Re: automatic en_GB to en_US conversion

[Robert Brady <rwb197@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 30 May 2000, Markus Kuhn wrote:

> Which sounds like a very good reason to keep the source text in en_GB
> and derive en_US (aka "Simplified English") automatically from the
> traditional form.

Yes.

> Do you know any examples, where the same word in en_GB maps to different
> words/spellings in en_US?

I can't think of any offhand, I suspect there is a good chance that there
are none, or at least none that are common enough to worry about.

> I'd also guess that en_GB is a far better source form for conversion to
> en_AU, en_NZ, en_CA, en_DE, etc. than en_US.

Yep. en_AU, en_NZ are basically identical to en_GB, as are en_AG, an_AI,
en_AQ, en_BB, en_BD, en_BM, en_BN, en_BS, en_BW, en_BZ, en_CC, en_CM,
en_CX, en_CY, en_DM, en_EU, en_FJ, en_FK, en_GD, en_GG, en_GH, en_GI,
en_GM, en_GY, en_HK, en_HM, en_IE, en_IM, en_IN, en_IO, en_JE, en_JM,
en_KE, en_KI, en_KN, en_KY, en_LC, en_LK, en_LS, en_MS, en_MT, en_MU,
en_MV, en_MW, en_MY, en_MZ, en_NA, en_NF, en_NG, en_NR, en_NU, en_PG,
en_PK, en_PN, en_SB, en_SC, en_SG, en_SH, en_SL, en_SZ, en_TC, en_TO,
en_TT, en_TV, en_TZ, en_UG, en_VC, en_VG, en_VU, en_WS, en_ZA, en_ZM, and
en_ZW. [1]

I suspect it is more practical to have programs in international
(Commonwealth) English, and then make a special en_US version. This might
have the beneficial side-effect of making American programmers more aware
of locales. On the other hand, the task of persuading American programmers
to abandon their simplified forms and write in the Queen's english would
probably be much harder than just writing a full AI able to do all
localisation of it's own accord.

[1] Admittedly many of these countries don't use much English internally, but
    when they do externally, they do it like en_GB.

-- 
Robert

-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/