GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 549705
Fallback for Portuguese should not be English
Last modified: 2008-10-30 20:15:34 UTC
It seems that the Portugal_Portuguese translation of gimp is fare away from being finished. Nevertheless the Fallback-Language should not be English. The Brazilian-Portuguese Translation on the other hand seems to be 100% finished. There are some differences between Brazilian- and Portuguese-Portuguese, but for those users i think it would be much easier if the UI would be entirely in Portuguese even if it would be Brazilian. Other information:
Such fallbacks are not something that the GIMP code could do as far as I can see. It's up to the gettext library. File a bug against GNU gettext, or if you are using some other gettext (on some proprietary Unix), against that operating system. I very much suspect it will be resolved as WONTFIX, though. In general, sure, I guess for Portuguese and Brazilian, one can be rather certain that if the user wants Portuguese localisation, and a string is not translated, then the Brazilian one could be used instead. But if such heuristics are added, what will then be the next request? If the user wants Danish, and a string is missing, show the Swedish one instead? Etc. Soon we will have a large can of worms. Many people take language issues very seriously, and are easily offended... just imagine the nationalistic feelings that might get hurt if one would fallback from Norwegian Bokmål to Norwegian Nynorsk, Swedish to Danish, Croatian to Serbian or vice versa, Ukrainian to Russian, etc... (Note that I don't know most of the mentioned languages, I have no idea how mutually understandable they actually are.) (Personally I am very much a cosmopolite, if that is the correct term, and couldn't care less for patriotic and nationalistic jingoism.) I don't see how gettext (or GIMP) could know if a translation is complete enough or not. It can probably easily check how large part of the strings are untranslated, but how can it know if the untranslated ones are just "unimportant" ones? Clearly no heuristic can be reliable enough here. If the Portuguese translation is no good and not getting better, then it should simply be removed (or the Brazilian translation should be merged into it). Take that up with the Portuguese team.
Ok i see... in this case i was just pragmatic. Neither do i speak Portuguese (just some phrases) but my girlfriend is Brazilian, and i installed GIMP on a japanese Windows-machine. So the default language was japanese, my girlfriend speaks japanese but she can't read kanjis, so i added the string pt instead of pt_br thats why i noticed that the Portuguese translation wasn't finished. And according to her and other Brazilian it know, and a buddy of mine how lives in Portugal now, the differences ar not that big, especially in the written language. Like English and American-English. Thats why i had the idea. But now i think it is better to contact the Portuguese team. Since there is no technical solution for this, and according to your concerns, i think it s better to contact the Portuguese and ask them. Thanks.
You can set up this fallback yourself. The environment variable LANGUAGE is assumed to contain a colon separated list of locale names that are used in that order. Next time please don't file a bug report but ask on the mailing-list first.
Ok i will do so next time. Sorry for the waste of time.