[translations] language code problem (for kurdish)

[Gábor Hojtsy]

Hey Amed,

On Jan 18, 2008 2:00 AM, Amed Çeko Jiyan <amedcj at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would translate Drupal into Kurdish (Kurmancî). I got cvs account and i
> created a project named Kurdish Kurmancî. I would use ku_KU as language code
> for Kurmancî, but i got that message "- We normally use iso639 2 letter
> language codes for Drupal, ie for Kurdish it is ku" all of otehr projects
> -like Mozilla Firefox, Google- would we use ku as language code. That is
> because they don't know any thing about Kurdish language(s). Kurdish is a
> languages family as Scandinavian.
> After i start to translate Drupal into Kurdish Kurmancî, some other friends
> started to translate into Kurdish Soranî. We are translating Drupal into two
> languages but we have one language code (ku). will one of us stop to
> translating Drupal because that problem? No, i don't think so. I have
> allready created ku, ku_KU, so_KU in CVS directory.
> I would Drupal will let us to use ku_KU and so_Ku as languages codes.
>
> *Maybe you would see that big mistake : http://www.google.com/intl/ku/
> That is Kurdish page of Google. When you open that page, you will some some
> thing in latin letters (Kurmancî) and some other things in arabic letters
> (Soranî). I hope Drupal will not fall in same mistake.

Well, Drupal 5 and before uses the ISO 639 language codes. With Drupal
6, we are migrating to the RFC 4646 codes, which supersede the ISO 639
codes as far as W3C directions go.
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt) It is important to choose
interoperable language codes, because when browsers send what is their
preferred language, Drupal can only choose the right one for display,
if the browser and Drupal use the same format. So we try to follow
standards.

I looked into the registry for information on how this is handled
there: http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry. Looks
like the IANA does not "know about" (to borrow your words) Kurmancî or
Soranî either. May it be that there are some other / alternate names
for these variants, which are registered there?

It would be great to do this to the letter of the standards, so I'd
ask you to collaborate and think this through first :)

Gabor