On Sat, Oct 11, 2003 at 09:06:06AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote: > > I would suggest adopting a policy for the language order. Of course, > determining the "most important" languages is a very delicate thing as > everyone would like to have his own language listed on the first page. >
I tried to propose this a while back: Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Please re-read the thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2002/debian-i18n-200203/msg00016.html And I also highlighted this issue in my Debconf3 talk (slides available at http://people.debian.org/~jfs/debconf/i18n) > Finding a realistic criterion would be Good, maybe. Either the most used > languages all over the world, or the languages for which Debian is most > translated (french would become first, maybe..?:-))), or something based on I'm not sure French would be the first one, there are a number of areas in which other languages surpass French :-) > developer number (german would then come first...)...or whatever else.... > I suggest you come up with a sort of criteria and submit them for discussion. Some come to mind, either global: criteria based on the percentage of population that talks a given language (based on ethnologic data), criteria based on the languages things (books, movies..) get translated into (transalation demanded world wide), which the UNESCO provides data about, or Debian specific: vitality of user/translators mailing lists, translated/localised programs, translated/localised debconf templates, traslated/localised documentation. >From my point of view, languagechooser should base its ordering in a very simple metric a) Order languages based on how up-to-date and translated is the the debian-installation, b) In case of a tie, order language by usage as a mother tongue worl-wide (first Chinese, then Spanish, then English, then Bengali, then Hindi....) This should be based on some real-world data like http://www.the-bag-lady.co.uk/wct/wf/index.asp?cont=worldlanguages or http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp So, in the event of the debian-installer being available fully-translated in the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Japanese, the order would be: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German, French. > > This should probably be discussed in a very general mailing list as this > impacts a very sensitive point....but expect no consensus reached. And that mailing list is debian-i18n, not debian-devel. However, if no consensus is going to be reached, what is the point of asking this to be done? Regards Javi
