2009/9/9 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org
The language variant system that we have could easily convert between US and UK English. In fact it already does convert between a language pair with a far more complex relationship, that is Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
The language conversion system is very simple, it's just a table of translated pairs, where the longest match takes precedence. The translation table in one direction (e.g. UK -> US) can be different to the table in the other direction (US -> UK). You would not list "ize -> ise", you would list every word in the dictionary with an -ize ending that can be translated to -ise without controversy. The current software could handle 50k pairs or so without serious performance problems, and it could be extended and optimised to allow millions of pairs if there was a need for that.
Hello again!
What would be needed in order to use pages like MediaWiki:Conversiontable/pt and MediaWiki:Conversiontable/pt-br at the wikimedia projects in Portuguese for the conversion? Is it easy to have the language conversion enabled? Could we gradually create the conversion tables?
Sorry for so many questions...
Helder