8 Supported languages

Most of the world's languages are underrepresented on the web. This product is trying to remedy that.

The product is provided with 108 languages so that the user interface is rendered as visitors would expect. Separate from these are the installation languages that should enable most to do the product installation. In addition, over 500 locales (language-script-region combinations) are available, providing an opportunity to write in the language of your readers, and have have it rendered properly. To take advantage of browser support for spelling and grammar checking, install the required language support modules in the browser you use for editing.

The master locale is selected at installation, but others may be added later. Only the regions of a locale can be changed once it is selected, so select carefully, preferably using the locale with the widest appeal for the master. If possible, the user interface language is derived from the selected locale, else English is used. These can be changed to any other, but changing those that already match the selected locale is not recommended.

The locales available will be defined by the version of PHP installed, and may be added to each with each release. However, as geopolitical changes occur, some locales may get changed regions, and those new regions will have to be selected when that happens, otherwise some user interface text may not render correctly. Your own content will not be affected. User interface languages may be added over time as further translation resources are engaged, either machine or human.

Installation languages△

There are 29 installation languages available:

Arabic
Burmese
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
English
German
French
Gujarati
Hausa
Hindi
Indonesian
Igbo
Italian
Japanese
Kannada

Korean
Marathi
Persian (Farsi)
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi (Gurmukhi)
Russian
Spanish
Tamil
Telegu
Thai
Turkish
Ukraine
Urdu
Vietnamese
Yoruba

These were selected because they had over 30 million speakers worldwide each. Pick the most familiar language for installing the product. The main language that the site actually uses is defined by the master locale and its user interface language.

User interface△

There are 108 user interface languages available, with the number of locales covered by them:

Afrikaans 2
Akan 1
Albanian 3
Amharic 1
Arabic 28
Armenian 1
Assamese 1
Azerbaijani (Latin) 1

Bambara 1
Bangla 2
Basque 1
Belarusian 1
Bosnian (Latin) 1
Bulgarian 1
Burmese 1

Catalan 4
Chinese (Simplified) 4
Chinese (Traditional) 3
Croatian 2
Czech 1

Danish 2
Dutch 7

English 105
Estonian 1
Ewe 2

Filipino 1
Finnish 1
French 46

Galician 1
Ganda 1
Georgian 1
German 7
Greek 2
Gujarati 1

Hausa 3
Hawaiian 1
Hebrew 1
Hindi 1
Hungarian 1

Icelandic 1
Igbo 1
Indonesian 1
Irish 1
Italian 4

Japanese 1
Javanese 1

Kannada 1
Kazakh 1
Khmer 1
Kinyarwanda 1
Korean 2
Kurdish 1
Kyrgyz 1

Lao 1
Latvian 1
Lingala 4
Lithuanian 1
Luxembourgish 1

Macedonian 1
Malagasy 1
Malay 3
Malayalam 1
Maltese 1
Maori 1
Marathi 1
Mongolian 1

Nepali 2
Norwegian Bokmål 2

Odia 1
Oromo 2

Pashto 1
Persian (Farsi) 1
Polish 1
Portuguese 12
Punjabi (Gurmukhi) 1

Quechua 3

Romanian 2
Russian 6

Scottish Gaelic 1
Serbian (Cyrillic) 4
Shona 1
Sindhi (Arabic) 1
Sinhala 1
Slovak 1
Slovenian 1
Somali 4
Spanish 28
Swahili 4
Swedish 3

Tajik 1
Tamil 4
Tatar 1
Telugu 1
Thai 1
Tigrinya 2
Tsonga 1
Turkish 2
Turkmen 1

Ukrainian 1
Uyghur 1
Uzbek (Latin) 1
Urdu 2

Vietnamese 1

Welsh 1
Western Frisian 1

Xhosa 1

Yoruba 2

Zulu 1

Language availability is dependent upon support in Unicode, support for the associated locales in PHP, and translation resources. Bhojpuri, Cebuano, Corsican, Divehi, Dogri, Esperanto, Guarani, Latin, Maithili, Northern Sotho, Nyanan, Sanskrit, and Southern Sotho (Sesotho) are awaiting support in PHP, which could happen with any future release. For those waiting upon Unicode support, it could take years.

Machine translated△

To get to have so many languages at release, they had to be machine translated.

The web is 55% English, with any others well under 10%. The product is designed for producing multiple languages as an attempt at giving an opportunity to change that balance, but that is dependent upon the user interfaces being available in other than English. It came down to whether to offer the product only in English at first and drip feed languages as they were translated by people, or go for machine translations with its increased risk of mistranslations.

The former risked just perpetuating an English domination, so the machines won, in return for providing 108 languages. To make the translations better, the wanted words or phrases were contextualised by using them in relevant sentences so that the correct words were more likely to be chosen, but there will undoubtedly be several that missed the mark. Apologies for those mistranslations in advance. Until professional translators can be engaged, your help with corrections would be appreciated.

Language is dynamic, especially in the technical world, so there may be better words that can be used as time goes by. While some rough machine translations may be a reason for feedback in the early days after release, down the track, there will still be a need to keep up with language trends, such as progressive de-gendering of pronouns, definite articles and other language constructs. Please provide feedback on terms that could be updated to these newer forms.

Providing feedback△

Feedback uses the help and contact page links.

On every public page, there is a Help link at the end of the article footer before the Links section, and at the top of every management page there is a ℹ link. These go to an article describing the page. At the bottom of those help pages is a Contact link. On the resulting Contact page, there is a Feedback for page option that has the path and locale of the help page.

To provide corrections to the user interface text for a page:

1.Click the Help link in the footer of a public page, or the ℹ link in the top navigation bar of management pages.
2.Click the Contact link at the bottom of the help page.
3.Select the Feedback for page option for the Subject.
4.In Message, describe in English what is wrong with the current wording and indicate what it should be.

No need to include the help page's path in the Message body as it will be in the subject of the sent email. However, include the locale of the page where the mistranslation occurred as the help page for that page may not be available for that locale.

While individual corrections are extremely useful, there may be some repeated errors that may be better served by stating the language principle that has been violated. However, such feedback has to be very specific and practical, like that a particular definite article (like the in English) never appears at the start of button names. Such a rule is easy for me to correct without understanding the language, because I only have to replace the specific text. That may require converting the first letter of the next word to uppercase, so let me know is that is not required.

Some areas where there might be errors are:

a.Text that normally appears before words in sentences, like the the or a in English, but not before those words in buttons.
b.Excessively verbose, especially on buttons and the like.
c.The sequence of letters for alphabetically ordered lists and tables.
d.The list item marker after the letter or number.

Once there is some consensus in the feedback for the words, they will be incorporated into the next version. Since I will have no idea what the meaning of the text is for most languages, I will be running any translation suggestions through a reverse translation and some dictionaries as a rough reality check.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide to improve the translations 🙏🙏🙏.