Generic "pt" vs "pt-PT" and "pt-BR"

[lidel]

Now and then, someone requests adding pt-BR "Portuguese (Brazil)" to our translation projects at Transifex.

Until now I believed country-specific variants of Portuguese do not differ as much as Chinese ones, so it was more efficient to deduplicate efforts and focus on a single, generic locale:

• https://www.transifex.com/ipfs/dashboard/all_projects/pt/

I don't speak Portuguese myself, so hereby I summon some native speakers active in IPFS community (including managers of js.ipfs.io website) to weight on this :-)

@satazor @hugomrdias @PedroMiguelSS @hacdias @fsdiogo @pgte @daviddias
@agentofuser @dntxos

Question:

• Are differences between pt-PT and pt-BR in written language big enough to justify duplicated efforts?
  • Would be useful to provide examples of existing translations that would look different in pt-BR
  • Perhaps its just a few labels that we could work around by creating a generic glossary?

[agentofuser]

Copying over my comments from private conversation with @lidel on transifex:

agentofuser wrote:
> Hi lidel,
> 
> Thanks for getting in touch. I saw the pt translation
> and it's good that there is something already. There
> are though some pretty significant differences between
> pt_BR and pt_PT, especially in colloquial language
> (different pronouns and conjugations) and technical
> terms (Brazilians won't know what a "ficheiro" is; we
> call files "arquivos"). I'm sure there can be some
> reuse between the translations, but adoption in Brazil
> will be much easier with a proper pt_BR translation
> that feels familiar. I'll be more than glad to help
> with that.

[hacdias]

@lidel, yes, what @agentofuser mentioned is true (the "files" translation is one of the huge differences) but there are more. Perhaps we should support both yes.

[hugomrdias]

yeah we should support both

[PedroMiguelSS]

Yes, that makes sense indeed. We should support pt-BR as well.

[lidel]

Thanks, we have a consensus then :)

DONE:

• added pt-BR to existing projects, so @agentofuser and others can start translating
• updated lang_map in .tx/config in all projects so tx pull -a (locale sync) will create proper filenames with pt-BR instead of pt_BR

TODO:

I kept pt as-is for now, as renaming it to pt_PT requires additional work:

• Rename pt→pt_PT at Transifex
  • Crude way to do it is to add pt_PT, download translations from pt and upload them to pt_PT, then delete pt
  • I emailed Transifex if they could just rename pt to pt_PT in all out projects (will update this issue when I get the response)
    • Update: Transifex confirmed the crude way described above is the only way to do it, so we may want to do it sooner than later.
• Rename hardcoded pt→pt_PT in existing projects
  • js.ipfs.io, Web UI, share app etc hardcode lang codes in additional config files. This means I need to rewire each app to use pt_PT instead of pt in a separate PR

[agentofuser]

Well I'm glad I dug that hole for myself now 😅 IPFS Companion translation is done, going to jump to IPFS Desktop next unless there's a higher priority I should know of.