On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 20:50, Rimas Kudelis <[email protected]> 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 -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/l10n/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
