Re: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?
On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 10:05, Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> >> and while we're at it - netherlands is really holland.
> >
> > No, it's not, actually. Holland is only part of the Netherlands.
>
> well, yes. but: in slovakia the name for the country is holandsko
> (slovak spelling for holland). maybe it insults some people in
> netherlands but that's how it is. so for me it makes perfect sense to
> call that country holland, I didn't even knew it's called netherlands
> until I learned english...
People from the Netherlands (spelt Nederland in the local language) who
incidentally are referred to as "Dutch" in all English speaking countries
generally don't tend to get offended by such things.
"North Holland" (Noord Holland) and "South Holland" (Zuid Holland) are two
provinces of the Netherlands, the people in those provinces tend to not mind
the entire country being mis-named, while people who live in other provinces
are more interested in correcting it.
Below is a URL containing a map of the provinces of the Netherlands, it was
the first result that google returned...
http://www.coffeeshop.freeuk.com/General/Provinces.html
Nederland means "low land". The Slovak term for "low land" would be another
possible name for the country.
> I am sure that is not the only example where the name of the country
> is confused or country has completely different names in different
> languages.
In the case of an installer or any other software which offers a selection of
languages the right thing to do is to display every name in it's local form.
So refer to Germany as Deutschland, South Africa as Zuid Africa, etc. When
someone is installing software you can assume that they know the local form
of their country's name and the representation of their language's name in
that language, they can not be expected to know other forms.
I expect that most people here don't know what language "Anglais" is, or what
country is referred to as "VS".
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