Re: Use of American/British English

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 03:51:20PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> mån 2004-02-23 klockan 14.52 skrev Andreas J. Guelzow:
> > > Every application in the desktop using its own English flavour is not
> > > the recipe for a consistent desktop experience.
> > 
> > Sorry, but how could the `desktop experience' be affected by the
> > language of the original strings? The user will see the translated
> > strings only, so only they need to be consistent for a 'consistent
> > desktop experience'.
> 
> Not really -- many users will not use any message translation, either by
> running in the C or en_US locales, or not having any NLS/gettext support
> enabled at all. This could be either on purpose (say, users happy with
> American English messages and wanting to cut all *.[g]mo files because
> of space restrictions), or by accident, due to a misconfigured locale
> (in general it seems surprisingly many not entirely unfamiliar
> distributions do not configure default locales correctly.)

This is then one more reason to use British English.
As most users outside the USA are taught British English in school, then
the most natural choice would be to use British English as the default.

Best regards
Keld