[Mediawiki-i18n] Internationalizing project names

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I'm really happy that this is brought up.

We have a similar issue in ContentTranslation, where we have to say things
like "Translate this article from __________" (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105588 ). In English it doesn't look
like a problem, because you can simply put a language name in the space and
it will be correct, but in Russian and in many other languages every
language name will have a different ending according to the Russian
grammar. It's not easily predictable if you want to cover all the words in
a language, but since the number of language names in the world is fairly
limited (in practice - less than one thousand), a few lines of code can
resolve it.

As a pet project I started implementing a solution for something like this
that would allow doing this in Russian:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/172501/

I also made a simplistic extension called "TestLanguageNameGrammar" that
should help translators see how the different language names appear with
the different grammar rules. After some cleanup it hope to get it deployed
on translatewiki.net for the translators' benefit.

Once it's merged it will be possible to do it in all MediaWiki-based
software, and similar patches will have to be written for other languages
by people who know these languages.

Niklas suggested doing it with less code and more data (see the comments on
the patch), but it's generally conceivable.

Erik, until we have a nice solution (hopefully soon, once I get that patch
merged), please
1. just take the translated names from CLDR
2. create a bug similar to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105588 for
your project, and list the relevant message there

For names of projects like "Wikipedia", "Wikisource", etc., you should use
the WikimediaMessages extension. It can also be used to write grammar rules
for project names if needed (see the file WikimediaGrammarForms.php there;
it is maintained according to community feedback and usually shouldn't
directly bother extension developers very much, but it's useful to be
familiar with it).


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2015-09-16 1:34 GMT+03:00 Erik Bernhardson <ebernhardson at wikimedia.org>:

> Within search we are moving forward with cross-wiki searching.
>
>
> This means if you go to de.wikipedia.org and search for
> ''Ревест-Сен-Мартен" we should show a message like:
>
> No results found on the German Wikipedia
>
> Showing results from the Russian Wikipedia
>
>
> Except of course, it should be (beware machine translation):
>
> Keine Ergebnisse auf dem deutschen Wikipedia gefunden
> Zeige Ergebnis aus der russischen Wikipedia
>
>
> So somehow, we have to map from a wiki id (ruwiki, enwiki, dewiki, etc) to
> a localized (not for that wiki, for every other wiki in all languages)
> version of that project name. How can we go about this?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mediawiki-i18n mailing list
> Mediawiki-i18n at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n
>
>
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