Ilmari Karonen wrote:
A popular game played with a bat and ball is -{en-gb:Cricket; en-us:Baseball}-.
That reminds me... some time ago, someone proposed to enable LanguageConverter on Commons (but without any automatic conversion, presumably) and to (ab?)use it to replace the existing autotranslation hacks based on {{int:lang}}. Would that be in any sense feasible?
There would presumably be two major use cases: the easy one, which I do believe the converter should handle just fine, would be to replace the current http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:LangSwitch, generally used to autotranslate short phrases, with syntax like:
-{de:Eigene Arbeit; en:Own work; fi:Oma teos; fr:Travail personnel; etc.}-
(See http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Own for the source of the example.)
I don't think it's really a saner syntax.
The not-so-simple case would be replacing http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Autotranslate, which is used to translate entire templates, usually (though by no means necessarily) combined with a long list of links to the various translations so that users can easily browse them if the automatically chosen version is no good or something. A naive implementation of that would look something like:
-{af: {{GFDL/af}}; als: {{GFDL/als}}; an: {{GFDL/an}}; ar: {{GFDL/ar}}; ast: {{GFDL/ast}}; be: {{GFDL/be}}; be-tarask: {{GFDL/be-tarask}}; <!-- ...and so on for about 70 more languages -->}-
(Source: http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GFDL.)
I'd like to hope that there might be some better way of doing it, though, even if I can't offhand think of what it might look like.
Still, would something like that work, even in theory, and would it be an improvement over the way these things are currently done (which is hacky enough itself)?
I don't think so. It's terribly ugly. You would want something like {{GFDL/{{ENABLEDVARIANT}}}} (no, such magic word doesn't seem to exist yet). But you would still have the problem of having people *choose* them. You wouldn't put dozens of tabs to choose the variant. Which in fact isn't a variant.
These are languages, variant system is not appropiate for them.