[Mailman-Users] English (USA)

Stephen J. Turnbull turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp
Mon Jul 8 23:40:43 EDT 2019


Jim Popovitch via Mailman-Users writes:

 > I just keep getting reminded

By your users?  By Tommy Robinson fans, Boris Johnson, and football
hooligans?  Or just when you see it in the list of supported languages?

 > that we specifically support USA English and we offer no other
 > English language support.

Patches welcome.  If somebody wants to provide idiomatic translations
to other English dialects, they're welcome to do so.  I'm waaaay too
lazy to do it. ;-)

I imagine that basically what happened is that ISO 639 provides a
baroque format for describing languages, which includes identifying
regional variation and other possible variations, as well as the
language.  The Mailman developers being mostly Americans, and wishing
for the .po files to be consistent in spelling and idiom, we specified
en_US as the language of the .po files.  (Note that gettext doesn't
know what's in the .po files; it could be a mixture of Portuguese,
Russian, and Korean for all gettext cares.)

Personally, I'd be against changing this.  I'm not worried that
anybody is going to think that other en dialects are completely
unsupported, and I think it's important for us to show that as far as
we are concerned en_US *is* a *dialect* that's convenient for us to
use in developing programmatic messages, and not "canonical" English.




More information about the Mailman-Users mailing list