[vlc-devel] vlc player languages

[Bruno Haible]

Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> 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.

This is all correct. Yes, gettext uses the locale names from glibc, and these
use the abbreviations from ISO 639. So far only ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 have
been required. ISO 639-3 abbreviations can change over time, as can the
shorthands in www.ethnologue.com (not a standard, but helpful in understanding
the relations among languages).

> 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 Gascon from Occitan. And so would any software based on gettext, 
> which means the large majority of translated open-source software.

This is correct. But Gascon and Occitan are slightly different [1][2], and most
likely a Gascon translation will not be accepted by the other Occitan speakers
who have set their LANGUAGE variable to "oc:fr". Therefore if a translator wants
to submit translations for Gascon, I would suggestion the locale name
  oc at gascogne
that is, a file name oc at gascogne.po. This is in line with the use of the
@xxxx modifiers to denote variants.

Bruno

[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_language