[Localization] [sugar] code comments?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Walter Bender <walter at laptop.org> wrote:
> It may become an important feature over time, such as when we have
>  Quechua support and want to fall back to Spanish before falling back
>  to English, but I wouldn't think it is a priority in any of our
>  current deployments.

Current target countries

Haiti: Kreyól/French/English
Rwanda: Kinyarwanda/English/French
Cambodia: Khmer/French/English
Afghanistan: Dari/Pashto/English, Pashto/Dari/Russian/English,
Pashto/Urdu/English, Dari/Tajik/English, Hazara/Dari/English...
Mongolia: Mongolian/Russian/English or Mongolian/English/Russian.
Later on a choice between Mongolian (Cyrillic) and Mongolian
(Traditional) will complicate matters further.
US: English/Spanish, English/French, English/Chinese, English/Italian,
English/Korean, English/Vietnamese,...

Other possibilities

Nigeria: any combination of Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, English and others
Brazil: Portuguese (Brazil)/Portuguese/English/Spanish, among other
possibilities
India: Any combination of more than 20 official languages, plus other
world languages

Me: English/French/German/Russian/Spanish/Yiddish/Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Swahili

You can't decide for your users what they want. It is best to let them
choose. I don't say that you have to allow 10 choices, as in my
example, but four or five is quite common. My grandfather spoke
Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and later in life English, and
knew a fair amount of Hebrew and some Aramaic. They do say that the
correct English word for a person who speaks multiple languages is
"polyglot", and the correct English word for a person who speaks only
one language is "American".

>  -walter
>
>
>
>  On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>  > Very interesting, I guess we should integrate it in the language
>  >  section of the control panel. AFAIK, this is not being considered yet.
>  >
>  >  If we don't want to add more complexity to the control panel UI, we
>  >  may assign under the hoods a fallback language to every language?

No. Too many possibilities, not enough information.

>  >  Perhaps someone from deployment could comment on the better milestone
>  >  to target this?
>  >
>  >  Tomeu
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >  On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>  >  > Interesting, thanks. Are there any plans to make use of this feature
>  >  >  in deployments?
>  >  >
>  >  >  - Bert -
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >  On 05.04.2008, at 12:05, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>  >  >  > Yes, by setting LANGUAGE env variable with a fall back language,
>  >  >  > some thing
>  >  >  > like "LANGUAGE=ur_PK:fa_IR:ar", you can specify multiple fall back
>  >  >  > languages.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  > On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 09:31:30AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>  >  >  >> ... which reminds me: Is it possible in gettext to fall back on a
>  >  >  >> language other than English when a translation for some phrase cannot
>  >  >  >> be found? That would be a useful feature I think, as long as there
>  >  >  >> are
>  >  >  >> programs that are not fully translated (which will happen very
>  >  >  >> often).
>  >  >  >>
>  >  >  >> - Bert -
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >
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>
>  --
>  Walter Bender
>  One Laptop per Child
>  http://laptop.org
>
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Edward Cherlin
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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay