Alphabetical ordering of supported languages in release notes gets messed up when localized

["Kenneth Nielsen" <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

Hey everybody

Since we just heard from Vincent that GNOME 2.23.6 is out, that we are feature frozen and the it therefore is time to start typing the release notes, I thought that I would bring up an issue I was made aware of when I was translating the last set of release notes.

In one of the sections there is a tradition for making an alphabetically sorted list of all the languages GNOME is supported in, and this list is translatable. The problem is that when I translated the language name they don't necessarily have the same first letter as they have in English, e.g. in Danish, Chinese starts with a K, and therefore the alphabetical ordering gets all messed up. You can see an example of this in the Danish version of the release notes from last time[1]. I know that this is purely cosmetic, but it does not look very professional. Does anybody have an idea on how to fix this?

I suppose the best way to fix it would be to use some kind of magical alphabetically sorted item list function/environemt, in whatever kind of language the release notes are written in (isn't it some form of xml), provided of course that such a function exist. The other alternative, that I can think of, would be to make the entire list (or itemization) translatable and ask the translators to keep the translation sorted (and maintain the tags if there are any). But that is assuming a lot about the soberness of the translator. Does anybody have any other ideas?

Regards Kenneth Nielsen

[1]http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/index.html.da#rni18