The mailing list for users of the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT)

[Stefan Winter <stefan.winter AT restena.lu>]

Hello,

> I’m logged into transifex and see the strings available for translation
> for ‘fr’,’fr_FR’, and ‘fr_CA’)

In Transifex, we usually define language in their per-country
specificity - just in case later on another variant is also requested.
That way, we can add a second without introducing an ambiguity of
whether fr (general) is "better" than fr_CA.

In the case of French, indeed we started with fr_FR and then - on your
request - added fr_CA for those little variances between the two countries.

Actually, I don't see "fr" (general) in Transifex at all? And that's the
way it should be.

I'm looking at https://www.transifex.com/eduroam_devel/cat/languages/

> The most furthest along are contributions to fr_FR.

Indeed fr_FR was a complete translation in CAT 1.0.something and
throughout CAT 1.1.x. For CAT 2.0 unfortunately the French team did not
update any translations and as a result there's now 45% untranslated
strings. We can't ship the language like that.

> Stefan and dev team, when ‘French’ is shown on the user interface,
> should we consolidate these or maybe seed the ‘fr’ translation into one
> set?  There may be some deviations from fr_FR and fr_CA but I have to
> believe they are minor at best.

Right now French isn't shown because none of the two variants has a
complete translation at least for the end-user visible part.

As soon as one variant finishes, we'll add "French" for it (ignorantly
taking any variant as a "better than nothing and the other countries
will certainly understand, right" :-) ).

In case both complete finish their translations, we'll make that "French
(France)" and "French (Canada)" as a distinct option in the UI.

> What I don’t know much about are the fall back positions on LOCALE for
> these.  I would think that we(as in cat.eduroam.org) would desire to see
> all strings in ‘fr’ as the default French LOCALE and if absent, it falls
> back to ‘en’. Is this how the dev teams sees the LOCALE detection/usage
> working?

The master config file defines which locale exactly is used. You can
look at the current status quo in Git:

https://github.com/GEANT/CAT/blob/release_2_0/config/config-master-template.php

As you see there is a language index "fr" mapping to locale "fr_FR" -
but is commented out as the translation is not complete.

Unless a langauge is clicked explicitly and/or in the current session
cookie, the locale is chosen based on the "Accept-Languages" header sent
by the browser (the optional priority weights in that header with the
q=0.x parameter are ignored). If there's a match in the list of
languages, that one is taken.

If the browser sets a preference to either fr_FR or fr_CA then
a) if we have both, the exact variant is chosen
b) if we only have one, fr_"whatever we have" is chosen

If no match is found, there is indeed a default, and that is English
(which is en_GB actually, as we never had a en_US translation).

Note that we never actually had the case where we had two different
language variants all completely translated. So while I think the code
does what I write above, we'll have a nice round of verification once we
have both language variants in our hand.

> Insight to helping the French translation along in the most constructive
> way is welcome as we would like to contribute to it in the right spot.

I like pragmatic approaches: right now the number of French translations
is 0. Getting it to 1 is priority; getting it to 2 is somewhat nice to
have. Which variant it is, I don't care much.

So you could either work with the fr_FR team to get their translation up
to speed for inclusion, or you could work on fr_CA and complete that
one. If you want to do that, I can also copy the existing fr_FR
fragments to fr_CA to give you a jumpstart (which you then still need to
review for their possible non-Canadianness).

So long as whatever path you chose is the only path that is being taken,
it does not matter at all whether the locale is called fr_CA or fr_FR -
if we only have one French at our disposal, that's the one we will use,
and we will label it "French". Only source code and product config files
will reveal the difference.

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

-- 
Stefan WINTER
Ingenieur de Recherche
Fondation RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et
de la Recherche
2, avenue de l'Université
L-4365 Esch-sur-Alzette

Tel: +352 424409 1
Fax: +352 422473

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