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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Translation/Translatable language names

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Translatable language names

  • Problem: Many language names do not have translations in MediaWiki. Wikidata, Commons structured data and the {{#language:...}} syntax often fall back to English instead. Translations cannot be easily added.
  • Proposed solution: Language names should be translatable on translatewiki.net. The CLDR data could be used to provide the initial set of translations so that only missing names need to be translated. Updates to CLDR could be used to update unedited translations and add translations that are missing.
  • Who would benefit: Speakers of languages other than English.
  • More comments: MediaWiki fetches translations of language names from CLDR. CLDR does not support all languages that MediaWiki supports and does not have (and does not intend to have) translations for all language names. The LocalNamesXx.php files can only be edited by submitting patches.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T231755, phab:T231748, phab:T324892, phab:T157809, phab:T256649
  • Proposer: Nikki (talk) 00:35, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Nikki: one of the challenges in this area is to keep the translations in sync with CLDR. Currently it seems there is no way to automatically submit our translations to CLDR to update the translations. Given that limitation, it may be possible to make language names translatable in translatewiki.net to fill the missing languages with the caveat that translations from CLDR may overwrite them once they become available. Do you think an approach like this would still be valuable to support the request? Thanks! --Pginer-WMF (talk) 14:38, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Pginer-WMF Yes, I think it would be worth it. There are a lot of language names that CLDR doesn't have (~300 out of the ~700 that Wikidata supports) and there are a lot more language codes we would like to be added. Ideally it would use the CLDR data to update translatewiki (rather than using the CLDR name regardless of what translatewiki has), then it would be similar to someone manually changing your translations after you've done them. - Nikki (talk) 14:40, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Perfect. Thanks for the input @Nikki! Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:05, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting