[Advacs-discuss] Loclisation - language and rules

[Oliver Elphick]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 17:10, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:
> John Hasler schrieb:
> > More US-isms for the glossary:
> 
> > Cost of Sales                   Cost of Goods Sold
> > Credit Note                     Credit Memo
> > Daybook                         Journal
> > Delivery Note                   Packing List
> > Profit and Loss Account         Expense and Revenue Summary
> > Turnover                        Gross Sales (or just Gross)
> 
> This terms are not unusual here.
> Large companies in the german speaking area use to follow IAS, and 
> translate their reports to EN. Seems that en_US is preferred.
> 
> Seems, that we need different translations. Same is true for de_AT 
> versus de_DE, and _very_ true for de_CH.

The German translations that Helmut sent me made me think how they will
apply where language and country are not co-extensive.  I am trying to
work out how to organise the project directories to handle
localisation.  It seems to be more of a problem here, because there are
rules of law for each country as well as language differences.  That is,
each country has its own laws; some countries share a language (a least
to a degree!) and some countries have multiple languages.

For example, de (the language) seems to cover Germany, Austria and parts
of Switzerland, while Switzerland has three other languages (French,
Italian and Romance).

Currently I have

sql
 |
+---------+
|         |
GL...    national
            |
   +--------+---------+---------+
   |        |         |         |
  AT       DE         GB       CH

so is that adequate?  Would you like to have:

sql
 |
+---------+
|         |
GL...    national
            |
   +--------+---------------+------------------------+
   |                        |                        |
   de                      en                        fr
   +----+-----+         +------+------+-----+    +------+------+-----+
   |    |     |         |      |      |     |    |      |      |     |
   AT   DE    CH        GB     AU     US   etc   FR     CA     BE   etc

or

sql
 |
+---------+
|         |
GL...    national
            |
   +--------+---------+---------------+
   |        |         |               |
   AT       DE        GB              CH
                      |               |
                      +--------+      +-----+-----+-----+
                      |        |      |     |     |     |
                      en       cy     de    fr    it    rm

This needs to be sorted out now and it will be very awkward to change
later.  I will need to build the include files so that they pick a
particular language and country, and that means I need to know
immediately how they will be organised.

Either way, we are likely to get a lot of duplication; perhaps it can be
managed by symbolic links, or stub files that direct the inclusion of
files from a different part of the hierarchy.

-- 
Oliver Elphick                                          olly@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight                              http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
GPG: 1024D/A54310EA  92C8 39E7 280E 3631 3F0E  1EC0 5664 7A2F A543 10EA
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