Add "German, Switzerland" language to l.d.o

I've asked the gws-berne lead (http://localize.drupal.org/user/3046) to comment here. What would be the language code you'd use? Is this just a derivative of the Swiss German translation? Do you think it is worth it to do the work all over again for that?

I think what Christian wants is "German as typed on a Swiss keyboard" (roughly speaking, there may be lingual differences as well, like the famous "grillieren" :).
This would indeed be a lot of work if done manually. But if he finds enough people to do so, why not?
He'd need to decide if he'd want to start from scratch or from imported .de files.

Yes, I'm trying to figure out as part of this discussion if we are aware of the workload implications and current lack of support for languages that are derivates of others making all languages start from the same empty state.

Based on Christians Issue text, I guess he would like to create a translation for Swiss Standard German (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German). This is the language derivate we (Swiss Germans) use to write. Don't mix that with our Swiss German dialects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German) we speak. I know it is hard to understand, but we write almost the same German as in Germany while we are speaking alemannic dialects that are very different from German :-)

So, Christians translation would not be a derivate of «my» Swiss German translation, but HIGHLY similar with the standard german translation. As he points out in the issue, there are just minor differences like «ss» instead of «ß» and differences in vocabulary (in Switzerland we use a lot of words origin from French or Italian in our Standard German).

The language code for Christians translation would obviously be «de-ch». I guess he would just take the german translations and «fix» them for Swiss Standard German. A full translation from English would be crazy in terms of work to do.

And one last note: You can nevertheless rename «my» Swiss German translation to «Swiss German Berne» if it helps. There are a lot of different Swiss German dialects and my translation is just one of them that is used in and around Berne.

@burki: yes, that sounds like we consider the German translation *done*. It gets continual improvements just like any other translation. Question is if Christian Zwahlen, et. al. is aware that while German is going on in parallel, it will need to be manually imported all the time to the Swiss German translation. For strings that are different, the German translation would always show up as suggestions for each string, so each time the German version is reimported, its a lot of manual work to clean up the differences again. This is basically how our system works now. Are you interested in taking this on?

@Gabor: I don't know if Christian is aware of the manual work he would have to do :-) And you ask Christian if he is interested in taking this on, aren't you? I'm not sure where the «@burki»-part ends :-)
By the way: is there any chance to have languages that use a translation as origin instead of english in the near future? This would make translations such as mine (and Christians if he takes this on) a lot easier.
Cheers
Stefan

There's this issue: #608488: Translation inheritance

Moving this issue to the new l.d.o project.

8 years since the last comment. I still think this is very valid and it just confused the hell out of me. In Drupal under "/admin/config/regional/language/add" you can add languages for your website. There is "Swiss German" in the list. But since the actual language code is not communicated to the user anywhere in that drop-down list, you might think that everything is okay but in reality the weird language code "gsw-berne" is silently added. If you are unlucky you start creating content in that language until you realize all the pages have the wrong langcode. :-(

I think "gsw-berne" is this somewhat strange-sounding variety you sometimes hear that's not understandable and not the normal one usually used for Swiss websites. A bit confusing probably for English speakers, sigh, but that's how it is. The correct language code is "de-ch" (AFAIK) which is the "normal" German one can easily understand and which only has some different spellings/expressions...

@rgpublic: sounds like from above that de-ch and gws-berne are not different codes for the same language but two different languages.

Yes, exactly. At least that's my take on this. Perhaps native Swiss people can enlighten us more on this. But for me they are totally different languages. de-ch I can understand without any (larger) problems. With gws I can understand almost *nothing*.

For example, this page is in de-ch:

https://www.srf.ch/

Looks perfectly normal. Can read everything. And gsw is something totally different. As far as I know it is rarely used in written language and far more used only in speaking. And there seem to be different varieties. gws-berne seems to be even a subspecies of that rare language. It turns out to be very difficult to find pages on the web in that language. Only dictionaries between de-ch and gsw like this:

https://www.auswandern-schweiz.net/schweizer-kultur/schweizerdeutsch-woe...

Even someone who doesn't know both languages can easily see many words are completely different. If some native speaker knows a full website in gsw as an example, please mention it here.

To summarize, de-ch is the way more common version. gsw is rare. gsw-berne as a subspecies is even more unlikely to come by.

I'm a native Swiss German speaker and "Swiss German" gsw is not the same as "German, Switzerland" de-ch. One language is how I speak, the other is how I read and write.

"German, Switzerland" or "Deutsch, Schweiz" could be added. But then someone needs to replace all "ß" with "ss" unless there's some automated process which can do it.

Aha. Very interesting. Almost like I assumed. I've changed the subject and description accordingly to make more clear what is going on. The template

[Base-Language] + Optional ( [Comma] + [Space] + [Country-or-Region] )

seems to be used elsewhere (e.g. "Portuguese, Portugal" and "Portuguese, Brazil" etc.)

My take now is that we have 2 different not mutually intelligible languages "German" (what I speak) and "Swiss German" (what phox4ever seems to speak). As they are not regional varieties we should use these 2 different names as "Base-Language" in above template.

We should eventually end up with sth. like this:

* [de] German => Already exists
* [de-ch] German, Switzerland => Doesn't yet exist. Could for the most part be a copy of "German" with search-and-replace of letter "ß" with "ss"
* [gsw] Swiss German => Doesn't yet exist.
* [gsw-berne] Swiss German, Berne => Already exists but incorrectly named as "Swiss German"

The most important sore point of this is (IMHO) the missing "German, Switzerland" which leads people to believe that "Swiss German" is the thing they'd want only to discover that all their pages have the wrong language code :-(

PS: Added the language codes to make it even more clear.

Removing the Postponed, because I guess/hope everything that needs to be done is clarified now. Usually I don't play around with the "Status" field that easily - hope it is the right thing to do in this case :-)