Norbert Bollow writes: > On some of those lists, it is really strongly desirable to actively > encourage the list's participants to see themselves as an > international community, in particular as a community where US > centric perspectives are not privileged over other perspectives.
Claiming that labeling US dialect as such is US-centric seems backwards to me. As I argued earlier, labeling it as "English" looks like linguistic imperialism (setting up US English as "standard" English), whereas labeling it "English (USA)" is both truth in labeling and an acknowledgment that US English is no more than a dialect. That said, it's true that the only US-ism I see in the current message catalog is a half-dozen instances of -ize (vs. -ise), where -ize is correct for Americans but AFAIK British, Canadians, and Australians consider -ize quaint but acceptable. So if somebody wants to go to the trouble of being the "generic English" "translator" and make sure that the catalog avoids gratuitous[1] dialect-specific spelling and idioms, now and going forward, it shouldn't require too much effort. To give you an idea, it took me about 45 minutes to scan a Mailman 2 .po file. It would probably take about 75-90 minutes to be thorough the first time, and after that the "translator" would just look at diffs, which would take much less time. I'd support the change for Mailman 3 if we were confident that the message catalog is reasonably dialect-neutral and going to stay that way, and if somebody else does the work. This could be implemented either by keeping the source message strings "generic", or by having actual .po/.mo files for "English". The latter looks more convenient for the "translator". > But I haven't ever gotten around to cleaning this up into a real > patch as suggested by the OP. As Mark points out, this change constitutes an imposition on the translators (some of whom actively dislike having others make changes to "their" translations) and on any users whose translations don't get updated for some reason (eg, they've got local changes to their .po files). I would completely support Mark if he decides not to accept the change in Mailman 2. Steve Footnotes: [1] For example, use of "authorize" and "personalize" wouldn't be considered "gratuitous" because they're technical terms which are hard to avoid, and because that spelling is acceptable everywhere, although British, Canadian, and Australian readers probably prefer "-ise". ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
