Language icons, etc

[marnanel]

There is a tool I look after called ProjectJournal which is used to publish the Metacity Journal posts.  I am considering releasing it, because some people have expressed an interest.

One of the things it does is list all the people who have contributed translations to a project recently.  At the moment, it looks like this (apologies for the old example, but it was the first I found):

• On branches/gnome-2-22: en_GB by pwithnall, es by jorgegonz
• On trunk: es by jorgegonz

Things I should perhaps fix about this include

• writing the translator's full name rather than their username
• maybe making the translator's name a link to their home page if I had it
• writing the full name of the language rather than the ISO 639 code
• alternatively, displaying an icon next to the language-- but it's not obvious what icons to use.  Some people use flags to represent languages, but of course this is rather broken because there's no 1-1 mapping between flags and languages.  Wikipedia uses icons which incorporate the ISO 639 code, which makes it seem hardly worthwhile using icons at all.  I feel this is a bit of a minefield and probably one we should stay out of.

What do you think?

Comments

[pne]

I think BCP 47/RFC 5646 language tags are fine; no need to replace them with full names (in which language? English?). I daresay people will tend to know the tags for the languages which interest them most.