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

Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom at gmail.com
Wed Dec 15 07:47:51 UTC 2010


On 15 December 2010 04:57, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> Hey Yannis,
>
> The discussion list for the localization of the MediaWiki software is
> actually MediaWiki-i18n, so I've forwarded your e-mail to that list.
> I've also included Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar on this
> e-mail, since they're the ones who made the Upload Wizard. :-)
>
> Thanks for reporting the issues you encountered!
>
> Casey
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Yannis A. <yannanth at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:08 PM
> Subject: [Translators-l] Dialects like "en-gb" on MediaWiki extensions
> To: translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> For example, when I go over to the Upload Wizard for testing and
> casual uploading, there's a banner at the top telling me that the
> language was not found and that it “defaulted back to English”.
>
> 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)
>

MediaWiki already handles this without problems, just that the
criterion is actually different from being a dialect.

I assume that Upload Wizard is using mostly JavaScript, which needs
its own localisation mechanism, which is not yet up to the same level
as MediaWiki itself.

 -Niklas

-- 
Niklas Laxström



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