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The language-picker

(Originally published as diary-entry)

In my little OpenStreetMap-editor translations are provided by contributors on hosted weblate, where thousands of text snippets have been translated already in the past year - which is awesome.

However, the language picker was a bit dry: it used to have codes for every langauge, e.g. nl, en, ja, 'pt_BR', 'zh_Hant'... Quite boring and not really user-friendly - but easy to implement.

Today, I decided to give these an overhaul. I wanted to show proper language names in them. But: in which language should we show the language overview?

Should we show the language option in the language itself? Or should the languages be shown in the current language? Showing in the current language also means that the name of every language should be translated too - a huge task... Also, translating every language has the drawback that, if a user accidentally selects a language in a foreign writing system, they'll won't be able to find their language in all the "gibberish".

Best of both worlds

I decided to offer the best of both worlds: in the menu, first language name is shown as the native speaker speaks it, followed by the language name in the current language (except if both are the same)

This means that, in all circumstances, everyone can find their language.

But, where to fetch every language name in every language?

Wikidata to the rescue

Of course, the internet must have a list of languages translated in every language. But where to find it or compile it?

I decided to have a look at one of the biggest repositories of knowledge: Wikidata. They do have an entry for every language (e.g. Dutch). To fetch every modern language, we turn to the SPARQL-endpoint with the following query:

SELECT ?lang ?label ?code
        WHERE
        {
          ?lang wdt:P31 wd:Q1288568.
          ?lang rdfs:label ?label.
          ?lang wdt:P424 ?code
        }

This one fetches all languages and uses the labels in every language as their translation. With a Typescript these can be downloaded and used as translation.

The messy real world

Of course, real life isn't as easy. There are dialects, differences in notation between Weblate and Wikipedia (e.g. zh-hant vs zh-Hant). But with a few exceptions, this can be fixed too. Some pragmatism doesn't hurt - even though it is nice that it works for most cases automatically.

The full script is available here.

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