Fallback in #MediaWiki #localisation

At translatewiki.net, people localise in many languages. The objective of all this work is that people understand what the software wants from them.

Often we do not have a localisation for a particular message. For such a situation, we provide a message from a "fall back" language. The selection of a fall back language is very simple; it should be a language that people are likely to know. When a fall back language or several fall back languages do not provide a service, ultimately it will be English what we serve to our readers and editors.

Sometimes using a fall back language has its issues:

• The difference between Russian and Ukrainian messages is sometimes mainly in the spelling. Language purists hate this. In such instances, our suggestion is to fix it by completing the localisation. In this way there is no need for a fall back language.
• For Spanish there is a more formal Spanish. There is only a need for a localisation when there is a difference. The need to continuously identify the messages that are the same is what makes these localisations difficult.

Having "fall back" languages is a good thing, we cannot do without them as long as we do not have full localisations for all the languages we support.
Thanks,
     Gerard

Supporting a #language

There is a #Wikipedia in 280+ languages. However, not all languages are equal. Some of the languages are not recognised as languages. From a support point of view this is not good. We prefer to make use of information that is available in standards. When the standard bodies have accepted information about a language, we can be relatively certain that what we do will be exactly what is done by other applications.

For the "Normandian" Wikipedia, the language is not recognised. It does not mean that there is no support possible or available. The language can be localised at translatewiki.net. The language falls back to English but looking at the text, it may be better to have French as a fall back language. It is unlikely that we know about special needs like plural or if we need to address women using the grammatical female form.

We are reaching out to all our languages and we we aim to provide proper support to all of them. With "Nourmande" it is extremely obvious that we do not know what to do. It is unlikely that any of us has the literature that answers these questions and really, as each of our Wikipedias must have people knowing enough of their language to support us.

You can support us by becoming a member of a language support team. You can support MediaWiki by localising the software in your language.
Thanks,
     GerardM

No politics please ...

At #translatewiki.net we take care of two things; internationalisation and localisation. Our developers work hard to make sure that the localisations can be presented grammatically correct for the languages we support and our community works hard to localise for their language.

The objective of all this is that people will find it easy to use the software that is localised. The most optimal situation is when all messages are localised in the target language. In order to deal with a situation that is all too often suboptimal, we have fall back languages. For some languages we have chains of such fall backs that all ultimately end with English.

Some people are annoyed with the choice we have made in such a chain. There are many ways we can accommodate people; when people want to seriously work on a specific type of localisation eg "formal German" they are welcome to work on it. The choice for a fall back in such situations is what makes sense; the German localisation is the most reasonable choice.

When people complain about the visibility of fall back texts, our standard answer is; localise the missing messages and the next day everything will be fixed at the WMF projects. Sometimes people complain about the fall back language itself. When the motivation is political, we are not impressed; what is important is that the readers understand the fall back language and when they do, it serves its purpose.

You can promote your language by providing the best localisation possible. Localising at translatewiki.net ensures that your work is available the next day at all the WMF projects, at all the MediaWiki installations that run LocalisationUpdate and ultimately at all the MediaWiki installations that don't.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The localisation of Veps and Estonian

Veps is a language spoken in Russia and it is related to Estonian and maybe Finnish. Now that Veps has been added as a language in translatewiki.net, there is a discussion what to use as its fall back language.

• People do speak Russian but Russian is not related to Veps, it uses a different script, it does not help the localisers.
• Estonian is closest but the localisation of Estonian is far from complete
• Finnish is quite different and this brings its own problems

Veps has a project in the incubator, it is a language that is struggling and this makes it extra important to help people with a user interface in their own language. One of the big problems is the lack of computer terminology in Veps. It is really important for the localisers to agree on what words to use.

It will be really interesting to watch how the localisation of Veps will work out and what fall back language will be implemented when the project goes life.
Thanks,
     GerardM