Supporting Spanish as spoken in Latin America/Caribbean

Question

We have an .NET Web application that specifically targets users in South America and the Carribbean. We're localizing it into Spanish but this is going to be Spanish as spoken in Latin America rather than Spanish as spoken in Spain.

Which language code should we use for our Spanish localizations? There is apparently a specific ISO code for Latin America and the Caribbean (es-419) but .NET does not support region subtags and hence does not recognize this code.

So when users select Spanish in our language selector, our plan it to set CurrentUICulture to "es" (and have "es" localizations based on Latin America Spanish). For the CurrentCulture, we plan to pick one Latin American ISO code (such as es-MX), hoping it's the best fit for our Spanish speakers. Does this sound reasonable or is there a better way to target Latin American Spanish speakers?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 21 '11 at 18:29

5

I'm from Argentina, and we never use es-MX, we use es-AR.

Since Spain is the only Spanish spoken country that is very different for Latin American spanish I would do one es-ES for spain and one es only for the rest

answered Nov 21 '11 at 18:29

Eduardo Molteni

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But CurrentCulture only accepts specific cultures (such as `es-ES` or `es-AR` or `es-MX`), it throws an exception if you set it to a neutral culture (such as `es`) because such a culture is not specific enough to determine formats such as dates (e.g. for `en`, should the 1st December be 12/1/2011 as in the US or 1/12/2011 as in the UK?). So we have no choice but to choose a best-fit specific culture when a user picks Spanish in the language selector. – Clafou Nov 22 '11 at 09:31
(assuming we don't have a specific culture in the accept-language list) – Clafou Nov 22 '11 at 17:36

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '15 at 00:47

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Let use es-es for spain spanish and use es-mx for the latinamerica, remmember link the other es-cl, es-ar, es-ve to es-mx to prevent an latinamerican to use the improper localization.

answered Aug 31 '15 at 00:47

Pablo

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 21 '11 at 15:30

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This sounds reasonable. Typically es-MX is treated as International version of Spanish.
We even use this in Spain and translate messages in Argentina...

answered Nov 21 '11 at 15:30

Paweł Dyda

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Thanks! Good to know that es-MX is a common choice! – Clafou Nov 22 '11 at 10:57

Supporting Spanish as spoken in Latin America/Caribbean

3 Answers3