From kde-i18n-doc  Fri May 14 21:52:00 2004
From: Heiko Evermann <Heiko.Evermann () gmx ! de>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 21:52:00 +0000
To: kde-i18n-doc
Subject: Language fall-back
Message-Id: <40A53F80.6030907 () gmx ! de>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=108457151419973

Hi everyone,

one user of our Low Saxon translation pointed us to a problem:
He wanted to use the languages
1) Low Saxon (nds)
2) Standard German (de) whenever there is no nds translation
3) English if there is no translation into nds nor de.

I had thought that this gets evaluated on an entry by entry basis 
(msgstr by msgstr). But now it seems to us that it is evaluated on a 
po-file basis, that means:

an application uses nds if there is an nds translation file. If there 
isn't it will show a German po-file. If there is neither, English is shown.

The strange result is that we get English phrases in programs where we 
do have an incomplete nds file in all those gaps that we haven't 
translated into Low Saxon so far. Our hope was that in those cases as a 
fall-back the German translations would be shown.

We only get German (quite complete translations) whenever we have no nds 
po-file.

Is this the intended behaviour?

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann
(KDE Low Saxon translation team)