On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 00:59 +0200, Christoph Sch?fer wrote: > Hi all, > > I have a question to the English native speakers contributing to the > project. > > There are (at least) two international variancies of English: Standard, > aka British English, and American English with some differences in > spelling (col_ou_r vs. col_o_r, rasteri_s_e vs. rasteri_z_e, etc.). I > was surprised to find the American variancy used in the docs, and even > in the en_GB.ts file, since Standard English is used in more countries > (Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India ...) > as an official language. Moreover, none of the developers seems to be a > US resident.
In fact, only one (Peter) is even from the US. He saw sense and moved to France :-P Both Craigs are from Australia, Paul is from the UK, and everyone else is from European countries with different native languages. Nonetheless, the project uses misspelled^WAmerican English as the standard because (a) that's what POSIX uses, and what the POSIX/C locale uses, and (b) because that's what our tools like C++ and Qt use. The only thing worse than having to misspell colour and grey is to have to remember that you have to spell them correctly in UI strings, and misspell them when talking to C/C++ API. Don't even get me started on API documentation. (Note: I'm just poking fun at the Americans here re misspelling. It's a dialect; I can deal with that.) > I am, personally, a bit confused when it comes to contributing to the > Wiki, because I'm not sure which variancy should be applied. I learned > Standard English at school, but would have no problem using AE instead. For the wiki, I'm not sure it matters too much. -- Craig Ringer
