http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58497
Bug ID: 58497 Summary: Strings are a confusing mix or US and British English Product: Wine Version: 10.12 Hardware: x86-64 OS: Linux Status: NEW Keywords: download, localization, source Severity: trivial Priority: P2 Component: -unknown Assignee: wine-bugs@winehq.org Reporter: imwellcushtymelike@gmail.com Blocks: 23124 Distribution: ---
The strings in the Wine code are a confusing mix of British (International/Commonwealth) English and US English.
Why does this matter?
Each variant of English has its own rules around the spelling of certain words. colour/color cancelled/canceled moveable/moveable and so on...
As there is no standard, each dialect of English will need its own translation file (.po). If there is standard usage of one or the other (US or British) then fewer translations are needed, as Wine will simply default back to that standard English (SUBLANG_NEUTRAL or SUBLANG_DEFAULT?)
Examples:
#: dlls/mferror/mferror.mc:473 msgid "Media format was recognized but is invalid.\n" (US English)
#: programs/reg/reg.rc:131 msgid "reg: The registry operation was cancelled\n" (British English)
I spoke with someone a few years back (I'm pretty sure it was Alexandre) on IRC (Freenode) but those logs are long gone, or very hard to find. From what I recall the "standard English" chosen was British. This makes sense as en_US.po exists for the US English translations.
I am happy to make the necessary changes to standardise the use of English, but I just want to be 100% sure which standard we are now using, as it may have changed since I last asked.
Note that some dialects need their own .po files anyway because they really are a confusing mix of British and US.
It seems like Windows defaults to US English. However, US English is only used by the US and the Philippines, so it would require significantly less effort to default to British English.
This confusing table gives a hint of the scope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:English_dialects