Re: Copyright year as %d

[Theppitak Karoonboonyanan <thep linux thai net>]

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Thomas Thurman <tthurman gnome org> wrote:
> I have to change the string
>
> "Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Havoc Pennington, Red Hat, Inc., and others\n"
>
> because of the new year.  Is there any reason I shouldn't change it to
>
> "Copyright (C) 2001-%d Havoc Pennington, Red Hat, Inc., and others\n"
>
> and supply the year in the code, so I won't be making all the translators
> change the string every year?  Is there any locale out there that doesn't
> represent the year 2009 in the same way it represents the decimal number
> 2009?

Buddhist Era is used for official date format in Thailand.
So, some translators tend to use it instead of A.D. (B.E. = A.D. + 543)

This is not really a problem currently. Using A.D. is also acceptable.
But there is some potential for the style change in the future.

For example, it can be translated like:

"<Thai-word-for-copyright> 2544-2551 ..."

if some lawyers tell us so to make it legally effective. (In fact, most
copyright notices for works published in Thai are in this form,
according to Thai law.)

Currently, most copyright notices in GNOME are not translated for Thai,
until it's proved necessary.

If that's the case in the future, even the strftime format string must be
translatable, so we can use "%Ey" instead of "%Y".

For now, Thai team should be OK with the proposed change.
We can file bugs when it's time.

Regards,
-- 
Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
http://linux.thai.net/~thep/