Please enable Kachin language (kac)
Yesterday I gave a "How to edit Wikipedia" training session to several speakers of the Jinghpaw language (http://www.ethnologue.com/language/kac) who were eager to get started writing Wikipedia articles in their own language. During the morning session I told them that they'd also be able to translate the Wikipedia interface into their own language, then had to eat my words in the afternoon after I discovered (during lunch break) that you can't start creating translations for a language until it's been activated on TranslateWiki, and that takes a manual step. I'd like for them to be able to localise the interface as soon as possible so that even more Jinghpaw speakers will be able to use their own Wikipedia page (the people I trained yesterday spoke good English, but most Jinghpaw speakers do not), so I'm requesting the creation of a new language on TranslateWiki.
- Language name: Jinghpaw
- Language name as used by native speakers: Jinghpaw
- Alternate names in common use: Kachin (the name of the region where the language is spoken), spelling variants Jingpho, Chingpaw, Chingp'o
- Num. of speakers of the language: about 900,000
- ISO 639-3 code: kac
- Script: Latin
- Writing direction: LTR
- Good fallback language for untranslated text: unknown at this time; I'll inquire. I suspect Burmese (ISO 639-1: my, ISO 639-3: mya) will be a good fallback language as most Jinghpaw speakers live in Myanmar, but I'll double-check.
I do not speak Jinghpaw myself so I won't be a translator for the language, but I'll be giving the native speakers technical training on how to create the translation. They seem quite eager to get started, so I'm sure one or two will want to sign up on TranslateWiki as soon as they're told about it.
Please let me know if you need any other information besides what I've given above.
I've created the Portal:Kac page.
For translators wanting to sign up for Kac. Until this language has been enabled for translation, new translators wanting to sign up will have to do a few practice translations into a different language, say Burmese, or use the alternative sign up procedure through the 'Don't want to translate?' link on the main page.
The patch in gerrit has a copy-and-paste error: it's using "kab" as the language code, when it should be "kac" for Jinghpaw/Kachin. "kab" is the language code for Kabyle, spoken in Algeria (http://archive.ethnologue.com/16/show_language.asp?code=kab).
I've confirmed with a linguist familiar with Jinghpaw that most Jinghpaw speakers have also been educated in Burmese, and Burmese would be the best fallback language. (Certainly better than English).
Hmm 9/10 Jinghpaw speakers live in Burma while 1/10 are in China. For those in China I guess 'zh-hans' could be used as a good fallback (and its translations seem more complete than Burmese - it's 'my' right?). A per-user fallback must be the best resolution here...