How best to internationalise names of new languages
Recently I pulled down the newest set of translations from Weblate and merged them into master. This broke the build because there is a convenient script which gets run by CI that has the following output:
./tools/langs-list-check.py
In the settings array: fi ko id bg ar fa nl de zh-rCN es sc sn sl th he ja ca uk cs el ro eo lv mk ta sv ug is sk sr sq fr pt-rBR nb ru hu my ur pt-rPT it zh-rTW tr ast hr et lt pl vi da gl zh-rHK eu hi en
Actually translated: fi ko id bg ar fa nl zh-rCN de es sc th sl sn he ja ca uk cs ku el ro eo mk lv ta sv ug sk sr is sq fr pt-rBR nb ru ur hu my pt-rPT it zh-rTW tr ast lt et pl hr vi da gl zh-rHK eu hi en
Missing:
kuFrom here we can see that there is a newly added Kurdish language translation (ku) which is not accessible from the F-Droid settings menu.
How would I go about deciding what to call this language? Here are some options:
- Call it "Kurdish" (the English name).
- Go to my Android settings and select Kurdish, then see what is there (it shows "Kurdish" when I select it in the list of languages, and then "Ku" once selected).
- Use Google Translate or other online translation services (Google translates the English word Kurdish to "Kurdî").
- Ask some of my Iranian friends if they know the difference between Farsi and Kurdish and if so can they provide a translation.
- Ask on the translation forum.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
Activity
mentioned in merge request !432 (merged)
The way we should be getting all language names is by asking Android what the language name is in that language. Google Translate will not help since it sucks at context, and the context a word is used can have huge differences in many languages.
For languages like Tibetan which have writing systems that were only recently supported in Android, there needs to be fallback English name. That way, devices that do not support that writing system will show the English, rather than blank or gibberish. Zom includes a kind of one-file library for handling this, which we can take, since I wrote it :)
Ideally, we'd only include translations that are something like 75% complete. Incomplete translations just make the app look buggy.
Cool. I've asked this question about excluding languages based on coverage in the translation forum. It is quite trivial to script which languages to include and add that to the
pull-trans.shscript. For example,curl --silent https://hosted.weblate.org/exports/stats/f-droid/f-droid/?format=csv | awk -F , '{print $5, $2, $1}' | sort -goutputs the following, and we could trivially exclude anything below a certain threshold:translated_percent code name 0.3 ku Kurdish 5.1 mk Macedonian 8.4 ur Urdu 13.0 sl Slovenian 17.5 ug Uighur 17.8 lt Lithuanian 23.6 ta Tamil 28.7 sq Albanian 29.3 lv Latvian 42.1 hi Hindi 75.1 my Burmese 78.4 gl Galician 85.4 hu Hungarian 86.3 vi Vietnamese 89.3 bg Bulgarian 89.6 ro Romanian 92.4 he Hebrew 94.5 fa Persian 94.8 ko Korean 96.9 th Thai 97.2 et Estonian 98.4 pt_PT Portuguese (Portugal) 98.4 zh_HK Chinese (Hong Kong) 99.0 da Danish 99.0 hr Croatian 99.0 zh_Hans Chinese (Simplified) 99.3 ast Asturian 99.6 sn Shona 100.0 ar Arabic 100.0 ca Catalan 100.0 cs Czech 100.0 de German 100.0 el Greek 100.0 eo Esperanto 100.0 es Spanish 100.0 eu Basque 100.0 fi Finnish 100.0 fr French 100.0 id Indonesian 100.0 is Icelandic 100.0 it Italian 100.0 ja Japanese 100.0 nb Norwegian Bokmål 100.0 nl Dutch 100.0 pl Polish 100.0 pt_BR Portuguese (Brazil) 100.0 ru Russian 100.0 sc Sardinian 100.0 sk Slovak 100.0 sr Serbian 100.0 sv Swedish 100.0 tr Turkish 100.0 uk Ukrainian 100.0 zh_Hant Chinese (Traditional)added bazaar label
changed milestone to %0.103 - UX Overhaul
changed milestone to %1.1
About names of languages I would follow the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes this makes ku - Kurdish - Kurdî (in latin chars, since they translated F-Droid using latin chars).
assigned to @eighthave
changed milestone to %0.103 - UX Overhaul
closed via merge request !461 (merged)