Re: [Phpgroupware-users] Simplified Chinese (zh) Translation

[C K Wu]

Dave Hall wrote:

> C K Wu <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Hello, folks,
> >
> > I have just posted 9 translation patches at savannah.gnu.org .
> >
> > The patches contain Simplified Chinese (zh) translation for the
> > following nine modules:
> > admin, calendar, email, forum, phpgwapi, preferences, projects, setup,
> > todo.
>
> Cool, I will assign them when https access to savannah is back up.
>
> >
> > charset is defined to be gb18030, since afaik all software used in
> > mainland China
> > (the main region using Simplified Chinese) must support the gb18030
> > charset.
>
> Hmmmm ... ok then we have a problem.  From the research that gugux and I
> did late last year and earlier this year, the zh language code is used
> for all variants of chinese and each variant uses a different charset.
>
> I would suggest that we have a discussion on the translators list -
> phpgroupware-docteam at gnu.org - on how best to handle the various
> languages and charsets.
>
> We currently use RFC 1766/ISO 639-1 language codes
> (ftp://ftp.nordu.net/rfc/rfc1766.txt), with the chaset being a phrase entry.
>
> But there is ISO 639-2 (3 letter codes) (see
> http://www.loc.gov/marc/languages/lang_pt2.html), or RFC 3066 ( see
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt) which is ISO 639-1 (see
> http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_639.html) plus ISO
> 3166 country codes
> (http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html)
> such as en-US, de-DE or de-AT etc.  This could even provide a fallback
> mode to en or de if the local version is not provided.
>
> I personally think that we should use RFC 3066, but the country codes
> should only be used where obsolutely required - such as pt-BR (Brazilian
> Portugueses) but not for en-AU (Australian English) or en-UK (British
> English) as the variation is minor.  While we are on this subject
> English is English people in the US speak English - not English US or
> American English!
>
> I am not claiming to be an expert in linguistics or chinese politics,
> but this is my practical suggestion for China, in the case of the
> mainland i would suggest zh-CN, Taiwan would become zh-TW, Hong Kong
> would use zh-HK, etc.  This would allow for the charset issues to be
> overcome.
>

Country code is a rather touchy subject in the Greater China region.
However phpgroupware's current setup of,

Simplified Chinese:    phpgw_zh.lang + charset=gb18030
Traditional Chinese:    phpgw_zt.lang + charset=big5

is a reasonable compromise that should work in the near term.

>
> Please don't get me wrong, I support this effort, but how we provide the
> best suppport possible for all users is my aim.
>
> >
> > All credits should go to www.dottech.com.tw, which provides the
> > original Traditional Chinese translation.  I only use an automatic
> > conversion
> > utility to convert the lang phrases from Traditional to Simplified
> > Chinese.
> >
>
> np, but have they been checked by a native speaker/reader?

no worries.  I am a native Chinese speaker and read/write
Simplified/Traditional Chinese better than my English.  I have
have gone thru all the files produced by the conversion.  They
look OK.  However, there will certainly be some comments
from mainland China users who are not accustomed to Taiwanese
phraseology.  These may be finetuned by a Chinese language
maintainer in the future.

Cheers,
CK

>
>
> > I don't intend to maintain the Simplified Chinese translation in
> > future.
>
> Do you have anyone to nomiate for the task?
>
> > My objective is to complete the Chinese language infrastructure within
> > phpGroupWare as it stands currently, so when the next version of
> > CK-Ledger is released, full Chinese language infrastructure is
> > available.
>
> Cool, I personally would like to see as many languages supported in
> phpGW possible :)
>
> > Therefore, feel free to take on the role of future Simplified Chinese
> > translation
> > maintainer.
>
> Pass :)
>
> Cheers
>
> Dave
>
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