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List:       fedora-devel-list
Subject:    Re: list major languages first in anaconda
From:       Martin Kolman <mkolman () redhat ! com>
Date:       2020-10-22 15:18:54
Message-ID: e475a26836bef021c61a24ed8c93402468336fd0.camel () redhat ! com
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On Thu, 2020-10-22 at 08:41 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 06:28:38AM -0000, Sundeep Anand wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > To help users choose their native language anaconda tries to evaluate priority \
> > languages based on geolocation and place them first in the list. Proposal[1] is \
> > to broad this scope by appending major/common speaking languages as well. This \
> > may cater to the use case where a major/common language speaker relocated to a \
> > different territory. Determining the list of major/common language is tricky, \
> > however, as a starting point we may look at gnome-control- center[2].
> 
> I strongly support this. The 10 or so most popular languages cover
> maybe 60% of the world population, so this optimizes language selection
> a large fraction of our users, without really making anything worse for
> other users, who just have to go through the search list as before.
> 
> As to the list of languages: I think we should go by the total number
> of speakers of a given language, though taking into account popularity of Fedora
> and OSS in a given group too. (For example, French is only spoken by 77 mln as
> the first language according to Wikipedia, but we have many French contributors
> and users, proportionally more than the 1% of world population that that 77 mln is.
> So I think it is important to include French in this list, even though
> it's not that popular in the world.)
> 
> Also, I think we should go by the *total* number of speakers, not just the speakers
> for whom the language is the *first* language. My thinking (and I would love
> to hear from people who are in this situation) is that many parts of the world
> people know multiple languages and are likely to select the interface in
> a second language, if that second language for example is of European origin
> and uses the Latin alphabet or is otherwise better supported by the software.
> 
> I think we should not put regional dialects (**) of a language on the list,
> and always stick to the most popular dialect. A speaker of a given regional
> variant might *prefer* it, but they will not have any trouble understanding
> the most popular variant. This saves us a spot, which we can fill in with
> another language that is significantly different than those already on the list.
> This increases the chance that someone who is using Fedora will see at least
> one language (and alphabet) which they know enough to operate the installer
> interface. (So for example, en_AU, en_GB, en_HK, even though they are somewhat
> popular, would not be included since en_US is.)
> 
> Finally, a caveat that if our localization in a given language is very
> bad, we should not advertise it, even if otherwise we'd want to include it.
> We should instead set a medium-term goal to improve fonts/translations/localization
> in that language first.
> 
> Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
>  we have:
> 1  English     1268 mln   <-- on the list already, twice
> 2  Mandarin    1120       <-- on the list already
> 3  Hindi        637.3
> 4  Spanish      537.9     <-- on the list already
> 5  French       276.6     <-- on the list already
> 6  Standard Ar  274.0     <-- on the list already (*)
> 7  Bengali      265.2
> 8  Russian      258.0     <-- on the list already
> 9  Portuguese   252.2
> 10 Indonesian   199.0
> 11 Urdu         170.6
> 12 German       131.6     <-- on the list already
> 13 Japanese     126.4     <-- on the list already
> 
> (*) ar_EG is on the list. Is it close enough to other Arabic languages?
> 
> My conclusion would be to drop en_GB, add one Hindi, Bengali,
> Portuguese, Indonesian and Urdu variant each (with the caveat about
> sufficient supported described above). This covers another 1.5trn people
> and gives us significantly better coverage in Asia and South America.
> 
> Japanese is important because it's a significantly distinct language
> with special fonts and conventions, and I think many speakers would
> not be comfortable in anything else. OTOH, German is meh, because in
> my experience all Germans understand English well enough to use it in
> the UI. If we had to drop one more language, I'd drop German.
Just a note about about possible implementation of such suggested improvements,
Anaconda does not contain the language/timezone/keyboard listings and mappings, 
it uses the langtable library, which provides this data over its API:

https://github.com/mike-fabian/langtable

So if more improvements are desired (both in data & code) they should be integrated
into langtable, Anaconda (and other users of langtable) will then just pick it up \
automatically.

In the past long gone Anaconda used to host and process the language/timezone/kybaord \
mappings and it was not just hard to maintain but also not accessible for other \
project interested in using the same data. For that reason the langtable project was \
created and the data and code for accessing it moved there. And even more \
signifficantly, it is maitined by Mike Fabian who know all about this things (thanks \
yet again Mike :) ).

> 
> Zbyszek
> 
> (**) a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular
> group of the language's speakers (Wikipedia)
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