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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 23:44 +0200, Claude Paroz wrote:
> 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.

We could add a processing instruction that gnome-doc-utils
would recognize for automatic resorting.  We should really
be doing these things inside gnome-doc-utils, rather than
as extensions for library.gnome.org.

I seem to recall XSLT (or perhaps just libxslt) being kind
of stupid with respect to locale-based sorting, but looking
at the libxslt source now, it seems to have code in place.
I haven't tested it to see how well it works.  Can anybody
provide me with a short list that should sort differently
in different languages?  I seem to recall ö being sorted
differently in German and some other language.

Note that glossaries are a bigger beast, because they're
frequently divvied up into glossdivs.  I've thought a lot
about how to glossaries better in Mallard, but I haven't
yet found a good solution.

--
Shaun