Re: Standard Compliance in Country Names
On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 10:39:29PM +0000, Chuan-kai Lin wrote:
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> Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> > As Martin wrote privately to me about this issue (I guess I could
> > quote him completely about this but I didn't receive his explicit
> > permission for that), we are not in the business of deciding which
> > name is correct. Following official standards is our only possibility
> > and, as he wrote, "If people disagree with the standard, they should
> > take it up with the standards body", which I perfectly agree with.
[...]
> Let's go back to issue of standard compliance. You quote ISO 3166 as
> the "official" standard on country names and intend to follow it to the
> letter. This is a decision I have problems with: ISO 3166 should not be
> treated as an a priori authoritative source of country names in the same
> sense that IANA is an authority on internet IP addresses. The
> distinction should be clear: ISO does not assign names to countries in
> the way IANA assigns IP addresses to RIRs. The only designations
> created by ISO are the alpha-2 two-character code elements, and I don't
> think anyone has problems with that.
Absolutely. This "standard" only assigns codes to countries and
regions, but there is no reason to consider their names as immutable.
There is a very similar case, you can see on
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/index.en.html
that 'gl' language is Gallegan. A translator changed this name to
Galician and told that he did not even know that Gallegan was the
English name for his language, since nobody uses this term.
But as ISO 639 tells that gl is Gallegan, *I* reverted this change to
follow the standard. After some days on a sunny sandbeach, I must
admit that this is a silly behavior, people should be able to use
the names which are best suited for their needs. (But changing
this language name is not that easy and will take several days)
So Christian, take some rest without net access and when you are back
we will see if you change your mind about this issue ;)
There is another problem about iso-codes, POT files have been submitted
to the Free Translation Project:
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_639
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_4217
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_3166
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_3166_1
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_3166_2
http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?domain=iso_3166_3
but AFAICT they are now out-of-date, which means that Debian translators
hijack these translations.
Denis
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