Setting Default Coverage Levels

Introduction to Coverage Level

• • For an introduction to coverage level, see the appropriate section in TR#35, "Coverage Levels".

  • To see how coverage level is used in the Survey Tool, see "Advanced Features" in the Survey Tool guide

To set your organization's default coverage levels

The Coverage Level determines the number of items that your people will see for translation in each locale. The best target in general is modern: some companies that use CLDR data require coverage at a modern level before they will use the locale; others will use data that is less complete, such as moderate or basic. If it is not feasible to attain modern coverage in a given cycle, it is still best to set the coverage as high as feasible, such as moderate. 

The number of items at each level varies by locale, but is roughly the following:

To see your current coverage levels, look for your organization in Locales.txt. It is a simple plaintext file, where each line is of the form:

<organization> ; <language_code> ; <coverage_level> ; <language name - optional>

A # starts a comment, and a * for the language_code means "all others".

An organization that focuses on a small number of locales will probably want to have just a line added for those locales, such as: 

Breton ; br ; modern Breton ; *  ; moderate

To request a change in the default coverage for your locale, file a new ticket.

As part of CLDR v35, the coverage level has been refined further. See ticket #11498

1. Basic Level. The flexible date and time formats, such as day + month patterns, are moved down from Moderate to reflect the increased use of these patterns for the minimally viable locale data.

2. Modern Level. Some lesser-used language names are pushed up to Comprehensive. (No data is removed: these are still accessible in the Comprehensive level.)

3. Languages. The following languages have higher target levels, and can have missing items added.

   1. Basic Level : Cebuano (ceb), Hausa (ha), Igbo (ig), Yoruba (yo)

   2. Modern Level: Somali (so), Javanese (jv)