translation in fedora 6 start page

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2006-10-21 at 21:50 +0100, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
> 
> O/H Paul W. Frields έγραψε:
> > On Sat, 2006-10-21 at 15:47 +0300, cornel panceac wrote:
> >> one thing i've just noticed:
> >> once i've selected "russian" i can no longer return to other languages
> >> since i can't read "english" in russian anymore.
> >>
> >> of course, placing mouse on every link finaly shows the english link,
> >> but we can not expect for the new linux user to know this trick .....
> >>
> >> (and there's the back browser button too -_- ...)
> >>
> >> imho, in every translated version, the links to another languages
> >> should be in the respective languages (like spanish link in spanish,
> >> english link in english, greek link in greek, etc)
> > 
> > There's a chicken-and-egg problem involved.  We can't write the
> > paragraph containing the list of languages until all the finished
> > translations come in.  Once that happens, the added paragraph is
> > untranslated.  Get it?  :-)
> 
> Paul,
> 
> I think Cornel meant that the paragraph should be the same in all languages,
> like the following:
> 
>   "English, Italiano, Ελληνικά, ..."
> 
> so that whatever page you visit, you will be able to return to your own since
> you'll always understand the link.

I don't get that from the OP, since it says "I can't read 'english' in
russian anymore."  

> An alternative is to have the language name localized in parenthesis, which
> comforts both users wanting to understand the links in their own webpage and
> people wanting to understand links in all webpages:
> 
>   EN: English, Italiano (Italian), Ελληνικά (Greek), ...
>   EL: Αγγλικά (English), Ιταλικά (Italian), Ελληνικά, ...
> 
> or the opposite (original name in parenthesis:
> 
>   EN: English, Italian (Italiano), Greek (Ελληνικά), ...
>   EL: Αγγλικά (English), Ιταλικά (Italiano), Ελληνικά, ...
> 
> 
> The first of the three ways solves the chicken-and-egg problem but is not
> localized, so it's the only paragraph from the page that a reader won't be able
> to understand. It's a tradeoff I guess, but at least it's better than having all
> the language names in English.
> 
> Anyway, this will be less important once the adaptive index will work. Even with
> that though, we should choose which of the above we will implement. :)

I would advocate ISO codes over other non-localized language names.
Localized versions would be fine, e.g.:

English (en), Italiano (it), Ελληνικά (gr)...

Since this fallback page will likely be written directly as (X)HTML, it
would obviate any requirement for translating the content.  The
localized language names can be found all over the googlemind.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
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