[[[Portal:Ms|ms-arab]]] Activate new language: Malay (Arabic script) - 'بهاس ملايو'

[ms-arab] Activate new language: Malay (Arabic script) - 'بهاس ملايو'

Hello. Malay is written in two scripts and one of it is Jawi script which is based on the Arabic script. It is still taught in schools and it is one of the co-official script in Brunei.

Tofeiku (talk)05:40, 1 January 2021

I have already done translating all the MediaWiki (most important messages) for ms-arab. Can this code be activated now? It is said ms-arab is now disabled. The code "ms-arab" is now available in Wikidata lexemes.

Tofeiku (talk)17:54, 27 February 2021

I've removed the messages saying it was disabled, given that now it is working within the translate interface of this wiki, and the fact it also has updated completion statistics running.


The message posted is informative only, except in the portal of a language showing variants that may be disabled as long as the link going to translate UI on this wiki does not load it in the correct language but loads translations for a fallback language: this is problematic when users follow these links and think they are actually translating for the correct language selected


(this is in my opinion of Translatewiki.net itself which should NOT redirect to another fallback language, using the language preferences of the currrent user! We've seen in the past that not disabling them caused troubles where peopel started to replace correct translation for a given language by translations for an unrelated language still not supported but that they selected either with ULS, or by modifying the URL in the address bar; such redirect should either not use any fallback return an error, or if they perform the redirect, there should be a strong banner notice at top of page that the content of the page does not match the user-selected language...)

Note: the removal of these messages had NO effect of the fact that the language [ms-arab] was enabled or not: I cannot change that, only Translatrewiki.net admins can enable it (that's why there's this support page to contact them and make them aware of your request). I'm not an admin, I can just help admins maintain the site to avoid common errors and inform users.

So if you see other messages syaing that the target message you want to translate to is still disabled, test the language code in the UI, by trying to change the language code in parameters of URL displayed in your browser, and then press enter and check that the page will render effectively the language selected and not another fallback language before replacing any displaed translation.

The '"disabled=*" options in parameters of the Portal page are there as a protection. Of course when the user's fallback language is English, typing an unsupported code will fallback to the Translate UI for English, but English is protected (you can't translate from English to English, only from English to a supported English variant), so there does not seem to be any risk on a first approach

But not all users have English as their primary language (selected in their preferences of with the Universal Language selector at top of pages. In that case, typing any unsupported language may fallback to some other frequent fallbacks like French, Chinese, German, Russian or Standard Chinese: if the user types an unsupported code, and don't notice that the server has made a fallback to ressources already edited and validated to French, German, Chinese, Russian, then they'll start "corrupting" these languages with translations intended for the other language they selected, and all these edits will need to be reverted and reviewed again.

Verdy p (talk)21:22, 27 February 2021
 

I'm going to enable it as a full-fledged translation target language in translatewiki. This will make it usable as an interface language in Wikidata, and also as a language for values in Wikidata, but if you want to use it for other content in Wikimedia projects, you'll have to discuss it separately.

Amir E. Aharoni (talk)07:58, 5 May 2021