Meta:Babel

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Just out of curiosity, on the home page, I changed my language to zh-hant to see how things would look like. I was stunned: almost 100% of the page was wrong.

So I pressed Translate and tried switching to zh-hant and was told (in Chinese) “zh-hant is no longer in use; please translate to zh”.

I switched back to zh and looked at the first string. To translate it properly I’d essentially have to break the entire string into two giant switches, one for zh-hans and one for zh-hant; to do anything else would create a huge mess.

The same is true for almost every other string.

So my question is: if doing zh-hant is now so difficult (thus discouraging people from doing zh-hant translation), why has direct translation into zh-hant no longer an option? This looks like someone wanted to promote a particular political agenda on Meta by wiping out zh-hant content (which really would be zh-tw content, since zh-hk “reader-writers” could get by with yue). — Al12si (talk) 11:45, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

PS: The switches don’t even work. Everything is in zh-hans even though UI language is set to zh-hant. This is a disaster. Al12si (talk) 12:08, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It seems that there is a larger project looking at zh-* variants; see phab:T286291. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:58, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks for the pointer. This is unfortunate. zh-hant and zh-hans (which really is zh-cn) should never have been merged. —Al12si (talk) 12:13, 9 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Al12si You may want to see why zh-hant translations are disabled at mw:User_talk:Cwlin0416#Re: Can i request to add language Traditional Chinese (zh-hant)?. Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 08:23, 19 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

But until this day, the conversion system which is supposed to be a replacement to zh-hans/zh-hant subpages still works badly. This is a problem that should be fixed a long time ago.—— Eric Liu_（Talk） 04:28, 12 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don’t know if I should ask this here or over at Babylon, or in a PM, or somewhere else; but I guess this is sort of about policy (though probably not exactly Meta policy, though CWS is on Meta), so I suppose asking here probably makes some sense.

I saw the CWS announcement today and was very confused: it’s like 82% in English (or 93%, or some other number, depending on how you count). I thought I missed a translation announcement so I went to the CWS page to look for the letter, but it’s not there. So someone just wrote something that’s like 6% (18%) in the target language and asked people to translate it after the fact.

I don’t know what to think of this. I suppose Wikimedia staff have access to a standard set of openings and closings in all languages and just used them; but to me a message that opens with “Please translate this into your language” and remains 82% in English just looks like an error, and I’d assume most people who see it would also feel this looks like an error.

I suppose I want to ask again: what exactly is the point of translator signups? The post right before this one is literally “please translate x”, and throughout the few months since I signed up I got exactly one trasnation notice, and it wasn’t some high priority thing like the CWS.

Thanks for any clarifications.

PS: Sorry again if this isn’t the right place to ask, but this is what we get for having two forums and a lot of the discussion that should be happening probably falls into the grey area between the two. — Al12si (talk) 19:23, 13 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Re: the "Notify translators" alerting system, I believe it got complaints when it was used too much in previous years, plus felt like overkill when used many times each day (given it's available for every translatable page, or even every massmessage), as it sends 1,000+ talkpage messages plus more email messages (depending on user-prefs). I believe almost everyone stopped using it because of those reasons. I also vaguely-remember it being broken for a number of years, which would also have led to disuse. For my team, the current de facto method of communicating about priority translations is the translators-l@ mailing list. I hope that helps (provide some context, at least). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 19 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]