Re: Serbian translation begins
sorry for overquote... I added Safir Secerovic, bs translator to CC
list and want to keep him with the context.
Quoting Nathanael Nerode (neroden@twcny.rr.com):
> Christian Perrier wrote:
>
> > (Alex Malinovic, serbian tanslator, and Safir Secerovic, bosnian
> > translator, CC'ed. Please keep CC unless one of both mentions he's
> > subscribed to -boot)
> >
> > Quoting Anton Zinoviev (zinoviev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg):
> >
> >> > This is cyrillic-written Serbian.
> >>
> >> This is interesting. Serbians prefer Cyrillic in their everyday life
> >> (books, papers, etc.), however I have the impression that in computers
> >> they use only the Latin alphabet with ISO-8859-2. (Officialy both
> >> alphabets can be used to write Serbian.) I think XFree doesn't have
> >> proper keyboard support for Serbian Cyrillic (this is easy to fix
> >> though).
> >
> > Indeed, after exchanges with Alex Malinovuch, who offered to to sr
> > translations, we ended up with this solution.
> >
> > We can also notice that we currently have "Bosnian" (bs) as one of d-i
> > languages. From what I have retained from exchanges with Alex, Bosnian
> > is indeed the serbian language as spoken in Bosnia and
> > Herzegovina.....the current translation by Safir Secerovic (sorry for
> > special characters....I currently have no way for inputting them) uses
> > Latin alphabet.
> >
> > So, but I may be wrong, we could have two different kinds of serbian
> > (or serbian-like) languages in d-i :
> >
> > "serbian" (sr) being cyrillic-written serbian
> > "bosnian" (bs) being latin-written "serbian"
> <snip>
>
> >> Serbians live also in Bosnia and Croatia. Only 10 years ago there was
> >> only one language named "Serbocroatian" (or sometimes "Croatoserbian")
>
> Yep. If you ask a linguist (scientist specializing in languages), s/he will
> most likely tell you that there is only one language, with *very* slightly
> different dialects, but with two different alphabets. (Traditionally
> "Croatian" used the Latin alphabet and "Serbian" used the Cyrillic
> alphabet.) Incidentally, the language code for this language is "sh". The
> separate "hr" and "sr" codes are entirely due to politics. :-P
>
> What's actually wanted is "Serbo-croatian (Latin)" and "Serbo-croatian
> (Cyrillic)". Much like "Chinese (traditional)" and "Chinese (simplified)".
> Of course, the locale system is not really set up properly for this, but
> maybe someone can come up with something. :-P Boy, do I hate the locale
> system. :-)
Well, yes if we forget about the locales issue, your suggestion is
interesting.
Except some small differences, it thus seems to me that the current
"bs" translations are more or less what you call above "Serbo-croatin
(Latin)" and "sr" translations would then be "Serbo-croatian
(Cyrillic)".
However, with such choice, we break from the iso-639 standard (where
sh does not exist...or does not exist anymore). And we probably jump
into a lot of political problems again....I'm enough with political
problems, you know...:-)
The statu-quo remains preferrable to me:
-sr==Serbian
-bs==Bosnian
-hr (no translator yet)==Croatian
We maybe need a way to distinguish between Cyrillic written and Latin
written Serbian......or indicate in some way that "Bosnian" is very
close to Latin-written Serbian.
Changing languagechooser for a more simple formulation would help, as
this would allow to make a more specific entry. See #243705
Safir, could you change the "bs" entry in
packages/languagechooser/languagelist.l10n to something like "Choose
this to proceed in Bosnian (Latin)"
and Alex : "Choose this to proceed in Serbian (Cyrillic)"
If that doesn't make your sentence exceed 58 colums, of course.
If languagechooser is simplified we could have entries like:
sr : Serbian (Cyrillic written)
bs : Bosnian (close to Latin written Serbian)
...or whatever will sound appropriate and not offending to anyone by
concerned translators (probably not easy....)
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