[sugar] Non English fallbacks for translations

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 10:07 +0900, Korakurider wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 7:18 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We have had this discussion before: we need to support multiple
> > languages in a specific order while handling translations, eg: Aymara:
> > Spanish: English
[snip]
> > a) This breaks existing i18n code. This means, activities which call
> > "from gettext import gettext as _" will not be able to use
> > translations. Removing that import line would work fine though. Is
> > that OK ? There's a slightly ugly workaround that works in the initial
> > tests that I did, but with that, activities with "from gettext import
> > gettext as _" in the code will support only one non English language
> > at a time.
> 
>   Original GNU gettext already has fallback feature. (see
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#The-LANGUAGE-variable)
>  To me, it seems straightforward to make it happen in Sugar/activities
> once the fallback mechanism is implemented in Python library.
> I think the breaking i18n code in apps/sugar you suggested should not
> be the way to go.

python's gettext implementation also looks to properly support using
$LANGUAGE.  

$ LANGUAGE=bogon:es python -c 'from gettext import gettext as _; from
gettext import textdomain; textdomain("coreutils") ; print _("Written by
%s and %s.\n")'
Escrito por %s y %s.

Jeremy