[vlc-devel] vlc player languages

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

[Adding gettext mailing list to the thread for comments]

	Hello,

Le vendredi 29 janvier 2010 04:32:53 Gabriel Artigue, vous avez écrit :
> Unfortunately, I don't know any other examples of software translated
> into Gascon.
> I think I can understand from your reply that if I convince you how
> different the text in Gascon would be from the Middle Occitan version
> you already have, then you would accept my proposal for translating
> the text. Did I get that right? I'm a professional linguist, and
> although time consuming, I'm perfectly capable of showing the
> differences between Gascon and other Occitan varieties.

By technical terms, I believe Christophe Mutricy refered to ISO 639 and ISO 
3166. In my understanding, GNU/gettext uses those international standards to 
identify software localizations. And VLC media player uses gettext.

A given language is preferably identified with its ISO 639-1 code. There are 
52 such languages in VLC today.

If that is not available, we can use the ISO 639-2 code. VLC includes 3 such 
translations currently.

If neither are available, the ISO 639-3 code is used as a last resort. There 
is only one case (Central Kurdish) in VLC at the moment.

When there is an ambiguity, the ISO 3166-1 country code is appended to the 
language code. In VLC, we already do that for British English (en_GB), the two 
Portuguese-speaking countries (pt_PT and pt_BR), and the two standard forms, 
simplified and traditional, of Chinese (zh_CN and zh_TW).


In my limited software engineer understanding, Gascon is considered as Occitan 
in ISO 639, namely 'oc' in ISO 639-1 and 'oci' in ISO 639-2 and -3. I assume 
Occitan and Gascon are both in the same ISO 3166 area, which is to say France 
(FR). Correct me if I'm wrong but then, gettext would seem incapable of 
distinguishing Gacon from Occitan. And so would any software based on gettext, 
which means the large majority of translated open-source software.

(Interestingly, I suppose Aranese could be separated as 'oc_ES' however.)

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis