Subj : Re: localization: What is a language
To   : comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.linux
From : Minderbinder
Date : Wed Nov 24 2004 02:18 am

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:06:46 +0000, David Barnsdale wrote:

> I've noticed that Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian will all default to
> English if a program doesn't provide for those languages.  Is there a
> way for a user who has, say, set the environment to Serbian to request
> that if a program has no Serbian support but does have Croatian then it
> should run in Croatian?

Good question. As far as I know, the locale system in Linux falls back to
the "C" locale, not English (such as en_US/en_UK), when there are no
localised messages available for the preferred language. There does not
seem to be a cascading system to allow graceful degradation as you
describe. It is for this reason that I consider locale to be next to
useless for bilingual/multilingual users, and in need of replacement.

You might want to look at www.openi18n.org and www.m17n.org.

Cheers,
Minderbinder.

.