Cirrostratus Policy on Languages

How do we work out which languages to translate the website into

English | Cymraeg | Gàidhlig | Gaeilge | Scots | Русский

Exedra is an internationalised website. That means that it allows users of the website to specify the language that they wish to read web pages in. It is not necassarily the case that the web pages will be available in the requested langauge, but if they are then the server will display the pages in that language.

That immediately raises a question as to which languages to make available. The default language is English. Welsh is the included as that is a fully official language of the UK (and as the service links to government services we should provide the official language). We have also translated some pages into some other formally recognised indigenous UK languages.

This raises then the question as to which languages to use. There is a wikipedia page Languages of the United Kingdom that looks at this question. Some languages in addition to welsh are formally recognised by one or more governmental body in the UK.

That will then start a debate as to whether Scots is actually a language. In 2018 there was a discussion in parliament where an MP (admittedly of antipodean origin) could not understand an MP who spoke in Scots. That perhaps is a good test.

In the end we have no problem translating pages into officially recognised indigenous UK languages as long as we can get a translator (which we cannot get for Cornish for example). Then if you want to read the site in a different language you can (up to a point). The main language remains English. There will be some pages only avaliable in English. In particular Scots is from the slang translator which is not really an official language translator. Hence we have only run this page through it. The rest of the site is in English.

Russian is, of course, not an official or indigenous language, but some pages are translated into Russian mainly to ensure that when we are testing we get the UTF-8 encoding right (something for the tecchies).





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