l18N - language fallback

Archives Feature Requests
1

I think it would be a good idea to provide a fallback for localized views.

Imagine your sourceLanguage is "en_us" and you would like to provide german views. You could place them within a "de_de" subdirectory. Someone visiting your website from austria, who might have "de_at" configured as preferred language would end up with the english default view, although the "de_de" localization might be better suited for him.

So, if a fallback existed, one could place the views under a general "de" subdirectory and everyone visiting the website with a preferred language like "de_de", "de_at", "de_ch", … would be serverd these views instead of the english ones.

I just came across that, because IE8 seems to be preconfigured with a preferred language "de" instead of "de_de" which is the one I'm using with FireFox.

2

I totally agree. There might not be many differences, but sometimes regional wording might be necessary.

3

You cannot trust the language preference from end users.

If you have an application supporting multiple languages, you should know what languages it supports. Then given a user language preference, you may resolve it into a known language. You should performance this process using your own procedure.

4

Well, the point is: 99.9% of the words might be the same in germany, austria and switzerland. so it does not make any sense to maintain different translation files for 3 regions just because of a few words. the point is, that the austrian (de_at) translation just defines a few keys and should fall back to "de" if no regional translation exists.

5

Is there such a fallback available now? The file /framework/i18n/data/de.php (-> german) contains the following array for the wide month names:




    array (

      1 => 'Januar',

      2 => 'Februar',

      3 => 'März',

      4 => 'April',

      5 => 'Mai',

      6 => 'Juni',

      7 => 'Juli',

      8 => 'August',

      9 => 'September',

      10 => 'Oktober',

      11 => 'November',

      12 => 'Dezember',

    ),

da_at.php contains just the different month name of the january in austrian german:




    array (

      1 => 'Jänner',

    ),

Now Yii::app()->getLocale()->monthNames contains only array(1 => ‘Jänner’) when language is set to de_at.

Is this a bug in the data or a bug in the source or am I using it wrong?