in U.S. English, and we have en_GB
team (and no en_US team).
Switching now to British English is going to cause many problems for
other translators as well.
I fully agree with Danilo - even though I don't like American
English (being
British ;-) - I realise that the majority of GNOME developers and
users either
speak or have been taught American English. With my own
correspondance with
NNES I have noted that, for Europe at least, American spelling and
grammar is
taught in preference to British and with the homogenity of American
documents
this is probably the safer option.
As the en_GB teams does exist (though it seems to just be me at the
moment!) I
see nothing wrong with stating that all strings should be follow
American
grammar and spelling.
I have actually raised bugs where spellings have been mixed (mainly on
gnumeric).
dave
FWIW, as the maintainer of the Canadian English (en_CA) translations, I
agree. People expect that if they don't request anything specific,
they'll get American English spellings. This is a nearly universal truth
across software projects, it seems, and more to do with convention than
with a recognition of what the majority of the world sees as native
spelling and grammar. Switching to en_GB as the default would make us
the odd project out, and would serve to confuse more people than it
would benefit.
I always accepted the C locale as being equal to en_US, but I failed and
still fail to understand why if en_IE or en_AU is unavailable I do not
fall back to "en" and for "en" to be equal to en_GB which is still
considered to be standard English is it not?
The worst part is when translators choose to use words like
Favourites/Favorites rather than simpler more sensible words like
Bookmarks which do not require localisation. (I started a translation
once because I was sick of seeing an almost useless error message which
read "bogus document". Anytime I hear "bogus" or "awesome" I cannot help
thinking it should be followed by "dude!")
Ideally translators should use standard grammar common to both if at
all possible.