Why are the files all localized to the country, rather than (also) the
generic language?
I was sort of thinking we’d have a generic “locales-de.xml” file, for
example, and perhaps then the specific country files where it varies.
We have a locales-de-DE.xml file, which is what you’re looking for. Use
of the second “DE” was a quick workaround for a Zotero bug, but yes, it
should be locales-de.xml. (You’ll see that the main German locale in
chrome/locale is indeed ‘de’.) We were going to change the CSL one back
once we fixed the bug.
In German, for example, it makes no sense to have a locale for the
German-speaking region of Switzerland because, while they do have spoken
dialectics (in fact many of them) that vary considerably from Germany,
they write in “High German” (e.g. the same exact language as in
Germany). As a result, the two files should be exactly the same. I
presume the same is likely the case in Austria as well.
The locales are determined by the users of Babelzilla, the site we use
to handle localizations. Firefox only offers a single German
localizations, ‘de’, but on Babelzilla they seem to feel that de, de-AT,
and de-CH all merit separate localizations. Comparing de to de-CH, I
only see a few differences–for example, “Gr��e des Kunstwerks” vs.
“Gr�sse des Kunstwerks”. According to Wikipedia, “In Switzerland and
Liechtenstein ss usually replaces every �.” Supporting that convention
isn’t too big of a deal–we could just copy strings from ‘de’ over any
untranslated strings in ‘de-AT’ and ‘de-CH’, and Babelzilla users could
change them if they preferred. Or we could just remove de-AT and de-CH
and probably not offend anyone too much, but we’d probably want to ask
someone from Austria or Switzerland first.
Likewise, I doubt written Spanish varies enough across Spain and Latin
America to need more than one locale file.
There is only one locale file for Spanish currently, but, for what it’s
worth, Firefox does have an Argentinian localization of Firefox, es-AR.
Related, what protocol do you suggest for soliciting help from users
like this on the translations? Should I ask her to contact me and add
the new translations myself? Or do you have some system for this already?
I think it’s best to continue to do them through Babelzilla, since
there’s a great community there and that’s where virtually all of the
localizations have come from. While changes could be checked into your
SVN directly, they’d be more likely to get lost when we merged the
locales from Babelzilla. (Currently, we use a script to merge English
strings into the other locales files for missing strings, since Zotero
currently has file-level, not term-level, fallback to English. The
upshot is that there are never missing strings in any of the locales and
it’s therefore more complicated to determine when a string has been
localized, so it’s easiest to just make changes in one place.)
We haven’t yet uploaded Zotero 1.0.2 to Babelzilla, however, so if you
want to put in those German changes from the user now, go ahead, and
we’ll upload as soon as you’re done.
We definitely need help here, BTW, b/c the German locales files are
quite thin, which is why the user above is seeing that bug.
The “undefined” part shouldn’t happen either way, so that would seem to
be a separate bug, but yes, the German locales are rather thin.