English UK vs English US

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Post January 2nd, 2009, 12:02 pm

Since the site is going to be in English, the target is English speaking people. If the person reading the site speaks English as his first language, he will understand both spellings. If English is his second language, then 'center' is a much better choice for pronunciation reasons.

Let's take an example in Spanish. Voy a Habana. Any person who speaks Spanish for his first language knows where Habana is but to reach someone who's second language is Spanish, I better say Havana. Now everyone knows where I'm going.
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Post January 2nd, 2009, 12:02 pm

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Post January 2nd, 2009, 12:12 pm

The target audience is English speaking people yeah, however in order to find the site people using a search engine will only really find the site through one of the spellings. For that reason alone i'd use the American spelling as it is the more commonly used English around the world.
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Post January 2nd, 2009, 3:52 pm

That's another good reason to use center.
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Post January 6th, 2009, 8:36 am

lol wow cool stuff! I only asked because its the url of the site if it was just a word in the site then ok just leave it but with the url if its uk spelling then only uk English spelling of the world would work and backwards I may just buy 2 urls! keep thing simple!

--

You know it me be a good thread to start this as some kind of "words that are different even though we are meant to be speaking the same language"!
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Post January 6th, 2009, 8:39 am

We had the same kind of thread going once with gray vs grey.
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Post January 6th, 2009, 4:55 pm

If you want to do it "right", you should look into Content Negotiation or something along the same lines designed for your own http server, and return what the browser asks for.

Content Negotiation is a blanket term used by Apache administrators which refers to the Apache mod_negotiation modules functionality. This functionality generally consists of reading and reacting to the Accept-* headers all modern browsers send with their request.

People in the US will generally be sending an Accept-Language HTTP header with a value of en-us, and I'm not entirely sure, but I believe people in the UK will be sending the same header with a value of en-gb.
Strong with this one, the sudo is.
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Post January 7th, 2009, 1:17 am

English from England.
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Post January 8th, 2009, 6:37 am

Though I prefer to use Traditional English from the The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, I think here the american variant - Center - would be better, because this is more widely used way of spelling, as american english and its modifications are understood and used in almost any part of the world.
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Post January 9th, 2009, 3:09 am

Unless you have specifc reasons to code for different regions, I personally I think you should use your own first language. If you start to translate or convert small parts you are merely bastardising your own language.
The language spoken in the US should be renamed American really as it is always morphing away from its original roots of the Kings/Queens English.
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Post January 9th, 2009, 7:10 am

According to your theory, English in Jamaica should be renamed Jamaican, in Guyana to Guyanese, Spanish in all the Spanish speaking countries to reflect the name of the country, Portuguese in Brazil to Brazilian and Italian in Sicily to Sicilian.

You have a lot of work to do.
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Post January 9th, 2009, 3:19 pm

Don2007 wrote:
Sicily to Sicilian.


That would just be sicil-y

bu-dump-tsh! :P
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Post January 9th, 2009, 5:36 pm

hahahahahahah cutest post I've seen in a long time :D very sweet, SB.

There's a grammatical definition of when languages stop being variants/ dialects of the same language and become a language in their own right. For political reasons languages in my region (Western Balkans) have been named after their states, but this is grammatically preposterous because we all still understand each other 98% when we speak. So I'm a marvelous polyglot, speaking Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian.................. too bad it's all one language.
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Post January 9th, 2009, 8:05 pm

Didn't the division that you are describing only start about 30 years ago when Tito died? I worked with a lot of people from there, actually most of them were from Kosova so they mostly spoke Albanian, but I never heard of that division on the Yugoslavian side.
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Post January 11th, 2009, 4:46 pm

I think an easy solution would be to purchase both domains and have one redirect to the other that way you can stick with one whether it's 'center' or 'centre' and still get visitors that may distinguish between the two URLs.
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Post January 12th, 2009, 4:44 pm

If you think your target audience would have a preference, pick that one and be consistent.
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Post January 12th, 2009, 4:44 pm

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