Thread:Support/Translate-magic-help («Vous pouvez traduire les alias de pages spéciales, les mots magiques et les noms des espaces de noms./reply (2)

This is really not what is happening in Wikimedia sites (and in fact all French Wikimedia sites contain several synonyms). What happens behind the scene is that the default English message is suppressed from the list, but really they all are comma-separated lists of names. Yes the interface allows only for one translation string, but the content of this string is still a comma-separated list (and it has been such since many years in MediaWiki).

What is true is that their capitalization does not matter (the namespaces are not case-sensitive), however the capitalization used in their definiton is the one effectively displayed in the UI (which only displays the first string, but still processed all other strings in the list as aliases that are going to the same page in the same namespace).

In other words, the comma character plays a syntaxic role in the edited translation and is not part of the displayed string at the top of pages, or in the special pages listing namespaces, statistic, roles, and gererated links shown in users histories (and other characters are also forbidden, mainly the colon ':' and the slash '/', plus the space separators surrounding commas are ignored, as well as runs of multiple spaces).

These translations are not simple strings, they are always splitted and then space-compressed before being processed in an ordered array by MediaWiki.