Thursday, February 11, 2010

In Friulian the language is called furlan and not friulano

In interwiki links on #Wikipedia, we use the native name of a language to refer to the article in other languages. For the Friulian language Wikipedia, it should say "furlan" but it says "friulano" because it defaults to the Italian translation.

We get these names from the CLDR, or Common Locale Data repository. The CLDR plays a vital role in the support of languages; with a bare minimum of information it becomes possible to make a language version possible in OpenOffice.org. One of the essential bits is the name of the language as it is called in that language.

In MediaWiki, we use the CLDR and consequently people are urged to ensure that the information in their language is correct. This was the message that was given for the Friulian language. It may be cumbersome, but it does ensure an improved support for a language.
Thanks,
     GerardM

1 comment:

Andri said...

But I think this problem exists only on translatewiki, on wikipedia interwikis are correctly referenced as 'Furlan'. Anyway, my biggest problem with CLDR is that if they add strings to new release, you could go below minimal coverage and your language won't be included in CLDR release, even if 99% of the data is there. In this case it's my fault, since I was busy when CLDR submissions were open, so I missed the deadline and now I'll have to wait for next release.
Then the second problem is that showing the language name in the fallback language (in this case Italian) is a good thing for comprehension, but it isn't very good for self esteem. On the other hand the english fallback doesn't have any connotation, it's neutral.
Hopefully I cleared some points. thanks for your interest anyway ;-)