Preferred Languages Chat Summary: October 26

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After introducing the Preferred Languages project less than two weeks ago, we held our first meeting on Wednesday. This is a summary of the Preferred Languages chat from October 26. (Slack log)

Attendees: @casiepa, @chantalc, @petya, @swissspidy

Topics

After going through initial feedback on the introduction post, there was a short recap of ideas that have been suggested so far:

Have a translated setting of preferred languages, where the translators would define the locales they should “fall back” to in case there’s no translationtranslation The process (or result) of changing text, words, and display formatting to support another language. Also see localization, internationalization. available. E.g. de_CH states to prefer de_DE and de_DE_formal after that.
- Pros: simple solution, no UIUI User interface changes needed
- Cons: very subjective, unclear how the expected translations would be installed
Rely on the Accept-Language headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. every browser sends, which is set based on the user’s system preferences.
- Pros: no UI changes needed, it’s a reliable standard
- Cons: no support for formal language variants, unclear how the expected translations would be installed
Extend the UI to allow setting multiple preferred languages
- Pros: leaves the choice to the user, clear how to install the expected translations, could be used together with Accept-Language
- Cons: makes the UI option more complex

Besides that, it was suggested to display a note to the user when there’s a missing translation to encourage them to translate WordPress. However, this can be worked on independently in #23348.

Before we get into details and possible solutions, more (non-technical) research needs to be done. We’re mostly interested in how other platforms and content management systems handle this. Think Wikipedia, Facebook, Drupal, Joomla, and so on. WordPress isn’t the only system facing this situation.

Research results can be shared in the comments to this post. Every help in that regard is highly appreciated! So far I’ve collected some information about Drupal and Joomla. After that, I’ll publish the results in a separate blogblog (versus network, site) post.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday, 9 November 2016, 17:00 UTC in the #core-i18n SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel.

#feature-projects, #i18n, #preferred-languages, #summary

Yoav Farhi 12:54 pm on October 30, 2016

Here’s mediawiki (Wikipedia) take on it:
Some languages in MediaWiki have what is known as a “fallback sequence”. This is where MediaWiki will fall back on a different language if it cannot find what it needs. An example of this is the language code frc (Cajun French), which falls back on the language code fr (French). The reason for this is that sometimes languages don’t have all messages defined in them.

Doesn’t look like the fallback chain is user editable, but I’m not sure if it’s preset or if it’s set by the translators. Here’s a visual representation of the chain from the link above:
fallback chains visual representation
- Pascal Birchler 2:02 pm on October 30, 2016
  
  Thanks for the comment! I’ve seen the graphic before, but not the explanation behind it. Looking at the code, the fallback chain is indeed hardcoded per language.
Pascal Casier 12:34 pm on October 31, 2016

I have started some discussions that I will, one after the other, summarize here as comments. I thought it would be a good idea to see how language plugins think about this topic and WPML was the first one I asked.
On the front-end side, WPML has an option to redirect users based on the browser language. The codes from the browser are compared with the existing WordPress languages and the most suitable installed language is then used. There is not always a perfect match, but it works in a lot of cases.
More information might follow.
Amir Helzer 12:53 pm on October 31, 2016

Pascal, Andrea told me that you asked him about that feature in WPML, so I thought I’ll join the discussion here. Thanks for including us.

This code in WPML is intended for content on the front-end. This brings heaps of considerations, especially related to SEO (Google forbids doing redirects that it doesn’t see).

As I understand it, we’re talking here about setting the localeLocale A locale is a combination of language and regional dialect. Usually locales correspond to countries, as is the case with Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil). Other examples of locales include Canadian English and U.S. English., which makes sense only in the WordPress adminadmin (and super admin). The feature in WPML is for the front-end.
- Pascal Casier 2:44 pm on October 31, 2016
  
  Hi Amir, thanks for joining. We are trying to gather all different ideas and explore how others think about language options. Our starting point is non-technical ( difficult for technical persons like me :-p ) so all infomation on how others dealt with this matter is highly appreciated.
Pascal Casier 5:06 pm on November 11, 2016

@swissspidy you have php.net already in your list ? http://git.php.net/?p=web/php.git;a=tree;f=include;h=e0270e5ef7885a97564b0a346598bc41b5ae96a0;hb=refs/heads/master

Probably the ‘langchooser.inc’ might be interesting.
(Thanks Daniele)
- Pascal Birchler 5:15 pm on November 20, 2016
  
  Thanks for the link! Looks like ‘langchooser.inc’ is just a specific implementation for checking the Accept-Language HTTPHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., and not even one that is in conformance to the RFC. So not ideal for the overview post, but useful for when we might end up using this header.

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