Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Language names should be in the target language chars

Hi Eike,

let me disagree with you. The points you mentioned are valid, but to me 
they look more like a bunch of selected edge cases than common real-life 
scenarios.

2014.04.14 15:03, Eike Rathke wrote:
> On Thursday, 2014-04-10 18:26:44 +0800, 锁琨珑 wrote:
>
> > So far, the language names shown in "Tools - Options - Language
> > Settings" are in the localed language name strings.
> >
> > I believe those language names should be changed to the target names
> > chars for all UIs, like the language listed here:
> > http://zh-cn.libreoffice.org/international-sites/
> > (see the second column)
> While having language names in their native language is fine for
> interfaces where a user only wants to pick his/her own language, it is
> not desirable for interfaces where several languages can be chosen for
> different purposes that are not native to the user. Let me explain some
> disadvantages:
>
> * a document containing language attribution the user doesn't know the
>    native name of, s/he will see a meaningless entry in the language list

If the user doesn't know the language in question, knowing the name of 
that particular language in their own language will hardly help. In 
other words, I doubt that actually knowing that the language is 
Whateverian (something you've never heard of) will help you understand 
the doc any better than knowing that the language is Gibberishian (the 
name you can't even read).

> * seeing the language list, a user will not know what languages are
>    offered except those s/he can somehow deduce

The user doesn't really care about "what languages are offered". What 
they care about is whether or not the language they need *at the moment* 
is offered. Assuming that they will know the native name of that 
language, it will often be much easier for them to find that name than 
guess it. Would you know or guess that German in Lithuanian is Vokiečių? 
I doubt that.

> * wanting to prepare a document with different locale settings (e.g.
>    using different currencies or formatting) the user would have to know
>    the native names

I doubt one could prepare a document in any language they don't know to 
such extent. Setting metadata would be my least concern in such case...

> * a developer adding a language to the language listbox would have to
>    know that name in the native language; yes, CLDR in the mean time
>    provides native names of most frequently used languages, but not for
>    the not so frequently used that now are occasionally requested; s/he'd
>    have to take the word of the one requesting that language

How's that a problem? If somebody makes a request, you can always ask 
the requester what the native language name is.

> * for developers this gets even more cumbersome for languages that can
>    be written in different scripts, or scripts the developer doesn't know
>    at all; would you know how to correctly write Arabic and enter it on
>    your native keyboard? Or Mongolian in the Mongolian script? You'd have
>    to rely on copy&paste and pray that your editor handles all Unicode
>    characters, RTL writing direction and so forth.

I agree that this might be a bit inconvenient for developers, but I'm 
pretty sure there must be an acceptable solution to that inconvenience. 
For example, non-latin language names could probably be stored in 
escaped fashion where appropriate (in the source code). I really don't 
think "X is inconvenient for developers" is a good excuse to keep 
something at a state less convenient for the end-user.

> > I am thinking about this because of the following reason:
> >
> >    * It's a waste of time for localizers to translate every foreign
> >      language names to their own locale. Even translated, it may not be
> >      correct.
> That's about 350 language names we currently have, of an overall of some
> hundred thousand words to translate (including help), doesn't really
> look significant to me. Plus, once translated the names almost never
> change.

It's still useless and – most importantly – inconvenient to most users 
(=those who know the native name of language they want to pick).

> >    * In case the users are trying to switch between languages, there may
> >      be confusion (for example, if I want to test something in Franch UI,
> >      and after that I want to change back to Chinese UI it's really
> >      difficult to find the right one in the list box.
> There's an easy trick for that: assign the language to a portion of text
> and reload the document in the other UI language.

I'm pretty sure that developers can find easy tricks to solve their 
inconveniences as well. E.g. copy-paste.

> > And there is a corrensponding bug report here:
> > Bug 59901 - UI: Name of each language in target language
> > https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59901
> I'll add the same comment there.

I hope your stance is not too strict about this.

Regards,
Rimas

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