Saturday, March 19, 2011

What to do when the #CLDR does not have it

At #translatewiki.net we use standards. It makes our life a lot easier because it prevents us from arguing about things we do not really know about. When there is a standard, we have always referred to the standard and asked people to update the data in the standard.

The CLDR is a standard where you can enter the name of languages and currencies and time formats... A long list of items is supported. One problem is that the CLDR supports 217 languages. At translatewiki.net we support 344 languages. When our people experience problems with getting data into the CLDR, at some stage we want to reconsider.

As we may be getting into the collection of translations for things like the names of languages, we will do this reluctantly and we will continue to give precedence to the information provided by the standards. Another thing is that there are many lists with the translations of language names and it does not makes sense to do the same thing yet again. One such can be found at OmegaWiki...

Another reason to be reluctant is that working on such functionality keeps our developers from more hard core work needed at translatewiki.net. We are very much like any open source project; there are more then enough ambitions and we welcome all the help we can get.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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