Hi WP Polyglots!
I would like to organize a team that would translate WordPress in Romani (Romanes) the language of the Roma (sometimes referred as “Gypsy”) people. Roma people does not have a country, they are about 15.000.000 people leaving all around Europe from Scandinavia to Italy, from Turkey to Ireland, from Portugal to Russia – as the largest European minority. But they do have a language.

Roma people are the most discriminated and excluded people in Europe, and many European institutions and international bodies are trying to support Roma education, inclusion and better information.
I was (unpleasantly) surprised when I realized that there is no WordPress in Romani language.

I am a WP user and human rights activist and educator, working in an international NGO, mostly with education about the discrimination and intolerance. In our work we focus on two things: we try to educate vulnerable groups to use the new-media tools in fight for their (human) rights, and we are debunking the stereotypes, bias and prejudice against the Roma people presented in the mainstream and other (online) media.

Providing Roma people with a tool to share information in their own language (and to create multilingual websites combining their own and the local majority language) would really be an important step and a great contribution to the struggle for inclusion and equal rights for the Roma communities around Europe.

I would like to create an international group that would work on the WP translation in Romani. But before I do that, I want to consult this community about it…

I checked the ISO 639-3 code, it is “rom”. (http://www.ethnologue.com/language/rom)
There is no “country”, so I guess we leave it empty?

There are a couple of standardisations of the Romani language, or better said, there is no single standardization of the language – jet. It is one of the challenges. But it is really very important to provide the Roma communities with the tools of communication and participation, that any version is better than non at all. I intend to involve several academics from different parts of Europe in order to find the best ways and a “common ground” in solving this issue for this particular project of translating the WP into Romani.

Basically, I just want to check with you WP Polyglots guys before I invite the experts and other helpers and organize a “Romani translation team”. So – can we do this?

LocaleLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/: rom
Country code: ???
Sub-domain: rom.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
Site Title: WordPress Romanes

best regards,
Misko

#locale-requests