Proposal: adapt languages to international standards (i18n)

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 09:42:51AM -0200, Daniel Tygel wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>    We are preparing Cirandas to be adapted to international metadata
> standards, and we had several issues because Noosfero uses non-standard
> nomenclature for languages. Normally, languages must be defined by the
> language and the country, such as pt_BR, pt_PT, pr_CI instead of pt.
> 
>    We would like to know if you would see problems if we migrate noosfero to
> use these standards. For the moment, we are using symbolic links in the po
> folder.

Language tags without a country code are perfectly valid¹².

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag
² http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646

When translating software, using country codes is only useful when you
actually have people translating for the different variants. When you
only have a single variant, not having a country code will cause the
available translation be served to speakers of all variants of the given
language, which is arguably better than serving English for European
Portuguese speakers when a Brazilian portuguese is available.

You seem to imply that not having country codes in language codes is a
violation of some standard. which standard are we exactly talking about?

>    Should we proceed and propose a merge request, or is there someone who
> thinks that this won't be good for noosfero?

It would be nice to understand first what actual problem you are trying
to solve.

-- 
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at colivre.coop.br>
Colivre - Cooperativa de Tecnologias Livres
http://www.colivre.coop.br/


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://listas.softwarelivre.org/pipermail/noosfero-dev/attachments/20141123/e745b6c7/attachment.pgp>