Convert locale and translation project lables to IETF (2009) language tags

[charlestu]

Launchpad now uses two-letter ISO-639-1 codes where available and three-letter ISO-639-3 codes for other languages. This allows for some confusion where multiple scripts are available [i.e. nan vs zh_TW, both of which refer to min nan chinese but with different scripts] and where codes would overlap [i.e. zh_CN with cmn-CN, nan-CN, yue-CN, and wuu-CN].

Converting to IETF (2009) language tags [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag], which consist of an ISO 639-3 alpha-3 language code [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3] plus an ISO 15924 alpha-4 script code [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15924] plus an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2], would resolve such ambiguities and would promote compliance with current standards.

Adopting standard language names with the script appended, where appropriate, and the country in parenthesis would avoid ambiguity (i.e. "Chinese (Hong Kong)" and "Chinese (Traditional)" are different languages which both use traditional characters).

Some examples of the proposed change:

current name - label -> proposed name - eitf tag

Arabic - ar -> Arabic (MSA: Egypt) - arb-Arab-EG
Bengali - bn -> Bengali (Bengladesh) - ben-Beng-BD
Brazilian Portuguese - pt-BR -> Portuguese (Brazil) - por-Latn-BR
Chinese (Hong Kong) - zh_HK -> Yue Chinese: Traditional Han (Hong Kong) - yue-Hant-HK
Chinese (Simplified) zh_CN -> Mandarin Chinese: Simplified Han (China) - cmn-Hans-CN
Chinese (Traditional) - zh_TW -> Min Nan Chinese: Traditional Han (Taiwan) - nan-Hant-TW
English (Australia) - en_AU -> English (Australia) - eng-Latn-AU
English (Canada) - en_CA -> English (Canada) - eng-Latn-CA
English (United Kingdom) - en_GB -> English (United Kingdom) - eng-Latn-GB
Hindi - hi -> Hindi (India) - hin-Deva-IN
Japanese - ja -> Japanese (Japan) - jpn-Jpan-JP
Min Nan Chinese - nan -> Min Nan Chinese: Pe̍h-ōe-jī (Taiwan) - nan-Latn-TW
Moroccan Arabic - ary -> Arabic (Morocco) - ary-Arab-MA
Portuguese - pt -> Portuguese (Portugal) - por-Latn-PT
Russian - ru -> Russian (Russia) - rus-Cyrl-RU
Spanish - es -> Spanish (Spain) - spa-Latn-ES

[David Planella (dpm)]

Hi charlestu,

Thanks for reporting this bug.

While this is a valid request, Launchpad should probably not be the first place to implement it. Right now most Free Software projects use glibc, which does not support IETF tags. Launchpad language codes are based on the glibc approach, with ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes.

I'd recommend adding a bug task for glibc and contacting its developers about the feature request.

I'm also marking the bug in the translations portal as Invalid, as the portal is a Drupal site which works with the codes Drupal uses. In this case, if you want to track it there, I'r recommend opening a bug at Drupal.

Thanks.