My langage request was weirdly not accepted

[Rayoun]

Hello,

I request a week ago the Algerian Arabic language on Transifex but it was not accepted. I'm surprised because Algerian Arabic is very different from standard Arabic and from Eastern Arabic dialects (Saudi, Iraqi and Egyptian which are present in the 0 A.D. Transifex page). It's written on the Wiki that "As we prefer to avoid duplicate work, new languages are only accepted when they differ from existing languages. [...] there are big differences between the Portuguese in Brazil vs Portugal, so we allow the "pt_BR" language."

I would to say that Brazilian and European Portuguese, even if they are different languages, are mutually intelligible, that's not the case of Algerian Arabic and standard Arabic: "Watson writes ”Dialects of Arabic form a roughly continuous spectrum of variation, with the dialects spoken in the eastern and western extremes of the Arab-speaking world being mutually unintelligible”. Effectively, while middle easterners can generally understand one another, they often have trouble understanding Maghrebis..." from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00727042/document.

We can say in comparison that Brazilian and European Portuguese are as different as Algerian and Moroccan Arabic. Mostly because Maghrebi Arabic languages were and are influenced a lot by Latin, Berber and Romance languages; mostly by French, Spanish (Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania) and Italian (Tunisia and Libya).

For these reasons, I think that Arabic Algerian, and more generally any Maghrebi languages, would be accepted in 0 A.D.'s Transifex.

Thanks for reading my post.

[nwtour]

I would use as a basis the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository to determine the status of the language
Unicode.org is authoritative enough to use their numbers without political controversy.

https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/22af90ae3bb04263f651323ce3d9a71747a75ffb/common/supplemental/languageInfo.xml
 

Algerian Saharan Arabic -> Arabic distance = 10
ar_*_$maghreb" -> ar_*_$maghreb distance = 4

pt_*_$americas" -> pt_*_$americas distance=4
 

[Stan`]

Hey Rayoun,

Thanks for taking the time to come here!

The reason I refused the language is because of the discussion here

It was said that most arabic language use the same written form so instead of having a lot of incomplete variants it would be better to have one good variant.

Ping @Nescio

[Rayoun]

Thank you for your answers.

I understand now. I mostly agree with @MrAdam, Arabic dialects are vernacular languages. The big problem of these "varieties" is that they haven't an organised (academical/official) written form, they are used to be spoken even if they can be written. For example Maghrebi languages can be written in Latin script, there is not one way to write a word. It's a big problem, a "standard dialectal Arabic" doesn't exist.

However Maghrebi Arabic languages tend step-by-step to standardize themselves. Recently standard Moroccan and Algerian Berber languages was formed even if there were a lot of Berber dialects. But that's not the case of Arabic ones currently.

Today, the majority of dialectal Arabic speakers can understand standard Arabic because they learn it at school. So, yes, there is no need of adding a lot of dialects even if they are not at all mutually intelligible with standard Arabic.

I created this topic because I didn't understand why Saudi (it's not even really a dialect), Iraqi and Egyptian Arabic could have a project and not the others. Maybe removing them from 0 A.D.'s Transifex could avoid any confusion.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Rayoun

[Stan`]

Yeah I need to clean those up. I'm not a transifex expert yet. Feel free to reach out to me anytime! Thank you for your interest in translating 0 A.D.

[Nescio]

8 hours ago, Rayoun said:

I created this topic because I didn't understand why Saudi (it's not even really a dialect), Iraqi and Egyptian Arabic could have a project and not the others. Maybe removing them from 0 A.D.'s Transifex could avoid any confusion.

Exactly! Those were added long ago and are still at 0%. I suspect they were political additions, hence why I started the other thread.

Meanwhile, standard Arabic (ar) is at 45%. Feel free to improve it further.

[nwtour]

I think that any officially recognized language should be added to transifex. But at the stage of export to SVN, filter out only those that have a degree of localization of more than 50%.

 

Let people be creative - but at the same time, empty files will not get into the game.

[Rayoun]

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

Meanwhile, standard Arabic (ar) is at 45%. Feel free to improve it further.

Thanks, I would really like to contribute to the standard Arabic project but I'm from this minority who don't/badly understand it but speak one of its dialects .

58 minutes ago, nwtour said:

I think that any officially recognized language should be added to transifex.

Probably. On the other hand some official languages like French Canadian doesn't differ a lot from Standard French, especially for "scientist" words and the formal usage.

[nwtour]

2 minutes ago, Rayoun said:

Probably. On the other hand some official languages like French Canadian doesn't differ a lot from Standard French, especially for "scientist" words and the formal usage.

It seems to me that the problem is not that people create little-used languages/dialects - but that they create files and never return to translation.

If the translator regularly updates the translation and keeps it up to date, then he sees the meaning in the existence of this translation.
Just need to protect from abandoned localizations

[Stan`]

6 hours ago, nwtour said:

think that any officially recognized language should be added to transifex. But at the stage of export to SVN, filter out only those that have a degree of localization of more than 50%.

Releases only contain translation that are more than 90% complete  using the latin alphabet. Other languages like CJK are provided as mods.