Hi all,
I received an e-mail from Dwayne Bailey, coordinator of translate.org.za (free software localisation group for South African languages), in which he showed interest in the idea of assisting with MediaWiki localisation in South African languages.
He also suggested using Pootle, about which you can find more at http://translate.sourceforge.net/ .
There have been a couple of mails on this list I believe about encouraging localisation somewhat independently of projects, so that for example a Ladino interface translation could be completed without the existance of a Ladino Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project. Of course, this is already possible, but it's unlikely to happen. Within that framework, it could become a prelaunch condition for requests for new language versions of Wikimedia projects, and would also allow for more collaborative translation rather than the current system where most system messages are translated by one or two sysops in the MediaWiki namespace, while regular users look on without the ability to make corrections.
While the current preferred method of localisation appears to be to use the MediaWiki namespace, this doesn't work well with the recently-introduced ability to choose ones' own interface language in preferences: if I choose on en.wiki to view the interface in, say, Navajo, or Amharic, or Bengali, nothing shows up because most or all of the translations for these languages were made in the MediaWiki namespace.
While this may not seem like a major concern, I think that there are more than a few editors on the major language versions who speak that language as their second language and might prefer to view the user interface in their native language. This may still not seem like a major concern because, after all, don't all of the "major languages" of the world have full translations of language.php? Unfortunately, this is not the case, and is limited almost completely to the languages of Europe, with few exceptions. Languages such as Bengali, Amharic, Telugu, Fulfulde, Armenian, are all major world languages with millions of speakers (Bengali, for example, is the national language of Bangladesh, and a regional language of India, two of the most populous nations on Earth, for both of which English is a relatively common second language), each of them has a widely-translated interface in the MediaWiki namespace, but none of them has a LanguageXX.php file, or if they do, it has few or no system messages.
Mark
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dwayne Bailey <______@______.___> Date: 23-Aug-2005 03:06 Subject: Re: Mediawiki software localisation To: Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
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This is a great idea, I will investigate how we can translate this. Do you think you guys would be interested in using Pootle (http://pootle.wordforge.org) so that other languages can easily translate?
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