Re: Bug#229325: country/region should be used

[Yao Heling <linux@800e.net>]

I believe the second option is good enough and means less work for
everyone.

Just my 2 cents,

YAO Heling

在2004年03月18日的13:56，Christian Perrier写道：
> Quoting Wang WenRui (wangwr@ustc.edu):
> 
> > Well, the ISO-3166 _is_ "country or area & region codes" according to UN[1],
> > it is a "coding standard for coding the names of countries and dependent
> > areas" according to Wikipedia[2]. Note that from iso.org[3]: the country
> > names used in ISO 3166-1 are all from United Nations sources. Using
> > these country names officially notified by the countries to the UN
> > Secretary General helps in keeping ISO 3166-1 politically neutral and
> > thus acceptable to as many users as possible.
> > 
> > Using "country code" _for short_ may be okay in some occasions, But not
> > fittable in a formal installer of the best GNU/Linux distribution, when
> > users "choose a country" from a list with
> 
> I think that the problem indeed happens only with Chinese (this is
> becoming an habit...:-))).
> 
> We have two options:
> 
> -use "Choose your contry or area:" and have all translators change
> their translation. Not a big deal, but maybe a headache (/me already
> tries to imagine how I will translate to french). And, for all of
> them except Chinese, this will make no difference...
> 
> -leave this as is and ask the Chinese translator(s) to change the
> chinese translation to "Choose your country or area...."or whatever
> will sound the most appropriate
> 
> 
> I'm in favour of the 2nd choice, clearly.
> 
> BTW, about the "politically neutral" choices of ISO on that matter: I
> don't understand them. They are *not* politically neutral in my opinion.
> 
> As far as I know, and though I'm not in any matter a specialist in
> international politics, HK for instance is a full part of the country
> named "People's Republic of China", codename CN. The territory has a
> special status inside CN, close to some kind of autonomy.
> 
> Indeed this is not drastically different from some autonomous regions
> in some countries (for instance Catalunya in Spain, or even USA
> states). So, I don't really understand why HK is still in ISO-3166. We
> are in 2004, not in 1999 anymore.
> 
> I probably have to check the ISO-3166 maintenance agency FAQ in order
> to understand (the ISO 639 FAQ already explained very well why
> Traditional and Simplified Chinese share the same two-letter code).
> 
>