Translate and/or adapt currency names? (Re: Could you make currency's names are shown in local language?)

[Frank H. Ellenberger]

Hello,

sorry for my late stepping in this discussion, but I am out of town, and have 
only a 56k-dial-in connection.

Am Donnerstag, 22. April 2010 um 23:05:57 schrieb Christian Stimming:
> Hi everyone,
>
> apparently it wasn't as difficult as I thought to actually mark all
> currency names for translation. This means we "only" have to get the
> translators to really translate them, and from now on they will appear in
> the correct language.
>
> HOWEVER: As "Dancefire" pointed out, there is already the "pkg-isocode"
> project http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-isocodes and
> http://git.debian.org/?p=iso-codes/iso-codes.git;a=tree that has collected
> plenty of translations for e.g. the iso-4217 currency names. We can re-use
> the translations from there by using the XX.po file form there as
> "compendium" when merging our local XX.po file with the latest gnucash.pot,
> like so:
>
>   make pot
>   cd po
>   msgmerge -C ../../iso-codes/iso_4217/de.po de.po gnucash.pot -o de.new.po
>
> Theoretically, this would provide us with the translations for all new 250
> introduced currency name string.

At least for opensuse 11.0 the package iso-codes-3.3 is available. I would 
assume, the other main distros will offer somthing similar - somebody could 
check that on distrowatch.

From /usr/share/doc/packages/iso-codes/README:
'To use this translation infrastructure, the programmer just needs
to call dgettext() in their program.

Example:
    dgettext("iso_639", "French")
will return the translation for "French", depending on the
current locale.'

I think the cleaner way than msgmerge would be, to require the package, 
because on the long run, I believe, also more other software will require it.

Probably a macro like N_ and _ for dgettext or dgettext("iso_4217, code) would 
be handy. BTW, are this macros defined by us or intltools?

> HOWEVER, as it turns out, the "official" currency name is quite often
> different from what we used as a string in our iso-4217-currencies.scm
> list. See
> http://git.debian.org/?p=iso-codes/iso-
> codes.git;a=blob;f=iso_4217/iso_4217.xml;h=0176ff9c50e5f8cc685a03366aecbdf6
>3f4ddd13;hb=HEAD for the "official" names. Examples:
>
> We: "British Pound"; iso-codes: "Pound Sterling"
> "CFP Franc Pacifique" vs. "CFP Franc"
> "Chinese Yuan Renminbi" vs. "Yuan Renminbi"

Yes, it is a problem, that full currency names are unique. 
http://www.iso.org/iso/support/faqs/faqs_widely_used_standards/widely_used_standards_other/currency_codes/currency_codes_list-1.htm
shows only a table with english countrynames and defined currencies. So 
different sources are free, to use different fullnames.

> Should we adapt to the names in iso-codes so that we can benefit from their
> translations? Or just ignore the ready-made translations for 30 languages
> there and insist on our own currency names? Well...

As the packages also installs /usr/share/xml/iso-codes/iso_4217.xml
we could probably drop the full name from our list and do a query by the 
alphabetical-code in that file to get the translatable full name.

Could you please wait with with your changes, until I am back in town on 
Monday evening, because I am in a bigger rework of the iso-4217 stuff as 
discussed in the 
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2009-October/026558.html 
thread? I would like to upload my changes, which conflicts with yours, if  
done parallel.


> Regards,
>
> Christian

Frank