Needs some work for Chinese use cases

  • This plugin lists Chinese languages as follows:
    中文 (Locale: zh_CN; Language Code: zh)
    香港 (Locale: zh_HK; Language Code: zh)
    台灣 (Locale: zh_TW; Language Code: zh)

    In English this would read:
    Chinese
    Hong Kong
    Taiwan

    “Hong Kong” and “Taiwan” are places, not languages. A better way to name these would be:
    中文 (中国)
    中文 (香港)
    中文 (台灣)

    In English this reads:
    Chinese (China)
    Chinese (Hong Kong)
    Chinese (Taiwan)

    Aside from the naming, the language codes need to be unique in Polylang and by default they are all “zh”. You could substitute a bogus two-letter language code, but then it shows in the URL permalinks. The better and industry standard way to do this is to use the locale code (zh-CN, zh-HK, zh-TW, en-US, etc.) in the URL and everywhere else instead of just the two-letter language code like Polylang.

    Until these roadblocks for Chinese language integration are dealt with, I think I’ll have to look for an alternate multilingual solution.

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  • Plugin Author Chouby

    (@chouby)

    Thanks a lot for the precision on the translations. You must understand that I don’t know Chinese and thus it’s easy to misunderstand informations I can grab on the Internet. My main source was the codex and for the past two years nobody pointed this error.

    However you have of course already the possibility to change the language name as you want.

    As for the language code, there is also the possibility to change it to any combination of 2 or 3 characters. My first idea was to use ISO-639 languages code. However it’s true that for some languages, the Internet standards do not use ISO languages codes. So I will remove this 3 characters limitation in the next release

    As for industry standards, I fear they are none. Some websites use the country code hk or cn (for example Samsung), some other use only zh (for example wikipedia), WPML uses zh-hans (don’t know where this hans come from) and some use zh-hk and zh-cn… So I keep zh for the default code, but it will be possible to modify it to fit your needs.

    You can already use the development version to take profit of the modifications:
    https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/polylang.zip

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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