Locations in the settings are not localized

[David Planella]

Binary package hint: indicator-datetime

When I try to add a new time zone location they are all always in English.

I'm not sure where this locations come from now, but it is a regression from the old GNOME calendar app, where locations were always localized.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Confirmed

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

This is an issue with the geonames server not being able to return localized names yet. Ubiquity is similarly affected.

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

From looking at the geonames.org data files (found here; http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/) it appears they lack any localised place names, I also can't find any specific geonames.org language/localisation API's so it seems they don't have any.

[David Planella (dpm)]

El dj 31 de 03 de 2011 a les 15:02 +0000, en/na Karl Lattimer va
escriure:
> >From looking at the geonames.org data files (found here;
> http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/) it appears they lack any
> localised place names, I also can't find any specific geonames.org
> language/localisation API's so it seems they don't have any.
>

Thanks Karl for looking into this.

We've got other places where we get localized country/region/city names
in the system. Two that come to mind are the ones in the iso-codes
packages and the weather locations (from the weather applet, I think?).
I'm wondering if we could match the names we get from geonames.org to
any of these and display localized names?

How does the GNOME calendar do it? Is it something we could reuse?

Regards,
David.

--
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the GNOME calendar uses libgweather, the ubuntu-geonames was discussed on IRC, see http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/03/23/%23ubuntu-installer.txt for the discussion, the translated informations seem to be available but with no api to get them at the moment

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

@David, I don't think gnome calendar uses geonames, matching locations would be problematic as we'd need to be able to match a partial localised string with a non-localised complete string. i.e. user starts typing in their place in their language e.g. "Deu" this will never be able to match Deuchland.

The other side of it is to translate the place name after it's been typed in english and geonames request sent/received, the location is added to the list and only THEN translated... Which doesn't seem like an ideal user experience.

Admittedly neither does english only place names, but at least it's consistent :/

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

I think the best way to deal with this is to create some kind of translation matching on the server. For instance, the query to the server includes a lang= parameter which the server uses to look up a translation. The mechanics of how the translations are stored and how they're accessed it not something I'd attribute to the indicator datetime or ubiquity packages.

Would anyone dealing with geonames like to hazard a guess how the server can localise the strings? If it means cross referencing and comparing multiple data sources which sources?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

To summarize what we know so far: geonames does seem to have localized names in its alternateNames.zip file. These names go into the database used by the server, but seem not to be searched by sphinx (the search engine used by the server). So that needs to be fixed.

Also, it seems the data has population info! So we can sort on that too.

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

So far myself and mterry have updated the geonames search to include alternate names and started working on supporting utf8 and non-ascii charsets.

The following pages are useful with regard to this,

Generating Charsets - http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2009/09/generating_char.html
Chinese Charsets - http://sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=209
list of charsets - http://sphinxsearch.com/wiki/doku.php?id=charset_tables

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

The latest push fixes the server side issues, we'll need to get this in place to test it with the indicator.

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

I've been reliably informed this is released.