Confusion with lang/en.utf8/langconfig.php thislanguage

[Ralf Hilgenstock]

We found that in German language pack the string lang/en.utf8/langconfig.php thislanguage was changed from Deutsch to English by someone. This created a problem if the German language pack was installed.

From perspective of translation its correct to translate the string English to Englisch. For this string its not correct to translate the term in this way.

I don't know how to handle this in a better way. Maybe its possible to add an information to the string.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

A similar thing happened with the Spanish language pack a few weeks back -- someone changed langconfig.thislanguage from "Espanol" to "Ingles". So clearly people do get confused by it.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to "lock down" a particular language string through the Launchpad interface. Perhaps we could store this string as metadata in the PO file, instead of as a translatable string? Sort of like what we do with the the langconfig.pluralrule string.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

It's worth noting, langconfig.thisvalue is a high-visibility string. It shows up in the dropdown menu that lets users select which language they want to use, which makes it *very* confusing if it doesn't have the correct name for the language.

[Son Nguyen (ngson2000)]

Hi Aaron

If we store the lang string 'thislanguage' as metadata, how the translators update the language name?

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Son,

If we stored the "thislanguage" as metadata, it would *not* be translatable through the Launchpad translation interface, but that's the point. It would stop people who aren't familiar with Mahara, from changing that string through the web interface.

Instead, "thislanguage" would only be changeable via the same method as "pluralrule" and "pluralfunction". I haven't tried to update those yet, so I'm not entirely sure of the details of that. :) I think it's done by updating the .po file directly and uploading it using bzr.

The translated name of the language is unlikely to change very often, though, so it wouldn't be that much of a problem that it's hard to change.