Append Language Codes to Language Names in the Dropdown Menu of the Language Field in RTD Admin

[hwhsu1231]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

We are unable to look up the language code corresponding to each language name directly.

Describe the solution you'd like

Append Language Codes to Language Names in the Dropdown Menu of the Language Field in RTD Admin. For example:

Chinese (zh)
Traditional Chinese (zh_TW)
Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

Alternative solutions

None

Additional context

None

[humitos]

Hi! Thanks for opening this issue. Can you expand a little more on what's the use case for this request? I'm not super familiar with this. Why would it be useful for? 🙏🏼

[hwhsu1231]

Hello, @humitos.

Hi! Thanks for opening this issue. Can you expand a little more on what's the use case for this request? I'm not super familiar with this. Why would it be useful for? 🙏🏼

Suppose that someone want to translate Traditional Chinese.

First of all, there is no limitation for Sphinx to generate Gettext PO files with different language codes (based on this issue). Suppose that a user want to translate "Traditional Chinese in Hong Kong" whose language code is normally zh_HK. However, ReadTheDocs cannot handle zh_HK currently. Therefore, even though he maintains the PO files for zh_HK, it won't work when deployed to ReadTheDocs unless it is supported.

Therefore, this change should be helpful for users who want to translate different languages before getting started. They can check whether their wished language is currently supported by ReadTheDocs in advanced.

NOTE: I also recommend that ReadTheDocs add the currently-supported languages list/table with corresponding Names and Codes in its Documentation. For example:

Supported Languages:

Language Name	Language Code
Chinese	zh
Simplified Chinese	zh_CN
Traditional Chinese	zh_TW

[humitos]

I understand that Read the Docs currently doesn't support specific language codes, but that's the other issue you opened at #11417. This issue refers to displaying the language codes in the dropdown selector --which I'm not sure they are going to be useful and will probably just add more confusion. I guess that "Brazilian Portuguese" should be enough for pt_BR and we don't to expose the language code there.

[hwhsu1231]

I guess that "Brazilian Portuguese" should be enough for pt_BR and we don't to expose the language code there.

But in different platforms, the same language name sometimes uses different language codes:

• "Simplified Chinese" uses zh_CN in Sphinx.
• "Simplified Chinese" uses zh in Material for Mkdocs.
• "Traditional Chinese" uses zh_TW in Sphinx.
• "Traditional Chinese" uses zh-Hant in Material for Mkdocs.
• "Portuguese" uses pt-PR in Crowdin.
• "Portuguese" uses pt in Sphinx.
• ...etc

Therefore, in my opinion, it would be helpful to check the language code corresponding to each language name.

[hwhsu1231]

Besides, I also noticed that there are two "Ukrainian" options in the dropdown menu currently. After checking its source code by pressing Crtl+U, I found that one of them is uk and the other is uk-ua.

<option value="uk">Ukrainian</option>
<option value="uk-ua">Ukrainian</option>

If this was intentional and not a mistake from Read the Docs, then I think it is helpful for users to recognize which option is excatly what they want by adding corresponding language codes.

Since some languages of specific countries/regions are so representative, maybe Read the Docs can provide the same language names with different language codes for those languages. For example:

English (en)
English (en-us)
Japanese (ja)
Japanese (ja-jp)
German (de)
German (de-de)
French (fr)
French (fr-fr)
Ukrainian (uk)
Ukrainian (uk-ua)
...etc

By doing this, backward compatibility can be maintained as well.