Re: [libreoffice-l10n] LibreOffice in Chinese (China)

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 20:50, Rimas Kudelis <rq@akl.lt> wrote:
> 2010.11.11 13:21, Aron Xu rašė:
> > Yes there is already a zh-hans item on that page. I'm not sure whether
> > we'd change it to zh_CN, because in glibc our language code is zh_CN,
> > and Mozilla use zh-CN. "zh-hans" is the non-official form to express
> > the combination of zh_CN and zh_SC, similarly "zh-trans" is for zh_TW
> > and zh_HK.
>
> Dunno where you took that info from. zh-Hans (means Chinese in Han script
> Simplified variant) is an official code from BCP47, which should be
> preferred to zh-CN (Chinese in China).
>
> Similarly, zh-Hant (Chinese in Han script Traditional variant) are preferred
> to zh-TW and zh-HK.
>
> Not all environments are already using these new codes, but in general, the
> direction of movement is towards them, not from them. For example, Apple and
> Microsoft have introduced them in their products recently.
>
> Regardless of said above, I'm quite positive that we should take OS
> expectations into account, and if zh-Han* locale codes aren't recognised by
> Linux, our Linux packages should probably use older, recognised locale
> codes.
>
> Rimas

I'm not so familiar about BCP 47 but I heard it was designed for
Internet application usage (such as HTML). So I agree to use it in our
wiki and other web documentations.

But for the software, I think we are using the ISO 639-1/2 in most
cases. Lists of languages in these two ISO standards are [1] and [2].
I think LO is a general desktop application suit and should follow a
standard that is well accepted, there won't be a better choice than
using ISO 639-1/2, which is compatible (or almost compatible) to most
platforms (Windows[3], Mac[4], Linux[5] and other *nix variants).

BCP 47 is used in OOo (correct me if I'm wrong!), but I don't think
it's a wise choice because we have to first map ISO 639 codes to
BCP-47 for we use gettext have i18n support, then we have to map BCP
47 back to Unix locales (which is almost ISO 639 codes) on most *nix
platforms. Such a process is complicated.

Language code usage of software are in a mess. Chinese on Windows, for
example, we can find:
 * zh_CN (ISO 639-1) for Windows itself (as in [3]);
 * zh-Hans (BCP 47) in Vista and .NET 2.0;
 * zh-CHS which should be replaced by zh-Hans but still being widely
used till even today because of Windows XP;
 * zho (ISO 639-2) are being used in some Microsoft documents as well.

There is no doubt that we should follow ISO 639-1 because all
standards mentioned above are based on it. For languages that do not
have an ISO 639-1 code, I suggest we use ISO 639-2 so we can easily
use gettext and support *nix systems, and map the codes to respective
platforms (Windows, Mac, etc) if necessary.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes
[3]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533052
[4]http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26811?viewlocale=en_US
[5]http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=tree;f=localedata/locales

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu

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