Languages

I'm very surprised to read that. I'm valencian myself and in charge of the Moodle Catalan translation that is used in many schools and colleges in Valencia, Catalonia, etc.

Hi rick,

apart from social/politic thinkings you should consider creating the Valenciano lang having the Catalan one as its parent (this is only a technical relation). Of course, this approach is viable if they are very similar and they can share a lot of strings (I don't know if this is true or no for your languages...).

This is because of "Moodle langs style of life". When you create a lang, you can define a parent language. This implies that every not found string in your current lang will be searched and used if it's found in the parent language.

For example, in Spanish, the "es" (Spanish_International) language is defined as the parent for "es_es" (Spanish_Spain), "es_ar" (Spanish_Argentina)...and so on.

As they are very similar (only some strings are different), all that "child" languages only have to have defined their "own particularities" in them. The rest of the strings are used from the parent one.

And this makes them easier to maintain them...sure !!

As the Catalan translation is in a very advanced stage, if it's true that the Valenciano can use a lot of strings from it, I think you shouldn't avoid this alternative of work...(if applicable to your languages, of course!).

Ciao, Eloy

PS: About the Vasque (or is it Basque? ) translation, it will be welcome, sure. Let's go !!

I think it is better to have one good translation than many buggy translations. This applies too to all flavours of spanish.
For instance I am trying to use text-filters for different languages and I use lang="es". However if the user chooses lang="es_es" it comes back to english and not to spanish.
Really I would prefer any spanish page (even if it uses
"agarrar" instead of "coger", I am not offended by that) than
the english page.

About politics and language.. it is always mixed up.... you can
ask why you have "mexican" translations and not "canary island" or "andalucian" translantion? (or "british" and "american" and not "californian" or "texan") the differences between the different spanish dialects (from spain) are probably bigger than the differences between the different varieties of catalan.
Certainly I understand better "mexican" or "argentinian" that some of the spanish dialects. The situation of catalan and valencian is really painful (I am valencian too). The catalan language, in all of its varieties, has been forbidden and even prosecuted during many years. Now it is just tolerated (for instance it is not recognized as one of the european languages because the French and Spanish governments block it). In catalonia it is in bad shape (I would say than much worse than spanish in Puerto Rico) but in Valencia it is in a really dramatic situation (probably much worse than spanish in California), no newspapers, virtually no radio or tv and it is just relegated to the small villages and to certain cultural instances (universities and schools). In addition since many years ago the spanish governments (supported by many valencians that have already abandoned the local language) are using the rule of "divide and conquer" with catalan. They promote the "valencian" and "catalan" as different languages (they promote translations catalan->valencian for the constitution, for tax return forms, etc while amazingly they do not care about people from "canary islands" or "andalucia", there is only one spanish version of those documents). With this policy they hope that in a few years valencian will disappear from valencia, and in a few more years catalan will also disappear from catalonia (just to put an example, imagine that someone promotes that the spanish spoken in California is a different language from spanish, and do the same in Puerto Rico and in Florida, invent different orthographies and accept as genuine "californian", "puerto rican", etc all the english words that are mixed up with spanish in those regions... then date the life of spanish in those regions!!!). That is why most of the valencians that really care about their language preffer to cope with a few non-familiar words from our brothers from the north (just few Kilometers) than using a different version of the language and fragment even more our small community...

I am sorry for this long message.. I did not want to answer because this question is very sad to me... but the question is general to all languages...If the differences in the words are so strong that could lead to misunderstandings, perhaps it is worth to have different versions... but I think that it is worth to make an effort to agree in a reasonable standard for each language and have good translations for it.

Arcadi