Friday, April 27, 2012

Duh; a three letter challenge to #Google #Android

Many a #Wikipedia is written in a language that is known by its three letter ISO-639-3 code. All these languages do not have a two letter equivalent like English (en) or Dutch (nl) have. These languages have their own localisation. This includes localisation for the Wikipedia mobile application.

Many people of us want to use this localisation on their Android phone. This is not that straight forward; you have to install an app that allows you to use a user interface in stead of the Android user interface itself.

There is a problem. Android is not ready to support languages that are only known by their three language code. It is probably an oversight and possibly because all the "big" languages have two character equivalents. However there is no language bigger than the language you grew up with.


NB duh is the code for Dungra Bhil, a language from India.
Thanks,
     GerardM

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And what about language variants? Like some chinese and be-tarask? :) If en-us/en-gb is supported (I don't know if it is) and other stuff, then chinese should be ok as well, shouldn't it?

GerardM said...

When languages themselves are not supported language variants are not supported either. They need more than three characters ...
Thanks,
GerardM

Amir said...

Wizardist, I managed to make be-tarask work on my phone using "More Locale".

Yuvi Panda said...

I should clarify that while Android itself supports it (the wikipedia app works for sah), the build system does not seem to support having resources localized to languages with three character codes. String localizations are provided to android in the form of values- directories, and this is what fails for 3 letter codes. Very probably a bug in the build system, rather than underlying android itself.

I've reported this to the developers group, and haven't heard back yet. Will file a bug in appropriate place if I don't hear back in a bit.