Meta talk:Conventions for multilingualism

English bias?

Is the english bias of this suggestion a problem?

For example, should the English version be En/Multilingualism, with Multilingualism instead containing links to all of the languages that the page is currently available in. This would reduce the English bias on the site. However, this would make the site a lot harder to navigate for most (english) users. It would also be more work when creating new pages and linking within articles, and most importantly be very hard to migrate current pages to use this system (it would be a massive bot-job to translate all current links...) I guess the ideal solution would be to have the language prefix recognised in software, so a link to Multilingualism from En/Translation will automatically add the En/ prefix to the link. Or even better, a link to Multilingualism automatically prefixes the language code set in the user's preferences to the link, and if this page doesn't exists, takes them to the root Multilingualism page so they can choose an alternative language. In this case the root page could even be auto-generated...

Hmm.... a lot of dev work required for that suggestion, so not very likely I fear. Regardless, the natural English bias gets in the way of 'ramping up our multilingual efforts', so it definitely needs some further consideration. --HappyDog 15:43, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Actually the best solution is developing a real multilingual wiki, but meanwhile we need a standard way for doing all multilingual tasks by hand :( . I think that in naming conventions and language templates there's already a standard, but what about translation/version coordination? One benefit of this proposal is having a central page for this coordination.

It's only one proposal. Anyway, I think we'll have to separate by hand all articles when software supports real multilingualism. :) --Peleguer 19:39, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

• I was thinking along similar lines about the software. Suppose we used uniform naming along the lines of Quarto/en, Quarto/es, etc. Then Quarto itself can use an extension that detects the user's language preference(s) and displays the appropriate translation. This way, a link from an untranslated page (like a talk page) to Quarto, would show the right version for any language user. --Krubo 12:06, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Templates for translating language names

Please see Meta:Templates for translating language names if you're interested in discussing the use of templates to translate names of languages into other languages (e.g., English in Japanese is 英語). - dcljr 07:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Proposal of archiving this document

Since this is actually a personal proposal, and have less support from the community, I have no reason to keep it on meta namespace. Very few editors followed it, name page with their language code and therefore all pages will be subpages of their language main page but it isn't follow meta convention, hasn't become our convention, hence it is not good to confuse newcomers as if it is our convention, not a proposal.

I propose it to move to main namespace as personal essay, not giving the impression it is our policy. If we can make it clear in another way, this proposal isn't our custom and people are expected not to follow it, I am not stick in my idea. However this document seems to me to cause confusion about naming convention (I saw some "fr/xx" pages, even very few), I wouldn't like to keep this document without any remark. --Aphaia 07:43, 21 September 2006 (UTC)