[Mediawiki-i18n] Fwd: [Translators-l] Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions

Liangent liangent at gmail.com
Wed Dec 15 06:04:59 UTC 2010


On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> Obviously, this would not be a problem with a speaker of British
> English, but it could potentially be a problem in all sorts of
> frameworks with someone who picked a language code like “arz”—Egyptian
> Arabic, which would predictably default to English even though a
> Standard Arabic version of the tutorial is available, which the
> average arz speaker would definitely be more familiar with!
>
> The problem, therefore, is how MediaWiki handles dialects as separate
> languages, and if it’s not fixed now, it could be a much bigger
> problem as the usability initiative affects more and more components
> of the website. Could some programmer fix this? I don't have the first
> clue about how PHP works...
> (sorry for the long post, by the way)

Some of Chinese dialects are well-configured. See en.wp main page in
za[1] as a good example (maybe this is the best example: za is used by
a minority in China but they use Latin alphabets in za, so Chinese
characters on that page are from zh translations as fallback. bo and
ug are not configured in this way). wuu[2] can be another example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?uselang=za
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?uselang=wuu



More information about the Mediawiki-i18n mailing list