[IIAB] Haitian Creole

[Joel Steres]

I'm looking at this pretty much for the first time, but I have a few
observations.

First off Babel includes list of default mapping from short names like
'de' to 'de_DE' defined in a dict (locally defined defaults defined in
LOCALE_ALIASES) that can be passed from outside the library.  However
at first glance I didn't spot support for passing it in from the flask
babel extension.

Second the babel library stores its data in a number of pickled data
files. The HT designation is already included in global.dat file but
the localedata directory does not include a file for ht or ht_HT. The
localedata files "contain much of the data defined by the Common
Locale Data Repository".  We should be able to create the needed files
(it's just a pickled, compound dict) but there might not be a nice way
to include it without pushing it upstream or including a patch script.
 When I unpickled one of the files I did notice that the ht language
and HT territory codes ARE already included in the data structures
(each language file seems to embed a mapping from each language and
territory code to a proper name).

We can look more closely if need be.

Oh, a couple of asides, the localedata is stored in
site-packages/Babel-0.9.6-py2.7.egg/babel/localedata/. The reason
there are two language files is that in cases where different
territories speak the same language the language group defaults can be
overridden.  For example en.dat described the US so en_US.dat is just
a skeleton dictionary, whereas en_GB.dat has some values populated.

-j



On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:58 PM, Braddock <braddock at braddock.com> wrote:
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>> "cpf", while listed as a language, did not have a locale entry.
>
> No, James is not correct about the ISO code selection, sorry.
>
> in ISO-639 "cpf" is not a language, it is a language group.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creoles_and_pidgins
>
> The correct iso-639 code for Haitian Kreyol is either "ht"
> (two-letter) or "hat" (three letter).  Standard locale nomenclature
> would be ht_HT.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole
>
> You would no more use "cpf" for Kreyòl Ayisyen than you would use "roa
> - Romance languages" for Spanish or French.  Same conecpt, a language
> group.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
>
>> There is no pretty way to get a new language into the Babel library.
>> I did a bit of a hack to pre-load the generic French locale as "cpf" -
>> I'm assuming they follow french conventions in dates and currency, etc.
>
> We will need to create a CLDR locale to do this properly.  A glibc
> locale exists for ht_HT, but it needs some work.  I'm afraid the
> assumption that ht_HT uses the same dates and currency info as fr_FR
> is also incorrect.
>
>> So Haitian Creole is now in IIAB.
>
> But "jammed in" in an unsustainable way at present. I will work on the
> glibc and CLDR locales with Kreyol localizers to allow it to be called
> properly, as ht-HT.
>
> Sorry to sound negative, but hacking i18n stuff is a dangerous
> shortcut that ultimately leads to bad places we do not want to go.
> Sadly it will take a little time to get it right, welcome to the
> "bleeding edge" of L10n/i18n, it's where Sugar Labs lives...
>
> cjl
> Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator
>
>
>> On 08/08/2013 07:18 PM, James McDuffie wrote:
>>> You should try and name it according to the ISO 639 language code
>>> I believe:
>>>
>>> cpf --          Creoles and pidgins, French-based
>>>
>>> http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013, at 04:33 PM, Braddock wrote: Chris and/or
>>> James,
>>>
>>> When I add the Haitian Creole ht.po we are getting exceptions from
>>> Python babel's library because it doesn't know the Haitian creole
>>> 'ht' language code.
>>>
>>> It appears to depend on some underlying CLDR dataset which
>>> contains the translations of language names into other languages
>>> and a lot of other language information.
>>>
>>> Is there some standard way to inform the system of Haitian Creole?
>>> Or is this a python specific thing?
>>>
>>> Thanks, Braddock
>>>
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