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

[Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>]

Le mercredi 06 août 2008 à 22:42 +0200, Kenneth Nielsen a écrit :
> 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
> 
Thanks Kenneth to bring this up. This is a problem we also encounter
e.g. when translating glossaries.

I suppose the most proper solution would be to do the sorting of the
list (<itemizedlist>) during the xsl transformation. Thats why I'm CCing
Shaun who may be tell us if this is something possible.

Claude