Re: Q: Can you please assist me with translation?

[Martin v. Loewis]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> It's not silly to distinguish between British and American spelling in
> translations.  

Paul, please comply with Hrvoje's request, and leave team matters to
the teams. You may be qualified to talk about English and its
dialects, but I seriously doubt you are qualified to talk about
Croation and its dialects. Native English speakers often make the
mistake to generalize from their language to other languages - those
generalizations are wrong more often than not.

> GNU diffutils, for example, has an en_GB.po translation for British
> spellers.

It's a different matter, and the perfect example of inappropriate
generalization. For English, there are communities that actively use
both the British and the American spelling of words, and also use
different vocabulary. Notice that the language code en_US is chosen
somewhat incorrect as well - (US) American English is spoken outside
the US as well, but I'm not going to dictate English speakers how to
identify their dialects, since I am not a native English speaker.

If the Croation team would find the need to provide different
communities with different translations, they would be encouraged to
do so (we'd need to come up with a local name, since the country code
may not help). If the Croatian team does not need such a distinction,
a package maintainer should not interfere.

> > Or requesting that Germans specify whether they translate into
> > "Hoch-Deutch" or deep Bavarian.
> 
> That's not an unreasonable request either.

You are not qualified to talk about this, either. It is unreasonable
to use Bavarian in written text, even though people do speak this
dialect. OTOH, it may be reasonable to identify Niederhochdeutsch
("Plattdütsch") as a dialect which is used for writing, as well, and
in fact, the language code "nhd" identifies this dialect.

It would be unreasonable to explicitly identify "Hoch-Deutsch": the
language code "de" *already* identifies "Hoch-Deutsch", implicitly,
and by convention. Don't tell other cultures what their conventions
are.

> I thought that "Croatian" was a pretty broad brush.  

Perhaps your thinking was incorrect. This would not be a problem in
itself. The problem arises when a member of the cultural group tells
you otherwise, and you keep your demanding position.

Regards,
Martin