Bug#553678: locales: Language soup in Nowegian locale
Package: locales
Version: 2.7-18
Severity: important
Tags: l10n
I love the way Debian lets users make their own choises, and would like
to recommend Debian to all my friends. Now the longstanding "language
soup" problem for the Norwegian locales keeps me from doing just that.
The problem: When I install Debian and choose Norwegian locale I get a
language soup of Norwegian, Sweedish, Danish and English in most
programs. This issue pertains to messages in console programs as well as
in several programs for X11. The soup is present in both versions of
Norvegian (Bokmaal and Nynorsk).
I suppose this is due to the fact that most .po files and simialar
translation files are more completely translated for Sweedish and Danish
than for the Norwegian languages. In a freshly installed system the file
/etc/default/locale contains a sting somewhat like this:
LANGUAGE="nb_NO:nb:sw_SW:da_DK:en"
I edited mine, so I do not have the original string anymore, sorry.
Now most, if not all, Norwegians understand Danish, Sweedish and
English, at least to a certain extent. Having a computer system that
speaks all five (remember; Norwegian has two versions) at the same time
and in the same program is very confusing. This happens if different
parts of the .po files are translated for the different locales. This is
not just a theoretical situation. It happened to me a lot, and it took
some sysadmin read-up to locate the /etc/default logical structure the
first time round.
My proposal would be to make the string reflect the real language
situation in Norway. I suggest making the string include only the
selected locale for the system, together with the "en" catch-all. This
is because Bokmaal and Nynorsk really are two different languages in
their own right. Mixing strings from both languages only makes it harder
to discern which strings are left for translation work; the same string
in nb_NO and nn_NO can be different in one letter only, even though the
string in question amounts to a complete sentence. Rather like en_US and
en_GB, I believe.
My proposal is thus to make the sting in /etc/default/locale read
as follows:
For Norwegian Bokmaal:
LANGUAGE="nb_NO:nb:en"
For Norwegian Nynorsk:
LANGUAGE="nn_NO:nn:en"
Now this leaves the locale "no" in the cold. I am not certain as to how
this locale is implemented. My guess is that it is a leftover from the
time when there was no distinction between the two languages in Debian.
The only reason for leaving it in might be in order for it to work as a
catch-all for web pages that use this non-existant locale. I believe
some browsers use $LANGUAGE to negotiate the language for web pages. If
this is the case it should be inserted right in front of the "en"
catch-all.
>From what I learn from
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=515099
the change should be made in the debhelper.in/locales.postinst script.
Maybe I am in err here, as I never even looked at this file.
If someone feels strongly against my proposal, please do not hesitate to
speak up. As I remember form some previous reading og bug reports around
this issue years ago the string was implemented like this after a
discussion with the developers working on Debian Edu (Skolelinux,
http://www.skolelinux.no, http://www.slx.no). I do not know the status
of their work in this area.
;)Frode
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.3
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=nb_NO.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages locales depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.24 Debian configuration management sy
ii libc6 [glibc-2.7-1] 2.7-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
locales recommends no packages.
locales suggests no packages.
-- debconf information:
locales/default_environment_locale: None
locales/locales_to_be_generated:
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