[wp-polyglots] request for translation extension

[Heiko Rabe]

Hi all,

my work as developer dealing with the PHP codepart of translations since 
3 month at WordPress community raised several questions/needs not 
handled qualified yet.
If you have a country with only one locale, you can nevertheless have 
many types of idiom/dialect their.
But this has not been respected until now. Let me illustrate 2 examples:

zh_CN   -> chinese  -> has got arround 7 or more idiom types can be seen 
here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#sortable_table_id_0
de_DE   -> german  -> may have idiom types like polite/bussiness (Sie) 
and colloquial (Du)

But both have only one locale (i think, there must be many more 
countries having the same problems).

My suggestion would be an extension of the *.po(t) header with a new 
field can be automatically processed and could be used to show up the
WordPress user several types of idiom during auto.update, if they available.

    X-IDIOM-TYPE:   Standard
or
    X-IDIOM-TYPE:   Bussiness
or
    X-IDIOM-TYPE:   Colloquial
or
    X-IDIOM-TYPE:   Mandarin
....

or what ever could be defined. This would allow the translator community 
to provide several types of translations for their countries and also 
give the WordPress users the choise of what they want to have at their 
backend.

Questions:
 - Why we don't support several types of idiom during auto-update with 
language files of WordPress ?
 - Would anyone else be interested doing so ?

I would be interested in you opinions about that extension of 
translations file header and also WordPress itself. This is a concept 
draft suggestion, feel free to criticize it/me. ;-)

Thanks in advance

Heiko