From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 12:25:41 CDT
Peter Constable wrote:
>> I doubt it's necessary to worry about erasing the
>> political distinction between Romanian and Moldavian.
>
> OK. For managing language resources, what ID should one use?
Well, you do as usual, you do both, just to be sure.
What is the problem?
You already have a plethora of ID, many of them are overload; I am currently
in Spain, and I encounter too many messages which say (a bit paraphrased):
"you are running a session in Spanish; the current application does not
support Spanish; would you like to use Spanish instead?" (of course, this is
created by the difference between traditional and modern sort; still it is
funny). Before that, I was amazed by the very existence of the locale
"French for Monaco"... I am sure nobody will switch to this locale, since it
will probably mean disappearition of a good number of French messages,
particularly in the "i15d apps" (only enabled for Belgium, Canada, France,
and Switzerland)!
Do not tell me you worry about the size of the resulting package: when you
are at handling Romanian for Moldova specifically, you have already (based
of GNP) about a hundred locales... Even if it is something very specialized
(say, a pan-Romance thesaurus), this will mean just one additional locale
into an already long list. And there is no additional work to handle the
fact there is two locales, since they are identical, so testing one or the
other should give identical results. What is really additional work, and it
is work for you (the project manager) is to ensure that both locales do not
diverge. With may imply proeminent comments in the sources (but you have to
make sure this does not show outside) or the standards, or special coherency
ruling while building.
Furthermore, you (and your company) do not want to play politics, do you?
And entering (either way, i.e. dropping Moldavian or dropping ro_MD) the
debate is always giving some heated extremists a way to bash your company;
giving both option is much more neutral (OK, doing nothing is better on this
respect; but does not satisfy :-( ).
Note that this does not apply only to Microsoft (of course, MS is much more
of a target of this kind).
By the way, the users may not be a good source for informations on such a
question. Basic users, the ones which you really want to know the advices,
have no preoccupation about IDs: once they have Romanian text and UI, they
are very happy; if that means switching the country to Rumania, well they
will do that; if there is an additional entry for Moldavian and/or Moldova,
and the result is the same, well that is fine too (and note that a number
will not even notice this); what is not good is when neither the entry for
Moldovian, nor the entry for Romanian in Moldova, shows the same level of
support as Romanian in Rumania: in such a case, they switch back in a hurry
to Rumania (and yes, I have experienced that, and more than once).
The ones which do have an eye about the ID are computer people (like the one
from gov' agency that set up, wrongly, the code at the home page ;-)), which
for their proper use are using English! The typical people of "Do what I
say, not what I do" kind. Which is why I said this can easily drift into
religious wars.
As you have already noticed in this thread, the issue is debatable, and
everybody has an idea this about; so I believe the responsive behaviour for
the IT technicians should be to stay neutral.
Hope this helps,
Antoine
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Aug 16 2004 - 04:51:39 CDT