WordPress Multilingual

In the Dark Ages it used to be common practice to kill the bearer of bad news. That was long before WordPress and Gengo, and no translator on this site has to fear such consequences when being mistaken for the post author. Nonetheless, this distinction is still of some importance in collaborative blogs, I think.

I? Who’s that? If you’re lucky enough to be reading this post in English or German you can see my name right on top of this article. If not, chances are that the translator pretends to be the post author.
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After much longer than initially planned, Gengo 0.81 is finally available for download here. There are inevitably bugs still in the codebase, but now that WordPress 2.1 is available, I’d like to concentrate on getting a version out that supports the newer platform. For those that don’t know, Gengo 0.81 is not compatible with WordPress 2.1 - the internal changes to WordPress require a few modifications to Gengo before it will work successfully.
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There are two aspects to a multilingual site, the writing and the reading. Providing tools for writing in multiple languages is worthwhile, but without similar tools for reading in multiple languages, the site remains monolingual, albeit with some smart links and localisation. Many readers of multilingual sites are themselves able to understand more than one language. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the number of polyglot readers as a percentage of the total readership would be higher than for monolingual blogs. Ignoring this does the polyglot readership a disservice.
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International language codes tell the software in which language a text is written.

Most of you know that en means “English”, fr is assigned to “français” or French, it stands for “italiano”—and so on.

There are even some fancy three-letter codes out there, such as gsw for Swiss-German/Alemannic. (more…)