Standard fallback languages for translation

Question

I have an app that's translated into ~10 languages. Of course we try to keep the translations up-to-date but it's never perfect, many are community-contributions, and we often release updates with translations that are only at various levels of (in)completeness (say 80%).

So missing translations are a fact of life. By default gettext falls back to the source language (English) when a translation is not available.

I have translations for pt_PT, pt_BR, and es_ES among others. In that case I think it would be preferable to fall back

• from pt_PT to pt_BR to es_ES and only then english;
• from pt_BR to pt_PT to es_ES and only then english;
• from es_ES to pt_BR to pt_PT and only then english;
• from any other language to english.

My questions are

• Is this culturally appropriate?
• Is this in any way "worse" than simply falling back to english (as now)?
• Is there any standard list of fallback locales like this? "worst-case but better than english"

I saw gettext: How to fall back to the base language? talks about fallback Czech->Slovak->English and Gettext fallbacks don't work with untranslated strings talks about fallback Spanish->English->Russian.

Answer 1

The exact answer depends on how exactly you are retrieving translations.

If you are using a GNU gettext compatible framework, setting the environment variable LANGUAGE, maybe in combination with LANG. Try this:

export LANGUAGE=pt_BR:pt_PT:pt:es_ES:es:en
export LANG=pt_BR

You can find more details in the file ABOUT-NLS which gets installed with internationalized packages, or online for example at http://www.sensi.org/~alec/locale/other/about-nls.html.