Re: Use of American/British English (was Re: request for string addition)

[Adam Weinberger <adamw FreeBSD org>]

>> (02.22.2004 @ 1902 PST): Bastien Nocera said, in 1.1K: <<
> On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 12:38 -0500, Adam Weinberger wrote:
> <snip>
> > If I misunderstood the topic, and it's actually about the use of
> > "behaviour" at all, and the issue is whether default translations can be
> > in British English: Is there anything wrong with asking that Americans
> > make an en_US translation if they want it?
> 
> The point I was trying to make was that it didn't really matter if
> translations were in a different flavour of English as long as the whole
> program uses that same flavour.

*nod* So then, should I file bug reports against apps that use both
"color" and "behaviour" by default?

> I write and use British English all day, and in all my programs
> (although in most of them, it's not really noticeable), and will keep on
> doing so. People that find that a program is not properly translated for
> their flavour of English (say, en_US users) can then translate the
> program as usual.
> 
> I'd also like to note that the use of British English [1] should not
> (and I don't think does) hamper the ability of the i18n team to
> translate into different languages.

No, of course it shouldn't... I sincerely hope it doesn't ::/. As long
as it's in a language that all translators can work from, there
shouldn't be a problem, right?

However, my message was more about applications that do not conform to
any one particular set of language rules. We have en_US, en_AU, en_CA,
en_GB, and en_IE as viable options for default strings (what's the
proper term here, anyway?). It seems to me that an application's default
strings should conform to the language rules of at least one of those
options; otherwise, it just creates more work/disk space for everybody
else.

If an application comes with "color," "favorite," "center," and
"behaviour," shouldn't the "behaviour" string should be spelled
consistent with the others?

# Adam


--
Adam Weinberger
adamw@vectors.cx // adamw@FreeBSD.org // adamw@magnesium.net
http://www.vectors.cx