Joining forces with Occitan
On Thread:Portal talk:Oc/Use French when no translation/reply (4) it was suggested that Occitan is extremely close to Catalan, to the point they used to be considered a dialect one of the other. If there is an high level of mutual intelligibility in written form, we could add a reciprocal fallback, as we have had for a long time for pt and pt-br.
Messages untranslated in Catalan would show in Occitan when available, and vice versa. Currently, the two languages have a similar number of translations, about 15k translated messages. Of these, there are 4690 messages translated in Catalan but not Occitan, and 3276 translated in Occitan but not Catalan (for comparison, falling back to a fully translated language would give about 16k messages).
Lindsay (2009 post) could not find studies on their mutual intelligibility, while Donneky (2011 dissertation) just confirms there are strong links and says:
As far as inter-state axes are concerned, this is already apparent in the cross-border Occitan Language Academy and the organisation by the Occitan group CREO [Centre Régional de l'Enseignement de l'Occitan] of a festival that celebrates Occitan and Catalan [...] Another way to overcome a lack of resources due to the extent of territory covered by the minoritised language and limitations imposed by state regime is to form intra-community links along the lines of European axes, as currently exists between Occitan and Catalan.
My first thought was please don't, I prefer English fall back. But I checked randomly some Occitan translations and I think that a Catalan speaking user with little knowledge of English will understand better Occitan messages. Some ones seem just a misspelling and it is a hard stuff to translate all messages. Some Catalan messages are currently in standard Valencian or Balearic insteed of Central Catalan. One may think wow there is an Aranese translator around, or even Algherese :-). For reverse side, Occitan to Catalan, I have no opinion but it may work as well.
Thank you both and thank you a lot Vriullop for checking the translation to go beyond your first impression! This is extremely useful.
Vriullop, can you please mention this proposal on the village pump of the Catalan Wikimedia projects, or at least Wikipedia and Wiktionary which are the most used? Thank you.
Done at w:ca:Topic:Tjc8xr0z769mskl5. Other Catalan projects will be addressed to this Wikipedia page.