Locales with country codes use English if the country code is different #1061

When I checked bitcoin-qt 0.6.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 after switching GNOME 2.30's language settings to fr_CA and fr_BE, I remarked that for some reason the fall-back language wasn't fr_FR but English. So a Belgian French speaker would have to use the application in English. IMHO, for Bitcoin the differences between countries are negligible if not entirely irrelevant so it would make sense to rename French (France) to French only on Transifex. It might also make sense to generally include locales with a country code only if they reach a given percentage of completion, especially if Qt insists on choosing English as the fall-back language rather than the same language with a different country code (right now there's a fr_CA at only 3%...).

Edit: I added French with no country code on Transifex, so feel free to delete French (France).

You can always help in making the translations better via: https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/bitcoin/resource/tx/

The lookup mechanism works like this when handling translation request from English to language 'xx_YY':

1. use message from 'xx_YY' if it exists
2. use message from 'xx' if it exists
3. fall back to defined message in source code (which is English)

Hence, I think it is a good suggestion to rename French (France) to just French.

This would be a good thing for all "major" translations, I dunno if there are more like the french one.

I can confirm what Iaanwj said, I tested it on my side: compiling from source after adding bitcoin_fr.ts (with no country code) and declaring the file in src/qt/bitcoin.qrc and then starting with ./bitcoin-qt -lang=fr_CA launches Bitcoin Wallet in French and not in English.

In other words making sure that there's a locale with no country code seems to have fixed the issue. I will copy the current French translation and add it with no country code to make sure the issue will be resolved for the next version. Feel free to delete French (France) to make my life easier -- I'm the one who contributed it on Transifex so no worries about inconsistencies.

Many thanks to gmaxwell and sipa for their help with compiling on IRC.

Diapolo wrote:

This would be a good thing for all "major" translations, I dunno if there are more like the french one.

Yes, right now at least Spanish, Portuguese and Greek (also spoken in Cyprus) are in the same case. Given possible particularities of each language, it would probably be a good idea to confirm this with respective translators and possibly add a guideline on Transifex advising to create a language with no country code if appropriate.

As Bitcoin-Qt now has a working language selection in the options, I would suggest to close this. I see no possibility to force translators to keep in mind to use a base lang, when e.g. creating a new translation.

@cardpuncher Anything to add, if not can you close this?

Indeed, the language selection makes this issue irrelevant.