Re: GNOME Lovers Needed: l10n work for locations database

David Lodge wrote:
Quoting Danilo Å egan <danilo gnome org>:

I don't think we have a policy of using American English in the msgid.
We discussed this before, and I proposed to have a more thorough
discussion at the Guadec meeting in Krisiansand, but there was no
meeting on this in Kristiansand. Maybe next time. My suggestion is that
we continue to use English English, as it is more used around the world.
and needs less modifications when going from one version of English to

So, it is recommended for at least documentation.

OTOH, we already have all the code in U.S. English, and we have en_GB
team (and no en_US team).

Switching now to British English is going to cause many problems for
other translators as well.

I fully agree with Danilo - even though I don't like American English (being
British ;-) - I realise that the majority of GNOME developers and users either
speak or have been taught American English. With my own correspondance with
NNES I have noted that, for Europe at least, American spelling and grammar is
taught in preference to British and with the homogenity of American documents
this is probably the safer option.

As the en_GB teams does exist (though it seems to just be me at the moment!) I
see nothing wrong with stating that all strings should be follow American
grammar and spelling.

I have actually raised bugs where spellings have been mixed (mainly on


FWIW, as the maintainer of the Canadian English (en_CA) translations, I agree. People expect that if they don't request anything specific, they'll get American English spellings. This is a nearly universal truth across software projects, it seems, and more to do with convention than with a recognition of what the majority of the world sees as native spelling and grammar. Switching to en_GB as the default would make us the odd project out, and would serve to confuse more people than it would benefit.

# Adam

Adam Weinberger
adamw magnesium net || adamw FreeBSD org
adamw vectors cx    ||   adamw gnome org
