RISC OS Translation ?

Ben said:

As a native English speaker, I’ve never had to rely on !Territory.

In my proper job we linguistically-challenged natives test localisation by using a case-reversed ‘language’, lIKE tHIS. Not pretty, but you can easily tell what hasn’t been translated or isn’t working.

Hello
Any news about a French translation for the Pi ? (Jerôme ?)
Thanks

Hi!

I am on and off programming on RISC OS computers since about 1989. The territory concept is fundamentally flawed. You do have three different territory numbers assigned to Canada (Canada1, Canada2 and Canada – don’t ask me which is which, see RPM3 p. 3-760), but only one for Spain with Castellano, Catalan, Valenciano, Gallego, Bask Language, …) and then LatinAm for a dozen further variants of Castellano. Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland and all the other multilingual countries suffer the same shortcomings. I took a first look at the Territory module in 1999 to see if I could just quickly do anything about the situation with the Spain territory and it seemed like a major problem instead of simply adding some message strings and rules. So I think the best approach would be to assign a new Territory number to a ISO 639 language scheme Territory module and add the ISO code as new configuration parameter to that module. That should solve all these problems once and for all…

The territory concept is fundamentally flawed.

Uh-uh. It is far from being configurable enough; for example a UK setup with Euro currency (and French style comma separator) and CET with automatic time changing by the OS (not relying on having Alarm running). Oh, and ISO style dates (ie backwards ones) only with slash separators, not dashes (looks better).

What might be an idea is to have a “generic” Territory module with UK baked in, that is capable of subsequently loading configuration files for other systems. Not as add-on modules, but human-tweakable config files. Then a snazzy Configure plug in to allow things to be twiddled.

For an idea, fire up XP (maybe Vista/7?) and go to Control Panel → Regional and Language Options and then click on the “Customize” (sic!) button.

This can be carried further within RISC OS to allow for a “territory” and a “language” to differ. For example, what language would one use for Switzerland? What about if you want to speak Breizh? (Breton) Or for the UK, Cornish or Gaelic? Does Wales have its own country code? Wales isn’t technically a separate country. ;-)

I think, personally, the problem with Territory is that it is too fixed. It is far from being flexible enough. As Jeffrey said about a year ago…

As far as I know there isn’t any tool available for tweaking territories. I think the easiest solution would be to build your own custom UK territory module.

Build your own module.
That makes my point entirely. ;-)

automatic time changing by the OS (not relying on having Alarm running)

That was changed during RO5.19 development, and included in RO5.20 is a Time/Date Configure Plugin, and Alarm (or Organizer) are no longer required to set Time, Date, or DST (at least for many territories).