Re: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
> 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 surprised to hear there is no official translation of Netherlands
in Slovakia.
I have done just a search with google, and found on the following page
<http://monyr.webpark.cz/nizozemsko.htm> titled "Nizozemsko-Holandsko
(Nederland-Holland)...".
If the author of the page is not dumb, I guess that Nizozemsko have
something to do with Netherland.
>
>> 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.
Well, French often refers to England when they talk about United
Kingdom.
And many people call Americans people of the United-States of
America.
But these mistakes should be avoided.
> 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.
Certainly.
Regards,
--
Mathieu Roy
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