I love the way Debian lets users make their own choises, and would like
to recommend Debian to all my friends. Now the longstanding "language
soup" problem for the Norwegian locales keeps me from doing just that.

The problem: When I install Debian and choose Norwegian locale I get a
language soup of Norwegian, Sweedish, Danish and English in most
programs. This issue pertains to messages in console programs as well as
in several programs for X11. The soup is present in both versions of
Norvegian (Bokmaal and Nynorsk).

I suppose this is due to the fact that most .po files and simialar
translation files are more completely translated for Sweedish and Danish
than for the Norwegian languages. In a freshly installed system the file
/etc/default/locale contains a sting somewhat like this:
LANGUAGE="nb_NO:nb:sw_SW:da_DK:en"
I edited mine, so I do not have the original string anymore, sorry.

Now most, if not all, Norwegians understand Danish, Sweedish and
English, at least to a certain extent. Having a computer system that
speaks all five (remember; Norwegian has two versions) at the same time
and in the same program is very confusing. This happens if different
parts of the .po files are translated for the different locales. This is
not just a theoretical situation. It happened to me a lot, and it took
some sysadmin read-up to locate the /etc/default logical structure the
first time round.

My proposal would be to make the string reflect the real language
situation in Norway. I suggest making the string include only the
selected locale for the system, together with the "en" catch-all. This
is because Bokmaal and Nynorsk really are two different languages in
their own right. Mixing strings from both languages only makes it harder
to discern which strings are left for translation work; the same string
in nb_NO and nn_NO can be different in one letter only, even though the
string in question amounts to a complete sentence. Rather like en_US and
en_GB, I believe.

My proposal is thus to make the sting in /etc/default/locale read
as follows:

For Norwegian Bokmaal:
LANGUAGE="nb_NO:nb:en"

For Norwegian Nynorsk:
LANGUAGE="nn_NO:nn:en"

Now this leaves the locale "no" in the cold. I am not certain as to how
this locale is implemented. My guess is that it is a leftover from the
time when there was no distinction between the two languages in Debian.
The only reason for leaving it in might be in order for it to work as a
catch-all for web pages that use this non-existant locale. I believe
some browsers use $LANGUAGE to negotiate the language for web pages. If
this is the case it should be inserted right in front of the "en"
catch-all.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=515099
the change should be made in the debhelper.in/locales.postinst script.
Maybe I am in err here, as I never even looked at this file.

If someone feels strongly against my proposal, please do not hesitate to
speak up. As I remember form some previous reading og bug reports around
this issue years ago the string was implemented like this after a
discussion with the developers working on Debian Edu (Skolelinux,
http://www.skolelinux.no, http://www.slx.no). I do not know the status
of their work in this area.

;)Frode

reassign 553678 localechooser
thanks

I think your problem is with localechooser in the installer, and I think
it is related to this:

nb_NO;Norwegian Bokmaal;Norsk bokmål;1;NO;nb_NO.UTF-8;nb_NO:nb:no_NO:no:nn_NO:nn:da:sv:en;console-setup

Seems likely that you are correct.

Should I file a separate bug against the Debian installer, then?

;)Frode

2009/11/2 Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>:

The real problem is incomplete translations.

The only thing the installer does is to set LANG in such a way that there
are logical fallbacks for strings that are not translated into your
preferred language. The fallbacks have been requested by the translators
for Norwegian.

If you wish less "language soup", then the best way to help avoid it is to
join the translation effort. If you think the fallbacks should be
simplified, you should discuss that with the translation team for
Norwegian.

No. The BR is already reassigned to localechooser, which is part of the
installer.

Cheers,
FJP

Quoting Frode Severin Hatlevik (frodeseverin@gmail.com):

No. The bug has been reassigned to the correct package.

However, I seem to remember that we got some advice by Norwegian
users|developers about Danish, then Swedish to be acceptable
alternatives...

Such alternative languages have indeed been droped for almost all
languages, but Norwegian was kept working this way after such advice.

Let's take an "authorised" advice about this.

Petter, what do you think about falling back to Danish then Swedish
for Norwegian (Bokmål)? Is this something that should be kept?

[Christian Perrier]

Depending on the target group, I believe it should be kept.  Those who
do not understand english, will most likely be able to understand
Danish and Swedish.  Those who do understand English find it slightly
annoying to see the Danish and Swedish texts when the Norwegian
translation is missing.

So my judgement is that for those that really need the translations,
it is better to fall back to Danish and Swedish than to fall back to
English.

Happy hacking,

I would very much like to help out with translations. My only limiting
factor is the time available. I hope this situation will improve in
the near future, thus enabling me to join the effort.

2009/11/2 Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>:

I see your point. The troubble with this approach is that _everyone_
is going to be stuck with the language soup. Moreover some tecnical
terms, especially in error messages and the like, is better understood
in English than Swedish or Danish.

Would it be possible for the Debian Installer to throw in an extra
configuration prompt, asking whether or not the Danish and Swedish
fallbacks shold be enabled? Or at least to provide information on how
to change the default behaviour. I am confused by the fact that my
system reports the following throug reportbug:


tnx

;)Frode

[Frode Severin Hatlevik]

Good to hear.  Are you aware of the translation effort coordinated on
i18n-no@lister.ping.uio.no?  Those people have worked on the
debian-installer, KDE and Gnome translations, and would love to get
more hands to handle more translations. :) See also
<URL: http://i18n.skolelinux.no/ > for the information they have
gathered about translations.

The "language soup" is only showing up when norwegian translations are
missing, so the correct solution is of course to add the missing
norwegian bokmål and nynorsk translations. :)

Anyway, I suspect it is best to discuss this issue with the Norwegian
Bokmål and Nynorsk translators available on i18n-no@, and see if some
consensus can be found if you want to change the current default
settings. :)

Of course not.  You can use whatever setting you prefer. :)

Happy hacking,

2009/11/2 Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>:

Thank you for the advice. I will contact them in due course.

<snip />

That I will do. Perhaps I can get some of them to consider my bug
report and solutions to it?
doing this in Deban. I once read this somewhere: "Don't work against
your distro, make your distro work for you." Of course I'd like to
learn how to sysadmin the "proper" Debian way.
Anyone?

;)Frode

Quoting Frans Pop (elendil@planet.nl):

As you probably noticed later on, Frode was talking about a soup in
the installed system (the bug was originally sent against locales.

And, of course, in such case, there will never be a 100% translated
system in Norwegian.

An idea could be detecting, for a given language, that alternatives
other than English are proposed by default and prompt users.

Something like:

Keep alternative languages (da, sv)?

For this language, one or more alternative languages are defined by
default (Danish and Swedish) and programs on the installed system will
use these languages if not translation exists for your language.

Please choose whether you want to keep this setting or revert to only
use English when no translation is available.



One should note this might trigger difficult challenges such as
extracting the name of the alternative languages from the LANG variable
(or not do this but only show ISO codes, which might be less clear).

And, of course, that would add extra complexity to localechooser..:-)

Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:

As this is not a bug, but the result of the chosen system implementation,
and it is unlikely, that a change will happen on such a basic level of the
whole installer localization, I mark this bug as wontfix.

Thanks for file this bug anyway!
We need user's feedback!