Hi Yohey, all Just for the record, Asturian, Basque, Galician and Catalonian flags are of official use in their respective areas of Spain, so there is not (much) political issues with using it.
That said, I agree that using country/regional flags does not represent languages properly. For example, in Asturies we use three languages: Spanish, Asturian and Galician, all three under Asturian flag ;) Regards -- Xuacu 2014-09-26 7:59 GMT+02:00 YoheY - OpenOffice <openoff...@yohey.hu>: > Hi for all! > > Thanks for your visits and testing! > Unfortunately, I have to say, the 'Flag project' as a 'Sweet child o' mine' > is failed: > Although it looks fine and makes aoo site a bit colorful, after a long > studying of using flags for languages, I have to say: it's failed. Using > flags takes the site to moorland. > . > > Not bothering things, like using images as links takes away the original aim > of hypertext - using text as links -, and images are slower to download than > text, there are still inevitable difficulties. > > - offering Korean language, we have two flags: North and South Korean. Using > them randomly makes no sense, using only one is very familiar for one side > and very offensive for the other. It wakes aoo site to be target of > political issues. > > - similar circumstance for Tamil language. While we use the flag, we are > probably taking side in an argument, which is not about helping people to > get free and high quality software on their own, native language. > > - There are flags for Asturian, Basque and Galician languages, but have > similar circumstances, like Tamil. > > - Hindi is very widely used in India, so as an outsider, I simply assigned > the Indian flag to Hindi language. But after studying the case it became > clear, that it is a very wrong way to use the flag. Hindi is not only spoken > in India, so using the Indian flag is kind of negligance for hindi speaking > people in other countries. Not to mention, that there are 21 more languages > in India, spoken by tens of millions of people each, spoken outside of India > too, without any usable unique flag, so using Indian flag for 22 languages > is quite wrong and embarrassing for both the site developer and the visitor > too. > > - taking languages, which are spoken in many countries is not quite simple > either. For example US English is not quite same as British or Canadian > English, so signing a US or Canadian flag for the visitor came from that > countries and supporting them with British English is more than confusing. > Using the Union Jack only for English speaking visitors from different > countries is also not a right way. And, using the real English flag instead > of the UK flag would be really misunderstandable for a high percent of the > visitors. > > - so, we can assume, that there are three common cases. One to one is very > rare, when one country has one language. One to many is the case, when a > country has more than one spoken language. Switzerland, zum beispiel. :) > Many to one case is when many countries speak the same language at least in > similarly. Like English, French, Spanish, Portugese. And the crown is for > many to many, when many countries has the same language but has different > languages within a country too. Like India. > > Sum of it all, using flags is technically cannot be done perfectly. > Making many mistakes has no benefits for aoo site. > I have to agree that "flags are for countries and for nations, not for > languages". > > Regards, > csaba > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: l10n-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: l10n-h...@openoffice.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: l10n-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: l10n-h...@openoffice.apache.org
