Tails

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-18 13:21:59

One question, first, that might help assessing the priority of this ticket: isn’t the name of these languages, in the Greeter, displayed using the preferred script for the corresponding locale? It seems to me that “Chinese - China” is displayed as “汉语” (which is simplified Chinese for “the Chinese language”). And I see that “Chinese - Taiwan” is displayed differently, presumably in traditional Chinese. I would hope this helps users pick simplified vs. traditional, even if we don’t spell out “this is simplified Chinese” vs. “this is traditional Chinese”: the mere fact the language name is written in a given script suggests which script will be used to display the desktop if one selects that language, no?

> Someone from Taiwan told me that, instead of the 4 options that we currently have, we should instead have 2:

> * 1 for simplified Chinese
> * 1 for traditional Chinese

The problem with this proposal is that our “language” option maps to a locale = a language and a territory. So what locale would each of this option map to? I’m concerned that any choice we make — e.g. we could map simplified Chinese to zh_CN and traditional Chinese to zh_TW — has the potential to make a subset of the affected users unhappy. Not providing options for Hong Kong and Singapore is perhaps sensitive. Now, even if they used the same script, I don’t know how much of a noticeable difference it makes to run the Desktop in, say, zh_HK compared to zh_CN. If it’s not noticeable, I guess most users won’t care. If it’s noticeable, we might open a deep can of worms. Maybe I’m overly scared.

> They should be written under the category “中文” (we currently have a different name for our Chinese category).

The two options are like this:

• Our Chinese category is currently titled “汉语”, which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language is how one spells “Chinese” (the language) in simplified Chinese.
• While “中文”, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese, represents the written Chinese, i.e. “Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language”.

I can think of good arguments in favour of either of those and I have no strong preference.

Be it wrt. the language (= language + territory) or the category title, given the sensitive political context, acting based upon the suggestion of one single individual, who’s from one of the parties in conflict, feels a bit tricky. So I suggest we do the same as more popular IT systems, e.g. Android or Windows.

#5 Updated by sajolida 2019-03-21 15:46:27

Right now we have 3 Chinese locales in our PO files:

• zh_CN: 97% translated, that would be “Chinese (China)” in simplified script
• zh_HK: 39% translated, that would be “Chinese (Hong-Kong)” in traditional script
• zh_TW: 39% translated, that would be “Chinese (Taiwan)” in traditional script

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-23 14:09:35

> Note that both scripts (eg. China and Taiwan) are under the same foldable section (Chinese) which is displayed in simplified Chinese.
> If someone can only read traditional Chinese, they might not find Taiwan in the Chinese submenu.

Good point. I hadn’t noticed that because I never scroll through this looong list: I always type the first few letters of the language I’m looking for, and search results appear unfolded.

> Also note that my Taiwanese user was coming back from trying “Chinese, mandarin” (without any Chinese script, Bug #16093) way up the language list, so maybe his reaction was influenced by this first bad experience :)

Right. If we at least removed these buggy ones for the (top of the) list, perhaps your tester would have not found it so quickly, and resorted to search, which expands the foldable section.

>> So I suggest we do the same as more popular IT systems, e.g. Android or Windows.

> Here is what Windows does:

> * When downloading Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO, see attachment) you don’t have options for any territories (except Spanish ( Mexico)) and only the 2 Chinese scripts: Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional.

OK, so I assume that either they ask for the territory later on, or they detect it via GeoIP, both of which have low risk of causing political trouble.

> I think we should do something similar: at least have simplified and traditional Chinese in 2 different submenus

What do you mean with “in 2 different submenus”? Two top-level list entries, just like Uzbek? Or two entries inside a foldable section? (and then how would that foldable section be called?) Or something else?

At this point, my proposal would be to do:

• Chinese (simplified)
  • Chinese (simplified, China)
  • Chinese (simplified, Singapore)
• Chinese (traditional)
  • Chinese (traditional, Hong Kong)
  • Chinese (traditional, Taiwan)

This avoids all the politically sensitive problems I was talking about earlier, just like Windows 7 does, and presumably like Windows 10 does (in a different way that we can’t copy).

#7 Updated by sajolida 2019-03-27 10:46:06

>> * When downloading Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO, see attachment) you don’t have options for any territories (except Spanish ( Mexico)) and only the 2 Chinese scripts: Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional.
>
> OK, so I assume that either they ask for the territory later on, or they detect it via GeoIP, both of which have low risk of causing political trouble.

Yes, my guess is that from the French download for example, you can then change your territory when installing.

Today I had an installed Windows 10 at hand. You can also go into the language settings and add a new language. Then the list displayed all languages and territories for which you can download a “language pack”. The list is flat, with no submenus, like I described in Windows 7.

> At this point, my proposal would be to do:
>
> * Chinese (simplified)
> Chinese (simplified, China)
> Chinese (simplified, Singapore)
> * Chinese (traditional)
> Chinese (traditional, Hong Kong)
> Chinese (traditional, Taiwan)

Yes, like this!

After Feature #16095 we might realize that the list is small enough to be displayed without submenus, like Windows 10 does. But we’re not there yet and we should do your proposal.

#9 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-01 14:35:29

> Yes, like this!

Updated the ticket description accordingly, then!

#10 Updated by sajolida 2019-08-11 21:53:31

Applying my proposal from Feature #16095#note-16 would be consistent with the proposal that we agreed upon here as we currently have in tails.git:po/:

zh_TW 100.0%
zh_CN 100.0%
zh_HK  37.1%
zh      0.0%

• I expect translators for each territory to use the common script from this territory.
• Compared to the proposal from Feature #16094#note-9 we miss Chinese (simplified, Singapore). It would be added automatically once people start translating for it, cf. Feature #16095#note-16.
• We should remove zh which hasn’t be used by translators, probably because it was unclear regarding the territory (and thus the script).

#15 Updated by segfault 2019-09-24 23:12:07

This seems to contradict the decision we made on Feature #16095: zh-TW is neither in the list of tier-1 languages, nor in tails.git/po. So should we still add it or not? And what about zh-SG and zh-HK?

#16 Updated by sajolida 2019-09-25 02:12:17

I based my reasoning on the content of master, which still has:

• zh_CN.po
• zh_HK.po
• zh_TW.po

These were removed from devel in 1aeddb857e, maybe due to the unfinished work in Bug #16774.

I’ll let @intrigeri confirm this.

#19 Updated by Anonymous 2019-10-04 09:19:22

sajolida wrote:
> Note that when defining our tier-1 languages we added “Chinese” without specifying whether it was simplified or traditional Chinese. Fixed now in 9784963a15.
>
> I was tempted to add at least 1 locale that uses traditional Chinese (Hong Kong or Taiwan) but it would be an unjustified twist of our policy regarding tier-1 languages (for example, neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan are high in the list of Tor users).
>
> They will appear again in Tails Greeter as soon as people start translating them again. I’m not so worried about that seeing the big Free Software community in Taiwan :)
>
> So I’m fine with only having Simplified Chinese appear in Tails Greeter for now.
>
> Still, how the language is listed should be improved, according to the feedback I received in Taiwan. See comments above.
>
> Right now it’s listed as:
>
> 汉语 (Chinese)
>
> And it should be listed as:
>
> 中文 (Chinese, simplified)
>
> With maybe some additional Chinese characters to qualify it as “simplified”.
>
> @u could probably help us on that.

This is hard! There is writing and language.

I would assume that the translations that are made are made into one of the standard chinese languages, called 普通话 Pǔtōnghuà in China and 国语 (traditional: 國語) Guóyǔ in Taiwan.

Now to writing.

To my knowledge 汉语 (Chinese) means “hànyǔ”, chinese language, which is often used synonymously with the word “Chinese”, while in reality it denotes a Han Chinese dialect that not all Chinese speak. So indeed, it would be wrong to use this translation for “Chinese”.

中文 (“zhōngwén”) language/writing of the land of the middle, is more generic for Chinese. The simplified characters are called 简化字 (jiǎnhuà zì).
So we could write

中文 (简化字, Chinese, simplified).

字 means character.

Traditional characters, written in traditional characters, reads 正體字 (zhèngtǐ zì), if needed later.

Wikipedia uses only 中文 - Chinese.

#20 Updated by segfault 2019-10-04 13:19:00

sajolida wrote:
> Still, how the language is listed should be improved, according to the feedback I received in Taiwan. See comments above.
>
> Right now it’s listed as:
>
> […]
>
> And it should be listed as:
>
> […]

That turns out to be hard to implement. A lot of code in the Greeter assumes that the locales are grouped by the language code (i.e. “zh”). I already spent 1,5 hours trying to hack something that separates Chinese into the two groups without breaking stuff, but I wasn’t successful yet.