> > Anyway, the issue does not even pertain to localechooser but rather
> > iso-codes which provides the relevant information.
>
> OK, so let's not use the official name. You should have noticed that
> I'm not worried about political issues but about an inconsistent naming
> scheme.
>
> The problem I originally have seen in the German translation is
> Mazedonien, Republik
> and
> Moldawien (Republik)
>
> You probably agree that this is inconsistent and should be avoided. I
> provided already a patch for this and assumed that using official names
> would avoid this problem at all (by not using the Republic suffix).
>
> Now I notice that only a very small subset of all the different naming
> conventions (XXX, Republic of; Republic of XXX; XXX Republic) is used in
> Debian Installer, namely XXX, Republic of. This is OK since it grants a
> proper ordering by the country und the suffix ", Republic of" is only
> used when necessary.
s/necessary/used in ISO-3166
The English names you see are the names in the ISO-3166
standard...except for countries where the "common_name" field is
filled in iso-codes (actually, only MK and TW).
The same goes for French as French country names are part of the
standard (which makes the task of the French translator
easy...:-))). The only translations for which we have some choice are
those of common_name for MK and TW. For MK, I did choose to use
"Macédoine" alone and for TW I use "Taïwan".
When it comes to other languages, you indeed have more latitude to
choose what you do because there is no official standard for them even
for the official names.
> Tobias (the co-maintainer and German translator of iso-codes) offered to
> change s/Macedonia, Republic of/Republic of Macedonia/ and the same for
> Moldova and Korea to make this more consistent inside iso-codes. Tobias,
> please don't do this, I noticed that the current usage is (at least in
> the Debian Installer) consistent.
While changing it could be possible, I agree that "Macedonia, Republic
of" is the best suited because it places Macedonia in a logical place
by alphabetical order.
> I'm sorry about this trouble, but as I told Tobias already in a private
> mail the very large collection of country names in different naming
> conventions is very confusing (at least for me :-))
Yep, but that is the standard. The official country names are not
consistent because each country has the right to decide what should be
its official "short" name (see for instance "Libyan Arab
Jimahiriya"). Most countries have chosen the "natural" name (France,
Germany, China), but some haven't ("Palestinian Territory, Occupied",
"Russian Federation"...).
What I know about all this is that, in though cases, there is usually
no "perfect" solution. These things obviously can become highly
political and thus sensitive (some will remember that the Taiwan
controversy in Debian made the kernel packages maintainer, Herbert Xu,
*resign* from Debian because, apparently, he didn't like us deciding
to give Taiwan its usual name).
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature