Thursday, March 26, 2009

The localisation of Veps and Estonian

Veps is a language spoken in Russia and it is related to Estonian and maybe Finnish. Now that Veps has been added as a language in translatewiki.net, there is a discussion what to use as its fall back language.
  • People do speak Russian but Russian is not related to Veps, it uses a different script, it does not help the localisers.
  • Estonian is closest but the localisation of Estonian is far from complete
  • Finnish is quite different and this brings its own problems
Veps has a project in the incubator, it is a language that is struggling and this makes it extra important to help people with a user interface in their own language. One of the big problems is the lack of computer terminology in Veps. It is really important for the localisers to agree on what words to use.

It will be really interesting to watch how the localisation of Veps will work out and what fall back language will be implemented when the project goes life.
Thanks,
     GerardM

1 comment:

Purodha said...

We will sooner or later have user selectable fallback languages so the current fixed fallback languages per language will become default fallback languages only.
Coming with the mechanism allowing users to select a series of languages in their preference settings, we will also be able to allow translators in translatewiki.net to individually select translations to which languages they want shown so as to assist them, and in which order, and Omegawiki corroborators to specify, which languages they want shown in personalized syntrans lists, and similar.