Help:Language support

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It is important that your language be properly supported on Incubator. Fortunately, getting satisfactory language support on Incubator (and other multilingual Wikimedia projects) has never been easier.

Universal Language Selector

Most language support is provided seamlessly by the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector.

First, find the Universal Language Selector control. You can find it near your user name, or near the phrase Not logged in, at the top of your screen or in the side menu bar, depending on what skin you are using. It includes an icon combining a Chinese ideograph and the letter "A", as well as the name of your current interface language.
To activate your language, search for and select your language. (You can search by name or by ISO 639 code.)

If you are logged in, you can also go to Special:Preferences to select your language.

As long as your language is supported, that's all you need to do.

Why is my language missing from the Universal Language Selector?

Languages do not become available on Wikimedia projects until at least 13% of the MediaWiki core messages are translated at translatewiki.net. (Note: the MediaWiki (most important messages) group is a subset of MediaWiki core messages.)

LangCom does not approve a first project in a new language until the most important messages, along with enough additional core messages to reach 13%, have been translated. So this is something your test community should be doing anyway.

For more information, visit translatewiki.net.

What happened to "Narayam" and "WebFonts"?

Previously, two important language support tools were found in the MediaWiki extensions Narayam and WebFonts. Those extensions have been deprecated in favor of the Universal Language Selector extension.

Other language support tools

Aside from the Universal Language Selector, there are some other language-support tools and resources available:

Typing: Edit tools

The default editor includes a section with "special characters" (in the bar above the edit form). You can click on a character to enter it in the edit form.
There are also additional characters below the edit form. You can request to add characters to this section. (Go to the Community Portal to ask.)

Multiple-script languages

If your language is written in multiple scripts (alphabets or writing systems), it may be possible to have one wiki with software that automatically converts content from one script to another. Two existing projects where you can see this in action are:

Serbian Wikipedia, available in both Latin script and Cyrillic script
Kazakh Wikipedia, available in Latin, Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic scripts

It is also possible to have one wiki where different scripts are entered manually. See Judeo-Spanish Wikipedia, available to some extent in both Latin script and Hebrew script, as an example.

For more information, see:

Need further help?

Visit Incubator:Community Portal or translatewiki:Support.