A mockup I’m played around with that tries to support the normal mortal case of just selecting the right locale, but supporting the apparently common situation of
a) wanting just the UI in US English which leads people to effectively set LANG=en_US and then fighting their applications one at a time to get them to not use Letter paper, not use a baffling date format, getting . vs , in numbers, inches vs cm, and so on
b) wanting dates in ISO format
and at the least letting you know up-front the effect your settings will have on applications.
e.g. X wants everything to be standard German
e.g. X wants UI in English because X finds that more comfortable but normally X will be writing in German and using metric, wants the normal German formatting rules to apply for numbers and currency, except for dates because X wants to use the ISO date format to avoid cross-cultural cockups on dates like the 6th of April and the 4th of June.
What maps to what
This should either be in a section about the user or the computer, probably better in the About Me caplet or its successor. How about using Geoclue to guess probable locale?
Man, that German translation makes me squeal.
“Vorgerueckt” for “Advanced” and “Vorbetrachtung” for “Preview” …
Hello,
Thanks for the idea and hopefully thanks for implementing!
I really like the mockup and think it will be really useful! Using standard date format and switching German to English UI for using support or tutorial will be very easy this way! Only translation could be better (Advanced = Erweitert, Preview = Vorschau)!
Dirk
re translations used in the mockup, I have about 8 words of German, I just plucked them out at random, they’re just illustrative to show what bits would be in what language.
The fun bit (for me) would be the creation of some exemplar lists of words and lib, along the lines of iso-codes, that are commonly misspelled in various languages for the redlining examples. Wiktionary list as a basis.
Remember en_GB has better defaults ie A4
Yes, as does en_IE and the outlier locale of en_DK (as well as some other English locales). Where en_DK also has ISO dates by default, though it uses international currency symbol as the currency sign while en_IE would default to a possibly more useful €. Also number formats in en_DK are the more universal (though alien to me) 1.000,00 format while en_GB and en_IE are 1,000.00. So it depends on what the goal is.
The point is that there are easily misunderstood consequences of simply whacking LANG=xx_YY in order to try and achieve one goal of say, UI in language xx, so maybe something like the above could head off some pain and bring LANGUAGE into play to support efforts to get “just the UI in English, but nothing else please”
Great job, but it’s really sad that localization still is so botched in GNOME that this is needed.
I don’t remember if GNOME makes the decision based on where you live or what language you pick, but either way, any use case outside “I am an American, therefore I live in the US and speak American English” or “I live in Sweden, therefore I only speak Swedish” is nigh impossible without lots and lots of magic. You can move to another country, you can’t speak another language, you can’t do anything that doesn’t fit a very narrow set of assumptions.
It’s plain retarded and there are tons of bugs, posts, and mailing list complaints about this. Not that anyone seems to understand the problem, maybe they all fit the assumptions? The weird thing is that it’s only a matter of asking about *both* language and where you live (or rather, what countrys way of doing things you prefer) instead of assuming that one of them automatically means the other (whichever way that was).
I really like this. I also find this insanely frustrating in GNOME, I made a number of locale changes to get correct behaviour only to discover that GNOME has its own internal overrides for things like the starting day of the week.
Being able to setup these things is pretty hard for the average user so seeing something like this is great. I’m glad you also included fallback languages since in many cases English is a bad fallback.
However, I think you might find that these things blow up into people wanting more options. In South Africa (ZA) we have a defacto currency representation of R1 000,00 but we’ve also being Americanised and use R1,000.00 – either is great except if you are a journalist or accountant and you need the nbsp version. We’d need decimal and thousand separator to handle that.