Ubuntu
language-selector package

  1. Bug #991002
  2. Comment #9

Comment 9 for bug 991002

Revision history for this message
Christian Perrier (bubulle) wrote : Re: Change name for bn-BD from 'Bengali(Bangladesh)' to 'Bangla(Bangladesh)')

Comments in this bug report are very badly informed.

The iso-codes package purpose is not to provide language names in the said language (or in whatever transcription of it). The purpose of the package is to provide the list of languages codes and language names IN ENGLISH, exactly as they are in the ISO 639 standard.

The standard says "Bengali", so "Bengali" will remain in the package.

Please notice that iso-codes provides translations of its strings. For instance, for iso_639, we have a bn_IN.po file where thetranslation of "Bengali" is:

msgstr "বাংলা"

No idea whether that says "Bangla" or anything else. I suspect it's likely to be it.

The problem might come because the translation is named bn_IN.po and not bn.po. This is a very common misconception of translators that they should have different translations for different locales. Unfortunately, the consequence of this is that Bangladesh users will NOT get this translation. I suspect this might be the origin of the problem.

To make it short:
- in a list of language names in English, the language name will always be "Bengali"....at least until the ISO 639 standard is changed (good luck...)
- in a list of language names in Bengali/Bangla, it should certainly be "Bangla" (written in Bengali script of course)
- in a mixed list, like we have in Debian Installer (the original one, the one that seems too complicated to offer as a default for Ubuntu users), it should be "বাংলা - Bengali" (guess what? This is what we have in Debian Installer)

This bug should be WONTFIX and will be marked as such in Debian