In OmegaWiki you can have many of the labels used in the data part in your language as well. For this to function, you have to select a language in the "user preferences" and there have to be translations of the words involved. Words like Estonian, Georgian or noun, verb, adjective will be shown in the selected language.
As the user interface is one of the most critical aspects for getting buy-in, it is something I often spend time on. Given that I do not speak languages like tiếng Việt, it is not always easy to find the right translations. For this language I was not able to find Gujarati. More bewildering was that I could not initially find the word Korean, it was there as korean with "tiếng Triều tiên" as its translation.
All in all I have added more than 10 translations in this latest session. I am sure that people who speak this language will have an easier time doing the same job.
Thanks,
GerardM
1 comment:
There isn’t really a Vietnamese translation for Gujarati. These days, Vietnamese writers keep the native or English term intact, rather than respelling it phonetically or borrowing from Chinese. In fact, this is policy at the Vietnamese Wikipedia. (The Vietnamese Wiktionary imported its entries from a dictionary that went the other way, tending to phonetically respell foreign names.)
Which is a long way of saying that our "translations" of language names usually amounts to tacking "tiếng" (language) onto the front of the place for which the language is named. "Gujarati", then, is either "tiếng Gujarat" or simply "tiếng Gujarati", whereas the phonetic respelling (very rare) would be "tiếng Gu-da-rat".
As for "Korean": well, the Inuit supposedly had a thousand words for snow. Language names in Vietnamese aren’t even close to being standardized, and you’ll find that sites like the BBC or the Vietnamese government will even vary its usage within the same article.
And that’s for a language that has close ties to Vietnamese through Chinese. CJVlang.com has some interesting examples of what often happens to Western names.
Punctuating often complicates matters: Spain can be rendered as "Tây Ban Nha", "Tây ban nha", "Tây-ban-nha"; or "Y Pha Nho", "Y-pha-nho", "Y pha nho", "I-pha-nho", "I pha nho". China can be "Trung Quốc", "Trung-quốc", "Trung quốc"; "Trung Hoa", "Trung-hoa", "Trung hoa"; "nước Tàu"; etc. To turn Spain into Spanish, you would either say "tiếng [Spain]" or "[Spain] ngữ", thus doubling the permutations.
What this means for Wiktionary and OmegaWiki is that we’d just be listing the most commonly-used translations. I appreciate that OmegaWiki allows for many-to-many relations for this reason. Unfortunately, it’s still quite difficult for me to edit OmegaWiki entries, because for every translation I provide, I have to submit the page and wait for Firefox to stop choking on the page’s JavaScript.
Post a Comment