User talk:Musaddam Idriss

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Hi Sir My name is ibrahima SARR from Senegal (Fuuta-Tooro). I was the creator of the Fulah page about 15 years ago and did most of the translations. I saw that you have been making a lot of vocabulary changes to the translations. For example you changed "hello" to "ɗerewol". But "ɗerewol" is rather "sheet" (of paper) than "page". Also changing "hello" to "ɗerewol" and leaving the adjective "heeriingo" is not correct and makes it altogether an incorrect translation. "heeriingo" should also change to "keeringol" to match noun class. Normally we do not even need to changed things like that because Pulaar-Fulfulde has a lot of variants. We should all focus in creating new context instead. And always discuss before changing what other people have done. That will help us be more productive.

Mi yettii.

Ibrahima Malal Sarr (talk)‎

Thank you for your mail Ibrahim. I'm glad that you are still active and in touch with the Fulah Wikipedia. I tried to look for all Fulah editors and discuss with them on how we can deal with the existing language variance that we have. Like in making decisions on what to use in certain name spaces, how to write them, etc in a way that it will favour us all.

We had a discussion with people like Oumar Bah who is supposedly living in Australia now and couldn't come up with a good idea as he insisted that we all must manage to understand your dialects rather than trying to bring together a neutral point that'll favor us us. I'm from Nigeria, and we speak the Adamawa Fulfulde. Owing to the fact that majority of the active editors on Fulah Wikipedia are from there trying to simplify the platform for them will make it more easier to contribute and engage many more contributors.

Musaddam Idriss (talk)‎

Thanks a lot ceerno Yes I am actually more active gathering documents that are still to be organized and formatted to be uploaded. But I have been less active in translations. There are many contributors in Fulah but they just don't use groups. They do workshops like we did in the holy city of Madiina Gunaas in 2018. I have known ceerno Umar Bah for 20 years now, indeed a great man living in Austria. We worked togather quite a lot. And he know about more dialiects than I do. But it is always difficult to deal with dialectal differences when they are huge like Pulaar vs Adamaawa Fulfulde. The best thing to do is use your own dialect so other people will be more exposed to it and learn it. The important thing is to use the standard writing as defined by the Fulfulde Commission of the ACALAN. I see Nigerians write dipthongs like ei/au/oi that should be written ey/aw/oy (just an example. As for tanslations, it is better to add new words you see to your vocabulary than change it to your own. Pleople can just ask what a word means for instance. Some were suggesting that we have different pages as it is very difficult to understand dialects that are far from your won. We live in extreme parts of the Fulah world (Senegal/Nigeria) thus we have huge differences that affect mutual understanding. Let's keep the discussing alive. Ibrahima Malal Saar

Ibrahima Malal Sarr (talk)‎

I must begin by saying, thank you so much for taking your time in putting such a great effort to gather those important documents and for your general contributions in developing the Fulfulde Wikipedia to what it is today. To balance the situation, I see the idea of creating the referral pages where the meanings of the dialectical difference can be found as a good one. For the case of diphthongs, it has to do with the influence of writing in English being our official language and I have discussed it with the fellow editors that they should adapt to the way you are writing them in order to form a uniform writing system.

Musaddam Idriss (talk)‎

Thank you for starting this discussion, Ibrahima!

My general recommendation is that in the user interface translation there should be uniformity of spelling and terminology. For example, the same word should always be used for things like "help", "template", "edit", "log in", "user", "page", etc. Please go over the page Translating:MediaWiki/Basic glossary, translate all the terms there by clicking "Translate this page" ("Traduire cette page") at the top, and consistently use these terms in all the interface translation.

You should also write a page that explains other rules for translating into Fula, which are not covered by the basic glossary. Here are examples of such pages for other languages:

There are several others. Cover things such as standard spelling (and link to external rules), style, register, syntax, etc. As much as possible, refer to external sources, such as dictionaries and standard spelling and style guides.

Currently, only one "global" variety of Fula is allowed, under the macro code "ff". It is technically possible to allow translation to other varieties if anyone thinks it is justified, but before it's enabled, it should be thoroughly discussed and explained.

When it comes to Wikipedia articles, you can perhaps be more lenient and allow different styles, but you should write a policy page about this in the Fula Wikipedia (not in translatewiki). For examples of how it's done in other languages, see these pages:

English: w:en:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling
French: w:fr:Wikipédia:Conventions de style, w:fr:Wikipédia:Difficultés de la langue française
Arabic: w:ar:ويكيبيديا:دليل الأسلوب/اللغة
Catalan: w:ca:Viquipèdia:Llibre d'estil/Variants lingüístiques (I know Catalan quite well, and the Google translation of this page is good. I think that this policy is quite good, and you can copy it to Fula. But it's up to you to decide.)
Examples in many more languages: m:Language guides

Amir E. Aharoni (talk)‎

Thank you so much for your help. Regarding the gloss on the interface, I'm glad that Ibrahim is in touch here because that will help a lot to have a balance/neutral ground where the words will be in favor of all the dialects and will help us to explain to other editors in our region as to what they mean (when it happens that certain words are not from our dialects). Regarding the following words to be use as namespaces on the interface here is our suggestions as Nigerian Fulah:

Annɗal cuɓɓangal, or Jefeere - Special
Yeewtere, or Bolle - talk
Hinɗinɗe, or kutirowoo - user
Yeewtere kutirowoo - user talk
Yeewtere Wikipediya - Wikipedia talk
Kirowal - file
bolle kirowal - file talk
Habbaruji yeewtere wiki - media wiki talk (but I have seen somewhere Ibrahim have translated Media as Mejaaje which can also be okay for us)
Deppe bolle - template talk
Ballitinɗe or ballital - help
Yeewtere ballital- help talk
Huuɗeeji - category
Deppe - template

Musaddam Idriss (talk)‎

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